Why Pray?

I wrote this awhile ago..  it needed to be posted. 

Before I can understand why I pray, I need to be clear about what I mean by the word pray.

When I was a child, praying meant saying certain combinations of words, prayers, to a man in the sky and his son. The "Our Father..." was a common one. Later my grandmother taught me to pray to the son's mother, but still there was that element of praying to and asking for. Sometimes there was a thank-you.

As I grew older I noticed this lack of gratitude in the praying I'd learned and decided to change that. I started making a point of saying thank-you for the smallest things - a beautiful sunset, food to eat, a smile from a stranger. At the same time my relationship with god was changing, becoming less through the church and more of a direct communication. My prayers became a simple "I love you" whispered under my breath when I caught the scent of lilacs on a June evening. God was becoming to me less a person in the sky and more a part of the physical world. Still other though...

Many years later something happened while I sat on a hill behind the Museum of Anthropology at UBC. All of my prayers, my apologies for humankind's wrongs, my gratefulness for all of the joys bestowed, disappeared. At that moment I became aware that i was not separate from the lilacs or the sunset or the food or the stranger. I understood that there was no need to pray to god, or goddess, for i am god, as are we all. Now when i pray there are no words. There are only moments of remembering - of returning to the knowing - that we are all one, we are all sacred, we are all god. That is why i pray.