"Prayer is unmarketable. Prayer gives no immediate payoff. You get no immediate feedback or sense of success. True prayer, in that sense, probably is the most courageous and counter cultural thing an American will ever do."(R. Rohr "Radical Grace" p.173)
So why pray at all, if no apparent immediate thing occurs? I guess for me, because at a minimum I find it helps to sort things out. It helps to get things off my chest so to speak. While there are lots of books out there trying to teach people to pray, I often wonder if it really is teachable? Jesus gives an outline that morphs into being "the Lord's Prayer." He never says pray these exact words, just pray in this way.
When you see someone who is a person of prayer, the first inclination is to mimic what they do. That may be a good starting point, but eventually prayer has to become your own.
People of course get frustrated when they pray for specific things and they don't occur. Religious leaders often don't help with the answers they give as to why a prayer wasn't answered. And yet, even when I don't get the immediate thing that I've prayed for, I'm often surprised by what does occur, usually in a pleasant way.
Prayer perhaps helps most by cleaning out the clutter in one's life which keeps you from seeing what is truly important.
Blessings,
Ed
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