Some people find prayer easy; I am not one of those. Sometimes there are situations or people I can focus on, but without these, I struggle. At least, I struggle with prayer as a shopping list, but there are other ways and reasons to pray. One of my inspirations is the poet and priest R.S. Thomas, who words have often inspired me. This poem tells of how he found prayer a way of simply being with God, moving us from "the snake-haunted garden", the Garden of Eden, our current world, to the "tall city of glass", the New Jerusalem in the book of Revelation, the place where God dwells.

Not as in the old days I pray,
God. My life is not what it was...
Once I would have asked healing.
I go now to be doctored...
to lend my flesh as manuscript of the great poem
Of the scalpel. I would have knelt
long, wrestling with you, wearing
you down. Hear my prayer Lord, hear my prayer.
As though you were deaf, myriads of mortals have kept up their shrill
cry, explaining your silence by their unfitness.

It begins to appear
this is not what prayer is about.
It is the annihilation of difference,
the consciousness of myself in you,
of you in me...I begin to recognize
you anew, God of form and number.
There are questions we are the solution
to, others whose echoes we must expand
to contain. Circular as our way
is, it leads not back to the snake-haunted
garden, but onward to the tall city of glass that is the laboratory of the spirit.