The Charter for Compassion is a non-profit organization with the mission to “support the emerging global movement of compassion to co-create transformation at all levels” in the world. On March 25th, the non-profit organized an interfaith webinar around prayer, and the author Reverend Margaret Somerville, was invited to discuss her book When prayer doesn’t work: Reimagining our understanding and expectations of prayer. With her, facilitating the conversation, was Rabbi Shelly Barnathan and Imam Jamal Rahman. So, what happens when prayer doesn’t work, or what happens when prayer actually works? And, does prayer not work, or are we making it wrong? These are the kind of fascinating questions covered in her book, and that the interfaith panel discussed from their different spiritual perspectives…
To understand these questions that we might all have, whether we believe or not in the power of prayer, Margaret Somerville takes a spiritual approach beyond the religious frames to replace prayer and its meaning within our daily lives through examples from her Celtic roots, Christian pilgrimage, Buddhism, Jewish, Hindu and Muslim traditions. Beyond the traditional religious structures, the dialogue between spiritual traditions sheds a new light on how spirituality and prayer are usually understood and performed. Bringing us back to the very purpose of prayer, she leads us to rethink prayer not as a mechanical practice and repetition of specific words in a particular set-up, but to think about the sacredness behind it. What if prayer is more about the ordinary, and the presence of the simple acts of our daily life, like being able to feel the sacredness while going for a walk in nature, sharing a tea or a good meal with a friend, with a relative, and even, she says, in such a simple act as washing the dishes. Therefore, the prayer is only ineffective when we fail to acknowledge or embody the sacredness in the practice.
This conversation and the book are obviously more complex than that, and if you are interested, you should definitely read it, as it helps better understand how we relate with the sacred in the world and also better understand, or at least investigate and explore: who we are? What is prayer? There are, for sure, lots of different ways to answer that, and this is, first and foremost, an experience, but having such conversations and sharing leads us to think and see the world as sacred.
Whether we pray or not, Margaret Somerville’s work and the interfaith dialogue around it are the voice of a shift in the way prayer is usually conceived or performed, going from preformatted and restricted time and space prayer to a prayer embedded into the very fabric of our daily lives, as a presence, more accessible and experiential.
