The Necessity of Prayer

I am reading Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy With God by Timothy Keller and am resolved to journal through each chapter to solidify and think through what I am reading.

Chapter One, The Necessity of Prayer

Prayer is a necessity because, as Augustine wrote in Confessions, to live well and worthily we must have a reordering of loves. "Fire tends upwards, stone downwards. By their weight they are moved and seek their proper place. Oil poured over water is borne on the surface of the water, water poured over oil sinks below the oil: it is by their weight that they are moved and seek their proper place....My love is my weight: wherever I go my love is what brings me there."

Dr. Keller explains that prayer is "with Another, and he is unique. God is the only person from whom you can hide nothing. Before him you will unavoidably come to see yourself in a new, unique light. Prayer, therefore, leads to a self-knowledge that is impossible to achieve any other way." Through prayer, Flannery O'Connor says, we come to see our ridiculous selves by degrees. As I commune with the One who commands me to love Him with all my heart, soul, and mind, I discern the misplaced loves of my heart for the purpose of reordering them.  Prayer keeps me honest. I can't fool God. I must be genuine. Prayer then is the beginning of profound changes in our hearts.  "Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me and know my thoughts; and see if there be any wicked way in me and lead me in the way everlasating." (Psalm 139:23-24)

But how do we pray? Is it all emotion and subjectivity? Is it an experience? In Dr. Keller's search for truth he discovered that there was "no choice offered between truth or Spirit, between doctine or experience." One Scottish theologian, John Murray, called communion "an intelligent mysticism." "It is necessary for us to recognize that there is an intelligent mysticism in the life of faith....of living union and communion with the exalted and ever-present Redeemer...He communes with his people and his people commune with him in conscious reciprocal love...The life of true faith cannot be that of cold metallic assent. It must have the passion and warmth of love and communion because communion with God is the crown and apex of true religion." Communion with God is intelligent, engaging the mind and reason, theology and doctrine. Yet it must reach the affections of our heart. It is essential, Dr. Keller exhorts, that we experience our theology.