We enter most appropriately into [the revelation of who God is] when we listen and tell stories to one another and listen and speak to God in prayer.
And, of course, silence. Silence is indispensable. It is a commonly overlooked element in language, but it must not be: Especially it must not be overlooked in the language of prayer. It is not as if Jesus speaks the revelation of God in his stories and metaphors, and now in prayer we get to say our piece. Silence, which in prayer consists mostly in attentive listening, is nonnegotiable. Listening, which necessarily requires silence on our part, is as much a part of language as words. The colon and the semicolon, the comma and the period—all of which insist on silence as part and parcel of speech—are as essential to language as nouns and verbs. But more often than not, silence gets short shrift in our prayers. Yet if there is no silence, our speech degenerates into babble…
Prayer is our first language. Anybody can pray. And everybody does. We pray even when we don’t know we are praying. “Help me” is our first prayer. We don’t have it within ourselves to be ourselves. “Thank you” is our last prayer. When everything is said and done, we realize that all that we receive has been a gift.
But there is irony here. Prayer, the most natural and authentic substratum of language, is also the easiest form of language to fake. We discover early on that we can pretend to pray, use the words of prayer, practice the forms of prayer, assume postures of prayer, acquire a reputation for prayer, and never pray.
-- Eugene Peterson, Tell It Slant
