A few weeks ago, I had a remarkable experience. One of our members asked me what I was going to talk about in that week’s Thursday-morning Lent discussion on prayer, and I said we’d be talking about intercessory prayer—in other words, about what it means to pray for other people. We got to talking, and she shared with me a beautiful image for what we do when we pray for someone else. I thanked her, and said I’d share it with the group.

Later that week, I sat down at my desk, and pulled out an article I’d been hoping to read by Brother Geoffrey Tristram, one of the monks at the Society of St. John the Evangelist, the Episcopal monastery in Cambridge. And right there, in his discussion of prayer, he quoted former Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey using the exact same image for prayer.

Great minds think alike. So what was this brilliant image of prayer?

Brother Geoffrey writes: “True intercession is being with God with the people we love on our heart.  In The Christian Priest Today, Archbishop Michael Ramsey writes movingly about intercessory prayer, and he gives a great image for what we are doing when we pray for others, drawn from the Book of Leviticus.  Aaron, the high priest, would go into the Holy of Holies in the Temple wearing a breastplate on which were jewels representing the tribes of Israel, whose priest he was.  He literally went into the holy presence, the heart of God, carrying the people, represented by the jewels, on his heart.”

We come before the presence of God, carrying the people we love on our hearts. The essence of praying for another person is not praying for something, asking God to bring about the outcome we’re seeking. We do this, often enough, asking God to give them that promotion or to heal them of that sickness or to change or grow or maybe to forgive us, and that’s okay. But it’s not what’s really at the core. What’s at the core of prayer is holding someone in the love of God, and inviting God’s love to transform us both. And when our prayers aren’t answered—when the outcomes we’ve been praying for don’t occur—it doesn’t mean our prayers weren’t heard, or prayed.

This is a gift, because it means we can pray for a person without knowing what we’re “praying for.” We can pray when we don’t have the right words. We don’t need to come up with something to say, or even know what someone needs. We simply stand before God with the people we love written on our hearts.

And as Brother Geoffrey writes, “when we do this, something else rather wonderful can happen to us.  This kind of prayer can change us; it can mould and shape our own hearts.”

So if you’re still reading this, there’s your homework: take a minute, or five minutes, or fifteen seconds to pray for someone else. Don’t pray for anything. Don’t worry about coming up with words. Just hold them between your love and God’s, and be still.