If thank you suffices as a prayer, I offer a lot of sufficient prayers by virtue of my gratitude practice. In all seriousness, I pray a lot. It takes on many different forms and these days it looks a lot different than during the days when I had immersed myself in a relatively strict religious doctrine. But now I pray a lot, several times a day.
When Oprah Winfrey asked spiritual teacher Iyanla Vanzant what her personal prayer is, Iyanla responded, “I have three: ‘Help!’ ‘Help me now!” and ‘Thank You.’ Those three will cover anything.” I like the way she thinks! If those are criteria for personal prayers, then I am in pretty good shape. Between the “thank you’s” that I offer every day, more often than not I also offer the other two (“Help” and “Help me, now”) on a very regular basis. I put my own particular spin on the Help prayer, uttering “Help me, please” and “Help me God” with some degree of frequency.
Prayer, to me, encompasses both the practiced, recited, ritual prayers that we learn through formalized religion as well as the deeply personal, heart-wrenching soul prayers like “Help me, God.” Then there are the even deeper prayers that can barely be uttered in words and those sometimes unrecognizable that go beyond conscious, active thought into something deeper. I have experienced prayer in all these forms, through all different events and states of being in my life. I am so grateful to have these as part of my modes of expressing myself to the Spirit, the Creator, the Universe, God and all the many names we have for the One. I was born and raised in a particular religious tradition, immersed myself deeply in a second, have explored a vastly different third and have found nothing inconsistent or incongruent with any of them in the sense that they all involved a form of prayer, of connection to a source. Or at least that is how I translate them.
I agree with Master Eckhart and Iyanla Vanzant and so many others who have understood the idea that to offer gratitude is to offer prayer and for me that is sufficient. Now I want to say a quick thing about sufficiency, which basically means “adequate” or “enough.” It is not a measure of quantity, like one can actually pray enough or offer enough thanks so as to be sufficient. To me the sufficiency comes in the depth, the authenticity, the sincerity of the thank you, and no one is in a position to determine that except you. I used to believe that certain things would happen if I prayed hard enough, and that when those things didn’t happen it was because I hadn’t offered sufficient prayers or that I didn’t have enough faith. It was a pretty heavy burden to put on myself and I still suffer from residues of that limiting belief. The sufficiency of my thank you, my gratitude, my prayer is not determined by some external source judging it, but is between me and God, me and my own inner self.
There are days when the only prayer I do say is “Thank you.” And on those days, I do indeed know that I have prayed sufficiently. And so it is.
