I respond:
I'm not entirely sure where we get the idea. I honestly think [these options] are wrong insofar as they go. Because prayer is not about us asking something from God. Prayer is relational conversation in which we ask to discern what God asks of and for us. The problem I have is that people make prayer something we want or need from God. This kind of praying turns God into a cosmic bell-hop that answers when we ring the bell or a cosmic soda-machine which gives us what we want when we put our money in and push the right buttons. God isn't concerned to give us the desires of our hearts; God is transforming those desires into the desire for his Kingdom come. Think Romans 12 here.
So it's not the case that there's three answers. There's only one answer to prayer, and that answer is Jesus. We are to follow in his steps (1 Peter 2). So our prayer is his prayer: "Thy Kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven".
I wonder if the idea is connected to a misreading of certain Old Testament texts (Psalm 20.4; 37.3; 1 Chronicles 29.18; 2 Chronicles 1.11, primarily). But I also think all the Old Testament texts that speak about "the desires of our hearts" have to be placed in their Jewish context. The Old Testament isn't an heir to our Enlightenment individualism. So these texts aren't about God giving me what I want. Instead, I think "the desires of our hearts" is a communal Jewish desire. In other words, it's a Messianic desire. "The desires of our hearts" is that God deliver God's people. It draws its meaning from the Exodus, which, in turn for we Christians, draws its meaning from Jesus himself.
So, again, Jesus is the answer to our prayers.
The trouble I have with the way most folks pray is that those prayers are often disconnected with the rest of what we confess about Jesus. Most folks pray as if God needs to intervene from his remote position in the heavens. That God is removed. I don't. I think God is as near as our breath and feeds the birds of the air and numbers the hairs on our heads. If Jesus is God-with-us, as a human being, then we take that Incarnation seriously. The Incarnation is where we draw our image of God. So all our interpreting Scripture, all our praying, all our working, take their cue from Jesus. The locus of our faith is Jesus Christ.
So praying, in the case of the New Testament, is listening to God in Christ through the Spirit. Praying, in other words, is a trinitarian relational act. In prayer, we find our desires reshaped and transformed into holy desires that mirror God's Son.
That's why I think a Christian spirituality of prayer begins with the "model" prayer that Jesus taught in Luke 11 and Matthew 6. "Teach us to pray", the disciples request. Because we don't know how to pray until we've learned from Jesus. Jesus alone is the pray-er.
Prayer is the trinitarian act of turning our eyes upon Jesus. It is a restlessness with the world, because it grieves in the face of death and the sin that brings it. But it is also a jublilation because prayer is the shout of Easter: "He is risen indeed".
"We do not know how to pray" (Romans 8.26). Paul was right. The whole uniqueness of Jesus of Nazareth lies in this: That he knows how to pray, because he knows to whom he is speaking. His greatest miracle was not healing or walking on water or driving out devils, but teaching his followers to say together, "Our Father ..." (Luke 11).
What we need to avoid, then, is the sanctimonious prayers that have us focusing on ourselves. We need to be delivered from our individualism, not have it confirmed.
That's why I think we close our eyes in prayer. Not so that we turn inward -- there's no place inside me I'd want to look for deliverance. I close my eyes in prayer not because I'm withdrawing into the silent recesses of self. No, I close my eyes because prayer is the act of learning to listen and see as God hears and sees. Prayer is learning to look at the world through Jesus, not through my own desires.
Most folks think of God granting or not granting "the desires of our hearts" in this individualistic sense that removes Jesus from our prayers and becomes nothing more than a magic spell. Prayer isn't the inner glow of my spirit or some uncontrolled gush of sentiment that I want or need something. Prayer is discipline, order, hardship, habit, obedience: Whatever it is that makes up a Christian life, that's what prayer requires. It's not enough to be left in my own solipsistic desires.
That's why the earliest Christians always insisted that Prayer and Work go together. Ora et labora, as Benedict of Nursia so famously said. Prayer is the discipline of learning obedience (obedience literally means "giving one's ear to" [Latin, ob + audire = "to listen toward"). Prayer is, as I said earlier, the trinitarian act of listening to God. The monastery -- that momentous institutionalization of prayer -- is founded on this truth. In order to pray, I bind myself to a rule, bend my will to another, submit to a grievous curtailment of the self. We learn to pray. The vow of celibacy in many religious orders signifies this curtailment. There's some part of what it means to be human that is crushed in prayer. For the person bound to prayer, it would not be right to represent life as fruition, satisfaction, fulfillment.
So, prayer is actually the opposite of God granting our heart's desires.
It is possible to waste our prayers. "Faith without works is dead" (James 2.14-26). Prayer without Work is wasted. Those who spend their entire time praying for God's will without doing God's will -- such as we see in Jesus Christ -- are simply spiritual procrastinators. In times that call for action, prayer can be disobedience in disguise -- especially if that prayer focuses entirely on ourselves and not on Jesus. In this way, folks will use idolatrous prayer as a way of dodging the demands of discipleship. Read Bonhoeffer's Cost of Discipleship if you aren't sure about this.
At the same time, though, prayer is a freedom from the world because prayer is that freedom for God in Christ. Does God command us to pray? Yes -- just as you might give water to a thirsty man, and command him to drink. God gives us permission to speak to God: That's the whole liberty of the gospel. That God is now with us in the details of our lives.
Prayer then is an ontological fissure in the world. It is the in-breaking of God's Being in the world. In prayer, shards of light break through, and the creatures that dwell in darkness rub their dazzled eyes. That, it seems to me, is precisely what Paul's driving at in Romans 8.
What is it that really sustains the Church's life and witness? Our sacramental hierarchy? Our teachers and clerics? Our projects and resources? Our thick books of doctrine and law? Or is the whole Church perhaps upheld by one old woman who shuts herself away all day to cry to God with sighs too deep for words? "Pray without ceasing", Paul admonished the church at Thessalonica (1 Thessalonians 5.16-17). That's precisely what we've done through those monasteries -- and in the practice of keeping daily prayer in the Divine Office.
We often complain about unanswered prayer. But if sometimes God doesn't listen, or doesn't hear, or doesn't answer, we ought to be relieved. The Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind -- and Job was lucky to survive the ordeal. Nothing is more terrifying than the prospect of an answered prayer. "For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return" (Annie Dillard). Using prayer as if it were the means toward getting what we want may be the very heart of idolatry.
Quite possibly the best book out there on prayer is Richard Foster's Prayer: Finding the Heart's True Home.