Jim Wallis: Revolutionary Prayer

"For me, prayer is more often becoming a time of listening than talking. There is so much noise in our world and our lives (much of our own making); prayer becomes a quiet space enabling us to stop talking long enough to see what God might be trying to say to us. The disciplines of prayer, silence, and contemplation practices by the monastics and mystics are precisely that – stopping the noise, slowing down, and becoming still, so that God can break through all our activity and noise in order to speak to us. Prayer serves to put all the parts of our lives in God’s presence, reminding us of how holy our humanity really is.................
.........Contemplative writer and priest Henri Nouwen once shared with our Sojourners community that the desert fathers regarded prayer as an act of "unhooking" from the harness of the world's securities. Such prayer may be the only action powerful enough to free us from our spiritual bondage to property, money, power, ideas, and causes, which often control our behavior.
Only those who have truly found their identity in God can resist the violent tugs and pulls of the false values offered by the world. By re-establishing our security in God, prayer becomes an effective weapon in resisting the world’s false securities........."

http://www.beliefnet.com/blogs/godspolitics/2007/02/jim-wallis-revolutionary-prayer.html