So-called two-way prayer has become a fashionable practice in AA. The notion that we can pray and God can answer is not new. Actually, the fact that God hears prayers and answers them is well-established even in very orthodox circles, e.g.:
Next, faith is needed, not only the general belief that God is capable of answering prayer or that it is a powerful means of obtaining His favor, but also the implicit trust in God‘s fidelity to His promise to hear a prayer in some particular instance. (Catholic Encyclopedia)
Closer to home, in AA, the Big Book also implies that God responds:
We are often surprised how the right answers come after we have tried this for a while.
Note, however, that it does not say God gives us the right answers directly in verbal form. The channel could be anything, though the source be God. I will come back to this later.
However, there are dangers, and caution is to be observed.
Let's take the very name: two-way prayer. A two-way road is a road with identical lanes going in opposite directions. Yet God is not praying to us. We're praying to God. And God is answering. But the answer is not a prayer. It is an answer. Prayer plus answer would be more appropriate.
Secondly, the name implies a symmetry, like in a chat with a friend. But we're really talking about a very small, flawed person and an infinite Power, in some people's conception the creature and the Creator of the creature and of everything else. The notion of symmetry must be set aside. As someone once said to a shop assistant in Prada who was being sniffy: You and I are here for very different reasons.
To pick up the point from earlier, if God does answer, He may or may not answer in the session itself. The notion of sitting down at a set time to pray is very good. To extend this into a sort of summoning of God to attend our 'session' is presumptuous, as though we're going to needle God into answering specific questions or giving specific advice, as though he's there to do us a favour if we say the right incantation. God was there all along. God will be there all along. If God wants to convey inspirations, intuitive thoughts, and decisions, He has all day, every day, to do so. Like Aslan in the Narnia books, God is not tame. If He has not already given direction, why not? What is blocking me from hearing His voice?
Expecting an instant answer, in a form that can be verbalised, contains two false presuppositions. Sometimes answers come much later, and answers are often non-verbal. We suddenly realise, sometimes months later, we have been taken down a different path, and, in retrospect, it becomes clear that an old prayer has been answered.
Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of the process is listening out for answers in the moment: words will almost certainly come into the mind. But are the words from God? If not from God, from whom or what? From one's own physical brain? From one's memory? What exactly might one have summoned? There are potentially more alarming answers to this question. The devilish can come in the most pious and innocuous of forms, and rationalisation can paper over the cracks of almost any shattered pathway. The risk of listening out for voices is that one might really start to hear them.
Lastly, choosing the session time, again, puts the individual in the driving seat. There is a purpose. There is an agenda. This I don't like to be my approach to prayer.
Here are some examples of what I do:
- I have the notion of praying in accordance with the schedule of a particular faith (which one does not matter to the reader: but there is the sense that I am doing what is suggested to me by those more spiritually advanced: I'm setting no agenda; I'm fulfilling an obligation).
- I start a session of prayer not with personal invocations but with standard, set prayers. This has the merit of reliance on tradition for the appropriateness of the prayers and establishes a context of humility in the face of those who have gone before.
- I pack my praying with standard prayers of praise, supplication, and thanks. They are mostly impersonal.
- I do ask personal things, in accordance with the instructions on page 86 of the book Alcoholics Anonymous and those other passages that suggest prayer, and I do ask specifically what to do.
- The personal things I ask centre mostly on recognising where I am wrong and what God would like me to do instead, which chiefly involves retrieving elements of God's already-revealed will from memory.
- I do not hang around long for an answer. Almost everything comes in its own time and way. It unfolds slowly. I tend to get on with my day and let God answer when He sees fit.
- If something comes directly, I test against spiritual principles and, if remotely questionable, with someone I trust spiritually.
- But in general I establish, through my prayer life, a generalised relationship of subservience to God in the hope that, as I go through my day, all I do is in line with God's will, that thinking and acting right becomes habitual and automatic.
- This last point avoids the danger or remaining in charge but calling in God as a specialist consultant.
- Instead: I give my day to God, and ask what to do, and almost invariably everything is ordinary and entirely expected. There is no specialness: only service.