Dr. Curt Thompson, author of The Anatomy of the Soul: Surprising Connections Between Neuroscience and Spiritual Practices that Can Transform Your Life and Relationships, on the relation between prayer, scripture, story, and neuroscience:
How prayer can make you whole
Prayer is ultimately about relationship. It's so much more than asking things of God, or even saying things to God. It's a participation in the relationship shared by the Trinity and the relationship shared between the Trinity and humanity. It is, in two words, about becoming whole.
Neuroscience offers us some marvelous insights into the power of relationships to make us whole (they can also wreck us). And interpersonal neurobiology, a branch of contemporary psychology, teaches us about the power of safe, secure attachments to literally remake the brain.
Here's a recommended book exploring all this. I've been researching this area for the past year and exploring the implications for spirituality. I've just started this book, but a perusal suggests it's just the right book to bring the primary sources (Allan Schore, Dan Siegal, and so many others...see the Norton Series for source materials) into conversation with Christian spirituality.
Dr. Thompson's book is short, well-written, and deeply immersed in the wellspring of Christian spirituality.
See also Thompson's useful website for more.
Prayer gives us hearts to do love
Too much spirituality is made complex, even unworldly. Prayer gives hearts to do love not merely think or talk about it. An award-winning brief film. It has only a handful of words, but speaks volumes.
What is love trying to do through you?
God is praying you into a life of prayer
Prayer—conscious, intentional, and in the words of St Paul, “unceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5.12)—is the highest expression of our intellectual, physical, and spiritual life. Prayer, when we are awake to it, is life.
When you consciously and intentionally enter into the prayer that is always going on around and within you, you become spiritually active. You are free and more fully aware of being alive to more than your “self-made me” and its many compulsions, anxieties, and obsessions.
This “lesser you” will only keep you curved in upon yourself, fallen into the sin that separates you and contracts you and closes you off from the presence of the Beloved, who is always near and whose prayer is always calling you to the friendship with God that is prayer.
Prayer can be as natural as breathing
Prayer can be and should be as natural as breathing—for we were made to pray just as we were made to breathe. The Bible tells us that in the beginning, God gently lifted the formless clay of the earth, cherished it lovingly, then kissed it and breathed life into it (Genesis 2.7). Prayer then is the experience of this tender intimacy, this reunion with the One who made us and loves us and who sustains us still by the Divine Breath.
Whether we know it or not, we exist by prayer just as we exist by breathing—God’s prayer for us and the prayer of our heart, which is always praying within us with each and every breath, each and every beating of our heart. Whether we’re mindful or not of this praying doesn’t matter.
Prayer is.
And without prayer—the sacred relationship shared by Creator and creation—things simply would not be.