Prayer & contemplation

To pray is to turn the whole self toward something — toward the sacred, toward what is most real, toward what most needs attending. Across all traditions, prayer takes forms as different as thunder and silence, from the chanted liturgies of the Orthodox to the wordless sitting of Zen to the whispered intentions of Yoruba devotion. What these have in common is not their form but their direction: outward, upward, inward, all at once.