Prayer is as old as time and as vast as human experience, found in every culture across history. Counter-intuitively perhaps, prayer is a far more common bond among Americans than religious faith itself. In overwhelming numbers, Americans say that they pray, whether they are religious or non-religious, devout or agnostic. In this week's program, we do not begin to "cover" the subject of prayer, but I think we open it up.

I'll devote most of this reflection to eloquent words that are spoken or quoted in this hour of radio — Rainer Maria Rilke, Roberta Bondi, Patricia Hampl, and Stephen Mitchell. I can't quote my first guest, Anoushka Shankar, because her approach to prayer comes in chant and song and simply must be heard in her voice. It is a wonderful introduction to Hindu theology as well a glimpse inside a lovely life. The four voices in this hour could not be more different. Taken together they suggest a far broader and richer definition of prayer than the public, politicized notion that sometimes divides us in cultural and legal battles. Perhaps because I am so averse to that kind of distortion, I am a great lover of the earthy philosophy of prayer of the theologian Roberta Bondi — whom I'll quote here first.

"We often have a kind of notion, as part of this highfalutin, noble picture of ourselves as pray-ers, that when we pray we need to be completely attentive and we need to be fully engaged and we need to be concentrating and we need to be focused. But the fact is, if prayer is our end of a relationship with God, that's not the way we are with the people we love a large portion of the time. We simply are in their presence. We're going about our lives at the same time in each other's presence, aware and sustained by each other, but not much more than that… However we are, however we think we ought to be in prayer, the fact is we just need to show up and do the best we can do. It's like being in a family."
—Roberta Bondi