Ask someone what is prayer, and you'll usually get a description instead of an answer. Words said at a certain time and in a certain posture, addressed to God. That's the shape prayer takes. It says nothing about what the thing actually is.
Teresa of Ávila spent decades trying to answer that question and landed on an image instead of a definition: the soul as an interior castle, and prayer as the only way inside it.
"The door through which we can enter this castle is prayer."
Teresa of Ávila
St. Silouane, who prayed for decades on Mount Athos, put it in far more physical terms.
"I desire nothing else but to pray for others as I pray for myself. To pray for people means to give one's own blood."
St. Silouane l'Athonite
Archimandrite Sophrony, a monk who studied under Silouane, added the caution the other two leave implicit.
"The prayer in the name of Jesus has nothing automatic or magical about it. If we make no effort to keep His commandments, we call upon His name in vain."
Archimandrite Sophrony
Three mystics, four hundred years apart, working in different church traditions, arrived at something similar without coordinating. Prayer isn't primarily about getting the wording right. It's about the direction of your attention, and how honest you're willing to be once it's pointed there.
Psychology backs this up from an angle none of the three could have predicted. Brain-imaging research on people praying shows activity increasing in the language and attention centers rather than dissolving the way it does during wordless meditation, because prayer is directed at someone instead of at nothing. Separate research on religious coping styles found the people who benefit most from prayer aren't the ones who hand their problems to God and step back. They're the ones who keep working the problem while staying honest that they can't do it alone.
Put the theology and the neuroscience side by side and they're describing the same mechanism from two different rooms. Prayer is honest disclosure to a presence you trust. It doesn't require getting the words right. None of it works without that part, though. It requires staying in the room instead of leaving it, which is a harder thing to do than memorizing a script, and probably why so many people never get past the description stage in the first place.
If any of this is new territory, the beginner's version starts here. For the psychology in more depth, see a separate piece on the psychology of prayer.
Prayer Stone is a daily Christian prayer app for iOS built for exactly that: a narrated prayer to follow instead of a blank page to fill, so staying in the room becomes something you do most days instead of something you mean to get around to.
Try Prayer Stone