What exactly does that mean, to pray affectively? You must try to pray so that, in your prayer, you open yourself in such a way that sometime —perhaps not today, but sometime— you are able to hear God say to you: ‘I love you!’ These words, addressed to you by God, are the most important words you will ever hear because, before you hear them, nothing is ever completely right with you, but, after you hear them, something will be right in your life at a very deep level.
These are simple words, but they capture what we ultimately try to do when we “lift mind and heart to God” in prayer.
In the end, prayer's essence, is simply this: we need to open ourselves to God in such a way that we are capable of hearing God say to us, individually, “I love you!”
This might sound pious and sentimental. It's anything but that. Don't be put off by simplicity. The deeper something is the simpler it will be. That's why we have trouble understanding the deep things, be they of science or the heart.
Anyone can understand what's complex, but we have trouble grasping the principle of relativity, the concept of being, the concept of love, and things about the nature of the God, for exactly the opposite reason. They're too simple. The simpler something is, the harder it is to wrap our minds around it and the more we need to make it complex in order to understand it. That's true too of prayer. It's so simple that we rarely lay bare its essence. It has ever been thus, it would seem.
On the morning of the resurrection. Mary Magdala goes looking for him, carrying spices with which to embalm his dead body. Jesus meets her, alive and in no need of embalming, but she doesn't recognize him. Bewildered but sincere, she asks Jesus where she might find Jesus (something, I suspect, we do often enough in prayer). Jesus, for his part, repeats for her the question he opened the gospel with: “What are you looking for?”
With deep affection, he pronounces her name: “Mary”. In doing that, he tells her what she and everyone else are forever looking for, God's voice, one-to-one, speaking unconditional love, gently saying your name. In the end, that's what we are all looking for and most need. It's what gives us substance, identity, and justification beyond our own efforts to make ourselves lovable, worthwhile, and immortal. We need to hear God, affectionately, one-to-one, pronounce our names: “Cheryl” “Julia!” “Kern!” ‘Ted!” “Steve” “Brad!” Nothing will heal us more of restlessness, bitterness, and insecurity than to hear God say: “I love you,”
Lord I pray for all my Sonshine Friends that we say the same thing to God: “I love you!” In all long-term, affectionate relationships the partners have to occasionally prompt each other to hear expressions of affection and reassurance. Prayer is not meant to change God but us. True. And nothing changes us as much for the good as to hear someone say that he or she loves us, especially if that someone is God.
