Prayer is to Christianity what water is to the ocean, what breath is to life, what love is to life’s meaning. Prayer simply is our relationship with God become conscious, deliberate and concrete. It is more a way of being than something we do.

That is why prayer needs to permeate the entire Catholic curriculum; and function in the RE curriculum the way RE functions in the Catholic curriculum overall. Why? Because unless there is a lived experience of encounter with God on God’s terms—and that is what Christian prayer is—then it is simply impossible to talk meaningfully about God in a Catholic educational context.

Prayer is vital. That is why God wants us to pray: because God desires to draw us into a fuller relationship; and praying is simply how that is done consciously, deliberately and concretely in and for us.

At its most basic and essential, the word pray means “to ask”. Learning to ask for what we truly need, when we are ready to receive it, is the key to life and true happiness. Because everything that is, is a free and beautiful gift, grace, learning to ask and receive is the most important lesson we have to learn.

Asking and receiving the gift that is life, being and meaning is the heart of our relationship with God, because grace—God’s gift of himself to us—is the purpose and meaning of life. Prayer therefore points to the deepest truth about human nature itself: we are made for the gift of union with God.

In GNFL this understanding of prayer is developed with emphasis on these theological principles:

• Prayer is about desire—ultimate desire: the desire to become one with God. In prayer we enter into a relationship with the One who intensifies our desire for being. In prayer we find ourselves loved into being in a way that invites us to participate in our own coming-into-being by liberating our desire from all fear, rivalry, selfishness, violence and malice—and therefore, from the power of death itself. Prayer must always be honest if it is to be true prayer, because by praying honestly we discover ever more deeply the ultimate nature of our desire, the desire for God.
• Prayer is our way of participating in God’s work of uniting us with himself. The ultimate expression of that work is the liturgy, “the work of God”, the public act of the Church’s communal prayer as thanks and praise, “the source and summit of the Church’s actions”.
• The central prayer of the Church is the Eucharist. At the most profound level, the Eucharist has to do with Christ alone, who prays for us: he puts his prayer on our lips, for only he can say, “This is my Body … This is my Blood”.

URL link to Theological Conversation chapter (PDF).