Prayer means calling upon God. Such prayer is a great form of worship. According to a hadith, prayer is worship. (Sunan Ibn Majah, Hadith No. 3828). According to another hadith, prayer is the kernel of worship (Sunan al-Tirmidhi, Hadith No. 3771)
Prayer is an act of a very personal nature. Everyone has to pray for himself on his own, just as everyone performs his own worship. No one tells another person to pray in his stead.
According to chapter 32 of the Quran, this is one of the virtues of believers: “They forsake their beds, calling upon their Lord in fear and in hope, and spend out of what We have provided them with.” (32:16) That is, they call upon their Lord in fear and hope. Calling upon God in this way is an extremely personal thing. Such prayer emerges from the deepest recesses of one’s heart. This kind of prayer has to be done by the individual himself. He cannot ask someone to fear God for him or to trust in God for him. Prayer is a criterion of a person’s servitude. One who believes in God must experience such moments in his life when his soul is moved greatly by the remembrance of God; when his heart and mind experience great convulsions in reflecting upon the concept of God. It is then that with this heightened spiritual state of mind, he begins to entreat God, to pray with heartfelt words.
One in whom this feeling does not arise will not, as regards his faith in God, be held to be reliable in the eyes of God. According to a hadith: “One who does not beseech God, invites the wrath of God.” (Sunan al-Tirmidhi, Hadith No. 3373)
Prayer is an act of great delicacy which takes place between God and man. During this act, no third person exists. It is a fact that the best prayer is that in which one pours out one’s heart in solitude. According to a tradition, “One virtue of such a believer is that of remembering God in solitude and then his eyes filling with tears.” (Sahih al-Bukhari, Hadith No. 660)
When looked at in the light of the Quran and Hadith, we learn that prayer is a sublime act of a very personal nature. For every believer, it is an expression of his godly feelings. It is only when you keep this reality before you that you realize that prayer is not something that a senior person should be asked to do for you. Such a request would produce an invalid form of prayer. It is like going to man instead of to God. Similarly, praying on a loudspeaker is also lacking in seriousness. Such prayer is not true prayer. Learning some words by rote and keeping on repeating them is also not prayer. Prayer, in reality, is an act that moves your heart intensely: It is not the recitation of a combination of some ritual words.
In Sahih al Bukhari, there is a maxim that reads: “Your prayer is your faith.” (Sahih al-Bukhari, Kitab al-Iman, Chapter 1) This means that just as your faith is, so will your prayer be. Prayer is a criterion by which to judge your faith.
If a person achieves a deeper level of faith, his prayer will also come out of the deeper recesses of his heart and will have a very spiritual colour to it. When one prays in this manner, his whole existence will become a part of his prayer. Prayer for him will become a meeting point with God. It will be like conversing in whispers with God. (Sahih Muslim, Hadith No. 551). On the contrary, for one whose faith has not become a part of his heart, prayer will be nothing but verbal repetition of certain words. It will amount to reiterating certain words ritualistically and this has nothing to do with the feelings of the heart. Such prayer will only be the utterance of mere words and not an expression of spiritual states.
Source: Discovering God
