If prayer seems about asking for something, consider other possibilities.

When I pray each day, I start in silence. I try to push away sounds and thoughts. Mostly I try just to listen. One of the things I believe about God is that God comes to us through spiritual action or energy. Spirit is one of the fundamental qualities that believers of many faiths attribute to God.

In Hebrew and Greek, the languages that have shaped my tradition at the foundational level, the word for “spirit” is the word for “breath” and also for “wind.” God is as close to us as breath, the very life force that is in us. Listening—conscious of one’s every breath—is the beginning of prayer.

So when I pray I listen for the universe, for its energy, for its very being. And when I pray in other ways—because the world needs peace, or someone I’m responsible for needs strength, or because someone has died, or because I am thankful for something—then I pray to God.

Of course I could go much further, and I do within our faith family. I could talk about God as we know God in history, evoking what theologians honestly call “the scandal of particularity.” Above all, I would speak of Jesus of Nazareth in whose human face I believe we see God.

And I could talk about the prayer of the church, the worship of God—regular, sensual, directive, evocative. Such public praise may be our purest prayer, filled with intention, sights, sounds, and very human dimensions.

But it all begins in listening.