Prayer and perspective

Sometimes, folks will ask what is so different about Orthodoxy or what it is that I get out of it. I often find myself using the word "perspective". It is not that it has changed my beliefs, but rather has taken me on this walk to view and experience my faith from a different angle. I have this mental picture of actually walking around the perimeter of something and then stopping to look and realizing that from that particular vantage point the same thing looks very different. The object doesn't change, but my perspective does.

Case in point, prayer. Most of the praying I have known in my life involved claiming God's promises, speaking boldly (and sometimes loudly)about your requests and needs as well as your worship and adoration. It wasn't necessarily greedy self-centered prayers just very direct and audible and "me" based.

Now for a little different perspective. These are some excerpts from a series of books by Fr. Thomas Hopko entitled "The Orthodox Faith" specifically regarding prayer.
"Sometimes prayer is defined as a dialogue with God."

So far so good. This is just what I have always been taught and believed. But it goes on with the following.

"This definition is sufficient if we remember that it is a dialogue of silence, carried on in the silence of our hearts."

Whoah, there's a twist. A couple of paragraphs later it even says that

"Saying prayers is not the same as praying. Prayer should be done secretly, briefly, regularly, without many words, with trust in God that he hears, and with the willingness to do what God shows us to do."

Now that is almost a world apart from what I have known . . . up to now at least. But the thing is, it's still prayer as communicating with God, but it is a different way to look at the purpose and practice of it. I don't feel like it invalidates what I have known in the past, but it does fill out and give a much broader meaning to what prayer is. Here is the really tough part that to me truly alters the perspective of my motivation to pray. Quite frankly, it rings true in my heart while scaring the bujeezers out of me.

"The purpose of prayer is to have communion with God and to be capable of accomplishing His will. Christians pray to enable themselves to know God and to do His commandments. Unless a person is willing to change himself and to conform himself to Christ in the fulfillment of his commandments, he has no reason or purpose to pray. According to the saints, it is even spiritually dangerous to pray to God without the intention of responding and moving along the path that prayer will take us."

See it? Prayer becomes about changing me and not the world around me. It becomes about what I can be transformed to, by and for God and not what He can make happen.

Perspective is a good thing.