UMC20260201 - Prayer as articulation¶
I’ve been reading a history of philosophy recently, and what strikes me in the book is not just what thinkers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle believed, but how they came to their beliefs.
They did not treat thinking as a solitary act; someone alone with their thoughts, staring into the distance. Thought emerged through dialogue, argument, writing, and response. Vague ideas and feelings were made conscious, challenged, refined, or discarded. Thinking happened between people and through words.
Articulation does something that is difficult yet necessary. To articulate something, to put it into words, forces us to decide what we mean. It exposes contradictions. It makes us slow down and commit to a thought rather than letting a fog swirl around in our heads. When we dialogue, argue or write, thought becomes compressed into language (like carbon into diamond) and released into the world where it is not longer hidden in our minds.
This process is not just intellectual. It is therapeutic. Articulation is one of the primary ways we come to understand ourselves. Many of the things we call “feelings” are simply unexamined thoughts. When we give them words, we often discover that what felt overwhelming becomes manageable, even instructive.
This is what prayer does.
Prayer is not primarily about informing God of things He does not know. It is about ordering the chaos within us. In prayer, we name our fears, our desires, our anger, our gratitude. We bring what is disordered into speech. And in doing so, we participate in healing.
Prayer creates order. And where there is order, there is the possibility of peace.
Love,
Cliff