Sunshine Cathedral Blog

Question: Can you explain how “affirmative” prayer works, and how it is different from traditional prayer?

Answer: I’m guessing by “traditional” you mean the style of prayer that assumes that we must get a distant Deity’s attention and then persuade that Deity to assist us in ways that It/She/He would not have done without our asking. That is how many people pray, but that is not the only tradition of prayer.

In contrast to the prayer of supplication (where we ask God to do for us what God was unlikely to do without our asking), the prayer of affirmation makes a very different (and I believe more empowering) assumption. Affirmative prayer starts from the belief that God is omnipresent, which is to say, God is wherever we are. Affirmative prayer states that God is Good and God is present to us, enfolding us with love, flowing through us, expressing as us. If God is Good and God is present, then our Highest Good must also be present. We affirm this truth until we accept it, and once we feel that our Good is at hand, we are much more likely to experience it.

In affirmative prayer we know that God is right where we are, we trust that God is Good and is withholding no Good from us, and so we confidently affirm that blessings are ours to experience. We allow ourselves to feel joyous and grateful as we embrace this truth, and then we relax knowing that all things are working together for our good.