Prayer, especially private prayer, is one of the most intensely social of Christian activities.

Perhaps that sentence surprises you; it certainly surprised me. Yet when I was studying the works of the great spiritual masters, I was surprised to find that when they talked about how to pray, they didn’t talk about what techniques to use, or what words to say, or how to carve time out of one’s day. They talked about avoiding petty feuds and jealousies, living in peace with our neighbors, and about our inward dispositions towards ourselves and others. This is where we begin in prayer — with our social lives.

Our Lord tells us that we should reconcile with each other before approaching the sacramental altar (Matt. 5:23-24). After all, if we are unwilling to reconcile with our neighbor, who is God’s image, then we are at some level unwilling to be reconciled to God, and even our most beautiful prayers will not find the grace they seek — because we have already rejected that grace in the form of our neighbor.

Our goal is not to achieve perfect reconciliation in the way that one can achieve 100 percent on a test. Because reconciliation is about relationship, there is no one right way to reconcile. What’s more, because you only have to reconcile when a relationship is strained, reconciliation often doesn’t feel very good. It is usually an awkward, uncomfortable process, prone to misunderstandings and false starts. Reconciliation, like prayer and like love, is a way of fumbling in the dark towards another whom, by definition, you cannot fully know.

There is no way out of the fumbling. For as long as we continue in the breaking of bread and the prayers, we shall be unable to avoid the awkwardness and finitude of our social natures. Our relationships with God and others will shape our lives in the pews, in our schools and offices, and even in the innermost depths of our hearts. But take heart. If you can become comfortable with your inevitable fumblings, you might stumble upon the joy of prayer. After all, it is in our imperfect attempts to find the other we do not yet know that all real intimacy is born. Just as a reconciliation can make a friendship or marriage stronger than it ever was before, so all of our struggles in prayer sow the seeds of true intimacy with God.

Prayer, especially private prayer, is one of the most intensely social activities Christians engage in. It will reveal to us our secret irritations with our neighbors and the unfinished business we had long ago forgotten. It will send us out into the world to reconcile until it is only our bread, and not our hearts, that are broken. In all this, it will train us for the true intimacy with God that Jesus Christ has won for us. May we all come to know its joys.