We have discussed before Maslow's stages of competence and how they relate to spiritual competence. The take home message there is that while we will never be really "competent," we were created to be loved by God and we should strive to accept his grace to help us learn to love Him and each other. If that is the case, then how do we increase in our knowledge of God and not just in our knowledge about God, with the distinction being that we should be improving our relationship with him rather than just "stalking God."
We can start this time by asking what prayer is and how we should pray. We realize that we are limited in our ability to pray by our limited knowledge of God. The more we know God the more we know how to pray, and the more we pray the more we know God. If our destination is prayer, we need to figure out how we are going to "get there" without losing our way with shiny, worldly distractions. We used the analogy of trying to get to Chicago from Boston and accidentally getting on I-87 South at Albany. The sooner you figure out that you're heading in the wrong direction, the sooner you can do something to correct the error and start heading to Chicago, and we identified three ways:
1) Listening to the Holy Spirit or your conscience - this is the equivalent of seeing the road signs and exits a few miles south of Albany and realizing you're heading South on 87 and you need to turn around and go back so you can keep heading west on I-90. To do this, you must be sensitive to the voice of the Holy Spirit, and this can get better or worse with time depending on how attuned you are to His voice.
2) Listening to Spiritual Guidance - this is the equivalent of someone seeing you are driving south through NY or DC and asking "aren't you supposed to be going to Chicago?" We can either listen to their advice or insist that we are heading in the right direction. The more someone knows us the sooner they will notice and hopefully intervene. The more trust we have and the more open we are to taking spiritual guidance, the more likely we are to listen and change direction.
3) Waiting for rock bottom - this is the equivalent of being on a boat to Cuba and finally asking "wait, I'm going to Chicago, why am I on a boat???"
We then discussed many different types/methods of prayer (e.g. psalms, agpeya, psalmody, attending liturgy, singing, personal prayer, petitionary prayer, etc.) and mentioned that it is important that the method does not become the final destination. If we are praying to say that we prayed, then we are still the center of our prayer. We must be most careful not in choosing the method but in our intention - we must keep God at the center of anything we consider to be a prayer.
