Rich Morgan asks (on Quaker-L, an ancient ancestor of the blog) "Who or what to Quakers pray to-God, Jesus, the light . .. Who would a secular humanist pray to?"

Although almost all dictionary definitions of "pray" assume it is a transitive verb, with God (or something) being prayed to, it does not have to be so. One of the definitions is "to offer (as a prayer)," which in part describes my experience of both prayer and worship. One can be in a state of prayer - a sub-set of the state of worship, itself a facet of the state of being - without praying TO anyone or anything.

The Feb, 2011, issue of "What Canst Thou Say?" was on prayer. One of the pieces I submitted made the printed edition; one other (originally spoken in Meeting for Worship) from the on-line supplement is the following:

Prayer
Consider prayer, and its central place in your religious life.
Not prayers of invocation, or petition, or intercession, or benediction.
Not the ritual prayer in which the priest leads the congregation.
Not lists of things to ask God for, nor lists of sins you want forgiven, to be paid for by more lists of blessings for which you are grateful.
Not even the same prayers said only to yourself.
Quakers have dispensed with these prayers in worship, and wisely so.
True prayer is less in words and more secret from all but God.
There is no need to formulate a prayer like a telegram that might be misunderstood if the right words are not chosen.
Prayer is instantaneous, a message from you to God that has to travel no distance at all.
God is within you, and hears before you speak.
The prayerful life is not learning to pray, or saying your prayers, but being aware that you have prayed when you have done it.
Prayer happens, and all else is afterthought.
It is a small explosion within you; the change in your attitude or action are its smoke and dust, impressive, important even, but not prayer itself.
You can test this experimentally:
The next time you feel a prayer coming on, in response to the beauty of the moon rising, the rain on dry ground, or the greeting of your loved ones, trace back your thought to the moment the prayer began, and you will find it was complete in that instant.
No one sees the colors of a sunset or the fog rolling over the hills, and then deliberately says, “How lovely, I think I will offer a prayer of thanksgiving.”
No, the seeing and the praying are simultaneous.
The spoken prayer is an echo, a reflection in the mirror of your mind.
To make a seismological analogy, prayer is an earthquake; what follows is an aftershock.
In psychological terms, prayer is unconscious; what follows is delayed by the neurochemistry of conscious thought.
If prayer were in the realm of physics, the spoken liturgical prayer is Newtonian: linear, orderly, precisely understood, but only an imperfect model of reality.
True prayer is described by the quantum theory of spiritual experience: a sudden change of state, an excitation, seemingly random, unconnected to a linear cause, on an infinitesimal scale but magnifiable, of undefined dimension, an atom of Truth, a mystery at the core of the Universe, and at the core of the soul.

-Eric Sabelman
November 20, 1994