WHEN do we turn to prayer? Perhaps, many would say, only in extreme situations. “One can only pray” is the point of last resort. When circumstances crowd in and crush, and when all else fails — as surely is the case in the Middle East today for those many terrified and traumatised by the inhuman bombings on every side — we can but pray. “Out of the deep have I called to thee, O Lord, O Lord, hear my voice!” The psalmist, as so often, gives us words for reaching out from darkness and despair, “out of the mire and clay”. When meaning and purpose seem to evaporate then our cry for help, to whatever meaning or purpose there may be, comes from the depths of our hearts. “God, if there be a God, help me. O Lord make speed to save me!”

But is prayer only a matter of last resort, a cry of desperation or dereliction? It is surely more than this. Maurice Nédoncelle, in a book of almost half a century ago, pointed to prayer as embedded in our human reactions with each other. In our praying to God we are grounded in our prayer to each other.

All languages are marked by the vocative in which we express in one way or another our requests to another person, requests which are petition not command. This human kind of praying always demands attention to another, and a longing for an answering and sympathetic response. There is no prayer without attentiveness, and the deepest prayer is the language of love, for love both seeks and knows that the other person will respond.

Here is the clue as to why we are, even if we do not acknowledge it, praying beings. It is because we are made as human persons with all the intricacy and delicacy of our physical make-up and grounding, as those who are made in the image of the God, who is, in Dante’s words “the love that moves the sun and other stars”.

That God is, of course, a mystery, just as every person is a mystery (there are indeed two things that recede in the face of definition, one is God and the other is I). To know God is to seek for Him continually. In praying we reach out to our Creator who both reveals and hides Himself, “smiting on the dark cloud with the dart of our longing love” as that medieval Christian treatise The Cloud of Unknowing puts it.

Prayer is about coming before God as we are and as God is. Therefore at the heart of prayer is adoration. Almost all the words for worship in the Bible are about bowing down or prostration. “Come in, let us bow and bend low, and kneel before the Lord who made us.” Because prayer requires the abandonment of the pride in which we see ourselves as the centre of the universe, its condition is humility. We respond to God with the vocative as we respond to each other — “O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness!”

If we come before God as He is, in his goodness, grace and compassion, then our adoration passes into penitence, our need of forgiveness and mercy, our longing for the pouring of His healing light upon our souls.

It was a Broadmoor patient, who had done terrible things, who told his psychotherapist that prayer was “washing your face from the inside” — or perhaps God washing our face from the inside. But how do we pray, how do we “turn to prayer” both in the sense of attending to God, and of turning the whole business of our life, our work and our relationships into that which is prayerful — “praying without ceasing”? The reality is that there are only two choices — “You start from where you are, or you start from where you are not.”

Starting from where we are means coming before God “just as I am”, without the usual “wardrobe of excuses”, and with all the rollercoaster of emotions. But were everything to be shaped by our subjective needs then they would be the measure and not God. Starting from where we are not means taking the words of the psalms and the Scriptures, the given daily patterns of morning and evening prayer, and so being led to praise when we do not feel like it, and being opened up to the mystery of the Divine Love which comes down to the very lowest part of our need.

When Jesus was asked by his disciples how to pray he gave them the pattern prayer, known simply as The Lord’s Prayer. “Our Father in heaven, may your name be held holy.” It is a longing prayer for the coming of God’s kingdom, for the doing of his perfect will, for the gift now of the bread of heaven, for forgiveness rooted in our forgiveness of others, and for deliverance from evil and temptation. We are to pray this deeply, drawing down our minds into our hearts, our willing and our choosing.

Then we will find, in George Herbert’s words, that prayer is indeed “God’s breath in man returning to his birth, the soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage” and indeed no less than “heaven in ordinary”.

The Right Rev Dr Geoffrey Rowell is Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe