Every Tuesday evening this semester and last, I've been auditing a Christian history class at Central Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Kan. Before class starts, our professor asks what people want to pray about. Then one of the students leads us in prayer.

Sometimes the requests have to do with pain or stress — medical emergencies, death, cancer and on and on. Sometimes they have to do with joy — such as the student who told us recently that he and his wife have learned they'll soon be able to adopt a baby from Vietnam.

Prayer, in fact, seems to be woven into the fabric of my life. In addition to prayer at seminary, I find myself in regular prayer at home, in a small group of church friends that meets weekly, in two study groups I'm part of — to say nothing of prayer at church services.

What's going on with all this? Why do we pray at all? Are we just talking to ourselves? Are we casting our lonely voices into an empty wishing well? Is God really on the job, dutifully taking note of our praise, our worries, our requests, our desperation?

Are we "battering the gates of heaven with storms of prayer," as Alfred, Lord Tennyson, once wrote? Do we think of God the way Harry Emerson Fosdick once told us not to, as a "cosmic bellboy for whom we can press a button to get things"?

No doubt each religious tradition would answer those questions in slightly different ways. But prayer seems to be almost a universal religious impulse.

Even scientists try to determine (almost uselessly, if you ask me) whether prayer really "works." Just a few weeks ago, yet another prayer study was in the news — this one about prayed-for cardiac patients.

I'm only in my early 60s, so I've not had nearly enough time to figure out everything about prayer. Thus, all I can give you are what I might call my tentative conclusions.

I think prayer, at its foundation, is a way to acknowledge that there is something larger than us, something transcendent and benevolent — a something that, in my Protestant Christian tradition, is not a something at all but a someone.

In this way, prayer can be understood as a courageous shout of affirmation into the universe that we are not alone, however much we may feel that way. Which is why prayer is so important for people of faith precisely in those spiritually dry times when God seems to have forsaken us.

Yes, prayer is also to be a time when we listen for the voice of that someone, when we silence our own throbbing brains and try to center ourselves in the divine presence. But when I ask people about that aspect of prayer, I find that lots of them have trouble discerning whether what they hear when they listen is really God's voice or the longings of their own hearts.

When prayer is understood as part of a two-way relationship and not as just a religious duty, that discernment process may get a little easier. But my experience tells me we always should be cautious imagining we know precisely what God is telling us in response to prayer.

There are many kinds of prayer and formulas for praying. One formula that stuck in my head when I was a kid was called ACTS — adoration, confession, thanksgiving and supplication.

I like that formula because it reminds us that asking God for things should be the last thing we do. This world and our life in it, after all, are not first about us. Rather, they're about God.

In recent years, I've come to a deeper appreciation of written prayers in the Anglican tradition. My prejudice against such prayers was that they are meaningless rote. But I now find that they are different each time I hear them and that there's something comforting about knowing that generations before me have said these same words in faith.

In the mystic tradition of Christianity, two kinds of prayer are central: apophatic and kataphatic. The first avoids the use of images. The second relies on images. The first, in other words, is praying with your eyes closed; the second, praying with your eyes open.

I can't recommend one over the other. I know only that when people insist that prayer is precisely this or that, we should have our eyes open to other possibilities.