One of the things that I enjoy about writing a blog is choosing an image to complement the writing. Usually I type in my title and scroll through the various images and add my blog. This one proved more difficult. To the extent that it’s taken me 24 hours to understand what image I wanted. Initially I Googled “Therapy as Prayer” and was presented with an array of pictures. None of which I liked. People at prayer. Prayers to overcome being Gay. Prayers to help fight cancer. All a sorts of therapeutic uses of prayer, I suppose. But not one that conveyed my view of both therapy and prayer. Nor one that conveyed my idea of therapy as prayer. Then I was sitting in my car waiting for my wife to finish shopping, thinking of nothing in particular when it dawned on me. I knew the image! It was a sunrise. This conveyed my responses to both ideas- prayer and therapy.

Both prayer and therapy are, for me, about openness. Being open to the Light – with all the risks, excitements, disappointments that go with Being in the Light. I grew up in a religious culture that emphasised what I think of as “Slot machine prayer”. I put my prayer penny in the slot, wait a bit and then collect my gift. I may not always like the gift, but my penny will always win a prize of some kind. There is a danger that therapy can become the same. “Anxiety? Put your money in this slot and out will pop a solution.” Depression? The same. Anger? Ditto. Neither of these constitute the real work of prayer or therapy. To quote Mahatma Gandhi “Prayer is not asking. It is the longing of the soul… better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.” One could substitute “therapy” for prayer. To borrow again from another thinker, the psychotherapist Carl Rogers said “In my early professional years I was asking myself the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in the way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?”

Gandhi and Rogers both understood something about our relationship with ourselves and the Other. Both prayer and therapy are about what happens when we bring our whole selves into a relationship where we can freely think, explore, muse, play… the list of possibilities is long. And such a relationship is risky. When I sit to pray, I can’t know where that praying will take me. Who or what will I discover about myself and God. (And vice versa.) The same is true in therapy. When I sit down with my therapist, I can’t know where we will visit. (Nor does he! That’s the risk and the pleasure.)

This is a blog, not an essay the links between prayer and therapy. But I have much more that I want to share, so more blogs will follow. Come with me on a journey into the Other.