It is an opening as well to receive from God encouragement, strength, the experience of being loved, and some indication of God’s will for me.

But it is not just God-and-me; prayer is not a withdrawal from others to be alone with God. To try to go to God without any concern for the needs, joys, fears, hopes, and happiness of others is to display a solipsistic self-centeredness that is unworthy of both the one who prays, and the God to whom one lifts his or her mind and heart in prayer.

There is nothing at all wrong with praying alone, in private and solitude. The mistake is to think you can, or should, detach yourself from the rest of the human race in order to be in solitude and alone in prayer. Before God, each one of us is all of us.

I can ask in prayer for what I need; that would be called a prayer of petition. But there’s much more to prayer than that. Thinking about God is praying. Consciously experiencing the presence of God within and around me is prayer. Walking with, sitting with, being with God as friend-to-friend is prayer.

In order to pray, I presuppose that God exists, that God can be known by faith, that faith is a gift, that the recipient of the gift of faith—the believer—can be nothing but grateful, that gratitude is the infrastructure of prayer, and that prayer is the flame that rises occasionally and consciously from the bed of embers that is my faith.

I pray to a God of mystery, a personal God, an approachable God, but a mysterious God nonetheless.

Therefore, I have to bow my head and trust. God is not altogether unknowable, just not fully knowable, and never fully known this side of heaven.