We are meant to pray. Prayer is as much a part of being alive as breathing. I can hold my breath for so long before I have to take another breath. If anyone has committed suicide by refusing to breathe, it’s news to me. Similarly, I wonder if even the most hardened atheist ever gets to the point of being entirely incapable of prayer. To the extent a person stops praying, something at the heart of human identity is dying in that person
Prayer is among the most persistent and universal of human activities. We know of no culture at any level of development in which some form of prayer doesn’t occur. However deeply we dig into the human past, we find traces of spiritual life.
Yet we live in a secular age that tends to regard prayer as having a decorative social function – possibly comforting for some but non-essential.
