What is prayer?

A new meaning from Spirit Self

Growing up in a Black Caribbean immigrant family that followed Roman Catholic beliefs, attending my neighborhood’s white-run Catholic church and school, I learned very early on about prayer in traditional ways. Just writing that sentence reminds me of rosaries (which I still adore), prayer cards, missals, Easter Sunday socks and shoes on my little feet, and the warm, heady aroma of frankincense.

Prayer, as we were taught to understand it then, connected us to an almighty but stern, barely knowable God, to the more accessible Son of God, Lord Jesus, and his loving mother Mary, Queen of Heaven, and to the readily accessible saints and angels. It was always something you made special time for, something done over here to be etherically transmitted over there…somewhere wherever. Something that left you and wafted ever upwards into the invisible where it might hit its target—or not.

Prayer ascended the chain of spiritual hierarchy, lavishing praise and gratitude to our betters or bearing tears and supplications the higher it climbed. Prayer often signaled acknowledgement of something down here fragile and damaged, lost, or lacking.

One prayed to be healed or to be corrected in one’s errors and forgiven one’s sins and other shortcomings. One prayed to get something one didn’t have or stabilize something uncertain. One prayed, quite often actually, on the behalf of others, to have a desired effect on the life and situation of a loved one or even strangers in need or in peril.

One prayed, mainly, because one was a humble human without significant power, a power that belonged, instead, to the Most High who clearly had made only a certain kind of people in His image if the visual images on display on church walls and in prayer books were to be believed—a suspect message reaching both the conscious mind and, sadly, the subconscious.

As part of my year (2026) of exploring things through the sensibility of my Spirit Self, I posed this question last night: What is prayer?

I asked because I was unsure of the utility of even using that word as I unfold new aspects of my spiritual practice and, especially, as I have begun participating in beautiful interdenominational prayer circles convened, once per month, by creative folks and social justice activists deeply concerned with genocide, racism, oppression of indigenous people and immigrants, environmental decline, and the overall rise of fascism.

The response from Spirit Self was most helpful and, frankly, it was to be expected. It began, as so many others do, with a reminder that “You’re already there.”

We already have what we’re seeking. We just have to wake up to it. And that tracks.

Spirit has taught me, all along, that there’s no separation between the human—and all that’s earthly—and greater Spirit. There’s no formidably unreachable Up There. Waking up to the Spirit Self within ourselves is the path to understanding and realizing what No Separation means.

So, then, what is prayer? More important, why is prayer?

Prayer is just more of the same. Prayer is a constant, a continuum. A relational communication—spirit to spirit, spirit AS spirit. It is both ongoing and fruitful. It is powerful and empowering.

Because Spirit is not something apart from me over there or up there. Spirit is here in everything I am and do. And that opens the portal for everything to be prayerful.

Not long after this message landed, I was taken on an unexpected mental tour of many of the times in my life when—out of character for the way I was raised as a quiet, well-educated, well-behaved little Bajan-American Catholic schoolgirl from an aspiring family—I moved with surprising audacity and courage as opportunities and challenges arose in front of me. I took real chances, one after another, around creative practice, intellectual exploration, travel, sexuality, and leadership.

Spirit Self was saying, We’ve been ONE all along, and now you realize.

As Ntozake Shange wrote, “i found god in myself/& i loved her/i loved her fiercely”

It’s up to me, now, if I will reclaim the word prayer and use it to express this reality. And, yes, I choose to do so.

So, now, please tell me:

Where do you find yourself with the word and practice of prayer?

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