Rowan Williams once brilliantly compared prayer to sunbathing. "When you're lying on the beach something is happening, something that has nothing to do with how you feel or how hard you're trying. You're not going to get a better tan by screwing up your eyes and concentrating. You give the time, and that's it. All you have to do is turn up. And then things change, at their own pace. You simply have to be there where the light can get at you."
Too much prayer is seen as effort, as an attempt to make things different by some mental act of will. But the world does not revolve around you or me. And I can't make it or other people dance to my tune by strenuously wishing things were other than they are. There is no magic involved. It's not about mysteriously offering up some shopping list of proposals to an absent-minded deity who might not have thought about them had you not suggested them first. It's not cosmic lobbying. The fundamental move is to give up trying to be in control.
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