If there was no prayer
There would be no pray-er
There would be no Being Worth Praying To
There would be no conversation
No relationship or correlation
No dialogue between the finite and the Infinite
The broken and the Whole (or sometimes the Breaker).
The soul and the Fountain from whose waters the soul first swam
would be eternally separated
The river of hope, of belief, of longing, of living, of receiving, of giving
Would run eternally dry
There would be no if, no what, no why
Only an endless stream of tasks
A lifetime full of unspoken asks
A series of repeated acts
A life lived only in a world of facts,
Of cold impersonal reason
That which would be made dormant would soon, inevitably, wither and die
If there was no prayer
No here, no there, nowhere
Would we find ourselves
Would we find one another
Would we find any trace of anything transcendent
Anything enduring
Anything real.