Or else we treat God like an object when we buy into the idea that if we say a certain prayer a certain number of times we'll have good luck or we'll receive a miracle in a week. Sometimes, we're treating God like an object when we blame ourselves for someone we love not being healed or dying because we didn't pray often enough or hard enough. When we think this way, we're acting as if God is a Vegas slot machine, and if we put in enough money (prayers) and pull the slot machine handle the right number of times (say those prayers the right number of times), the three lemons or five bars will line up, and wealth - or healing - or whatever we're praying for - will drop into our hands.
Jesus himself said "When you are praying, do not heap up empty words/phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him."
Well, then, we might ask, if God knows what we need before we ask Him, why should we bother praying? James Alison says that, in Jesus' mind, we are the slot machines, and in our ignorance and wrong-headedness, we're often getting our handles pulled by the wrong players: those people and thoughts and feelings in our lives influencing us in the wrong way, leading us in the wrong direction, or, at least, not realizing that we don't know all the results that would follow if we got what we asked for. God is the Perfect Player! God knows us! But God needs us to allow Him to "work on us," pull our handles, and work with us.
God knows that we don't really know who we are. We're constantly trying on different identities, the identities that other people want us to have. And our ideas about what's good and best for ourselves and the people in our lives are shaped by our own small, limited understandings of ourselves and reality.
God, on the other hand, has a deep desire, a longing for us, and knows who we are, what is good for us, what we really need. But the only way that God can get access to our slot machine handles is for us to pray, to allow Him entrance to our souls. Our praying, talking to God, opening ourselves up to God, is the only way that God can "gain access to recreating us from within, to giving us a 'self,'...that is ...a constant flow of treasure." (Alison, in "Jesus the Forgiving Victim.")
God doesn't care how long our prayers are. God doesn't care how many times we say them. God wants prayers that are the love and trust words of a relationship. God wants an open attitude from us, a loving heart waiting for His words, so that He can "open us up," and reveal to us the treasure that we truly are in His eyes.
When we realize that God is not an object, like a spare wheel or a slot machine, that we try to influence and manipulate by saying just the right words or doing the right things to get what we want, then - Who is God really? What happens when we really talk to Him, really listen to Him?
For Alison, God is, for one thing, deathless. Unlike anyone we know or have ever known, God is neither limited by time, nor does God know death as a reality in God's life. Death cannot limit or end God's life as Death limits and ends ours. God is "Someone, therefore, for whom mortality, existence in limited time, our reality, looks entirely different." Our knowledge, our imaginations, and our desires only extend as far as what might happen today, tomorrow, next month, or next year. God sees everyone, every event, every project of ours, in the light of eternity, in the light of what can happen that will bring the whole sweep of all the eons of Time and the "plans of His heart" into eternal fruition.
When we pray by asking God to show us the way, our hearts are touched by faith in God's deathless heart, God's eternal plans. Suddenly its OK to not have as much money as my neighbor does, because I trust that God will always show me the way to have enough. Suddenly it's OK to begin a project, raise a child, or join a movement, not knowing whether I'll see the end result of my nurturing. It's OK to know that in the future others will change what I've worked so hard to accomplish. God knows every end result! I don't have to see it to believe in it, believe that good will triumph.
Knowing that a God Who sees all of time into eternity is totally unhurried, we can be OK with our personal failures because we know we're only one stone in the Wall of the Kingdom God is building. Looking at ourselves through God's deathless eyes, we can handle our illnesses and our deaths because we know that death is not the Final Answer for any of us - abundant and eternal life is.
God is the One Who created the Universe, Who created something out of nothing. But God is always creating! God is the One Who delights in creative abundance, Who guides us into believing in ourselves and taking risks and being creators ourselves. If in prayer we ask God to lead the way, our hearts are touched by faith that God continues to create something out of nothing in our lives. God turns our dead ends into living pathways, carries us around dark corners into the sudden sunlight of new hopes and enlightenment.
In other words, God made us so that we're always desiring someone or something. God wants to enlarge our desires! Instead of us wanting what we desire for ourselves, God wants us to have faith in His desires for us. God is the One Who knows us through and through, knows who we really are, what we're capable of becoming. And the only way our hearts can be enlarged so that we desire what God desires for us is for us to pray: Father, show me the way, and may Your will be accomplished in my life.
Sometimes it's easier to think of God as a spare wheel or a Vegas slot machine instead of a Person, because then we can avoid a relationship. We can narrow our "doings" with God the Supreme Being into proper words and actions, and that way avoid having to trust a Person. We find it hard to believe that God loves us or even likes us. We've found it safer in the past to keep people at a distance so they can't hurt us. Sometimes when life doesn't go the way we want it to, we feel as if God is testing us unfairly or using us sadistically like playthings to be tossed aside.
Yet there are no hidden intentions in God. If we can only trust the Father of Jesus, Who is also "Our Father," we can believe that God is always "for" us. We can trust and believe in the Father as Jesus did because we know that God allowed His Son to come to us as a fellow human being, to explain that God is Love and Mercy. God allowed Jesus to come to us even though He knew that we human beings would use Him, abuse Him, and finally treat Him as our scapegoat and murder Him.
Yet, death was not the Father's final word. Our Father raised up His perfect Word to us, Jesus, and forgave us so totally for our murderous hearts that He promised us eternal life also - if we could immerse ourselves in the deathless mind and heart and will of His Son - in prayerful communication with Him.
When we can let go and let God, when we can trust and rejoice in God's quiet work enlarging our hearts and the desires of our hearts, we can re-discover ourselves. We can find that we are God's Beloved and dare to dream, to risk. We can say "yes" to God's abundant love and mercy. We can trust that with our consent God is making good things happen, even if we can't see the end result. We can say continually to God "Remind us that we are the slot machine, and You the delighted player, so happy and lucky to have found us, fine-tuning us into disgorging more treasure than we ever knew we had." (Alison.)