The Goal of Prayer

The mystics tell us that the goal of prayer and our hidden life is union with God.  We use that phrase too often, to preserve the sense of its awe-fulness.  For what does union with God mean?  It is not a nice feeling we get in devout moments.  Union with God means every bit of our human nature transfigured into Christ, woven up into his creative life and activity, absorbed into his redeeming purpose, heart, soul, mind and strength.  Each time it happens it means that one of God’s creatures has achieved its destiny.

And if we want to know what this means in terms of human nature, what it costs and what it becomes, there is only one way: contemplation of the life of Christ.  Then we see that we grow in wisdom and stature not just for our own sakes—just to become spiritual—but that his teaching, healing, life-giving power may possess us and work through us; that we may lose our own lives and find his life, be conformed to the pattern shown in him, conformed to the cross.  Those are rich and costly demands; and what they ask from us on our side and from our prayer is a very great simplicity, self-oblivion, dependence and suppleness, a willingness and readiness to respond to life where it finds us and to wait, to grow and change, not according to our preconceived notions and ideas of pace, but according to the overruling will and pace of God.

– from The Light of Christ, by Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941)

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