Two Kinds of Prayer

At 3 AM (3 AM is my muse), I was thinking about our friend Bruce Charlton and his preference for praying to Jesus because it is more intimate–we have a real conception of Christ from the gospels but almost everything we know about God the Father we know third-hand.  That’s fixable, of course.  If you do enough praying to the Father, you begin to develop an intimacy and understanding with Him also.  But I take BC’s point.

But something also says that it is important to approach the Father wearing Christ’s  mask, which is what we do in prayer.

I wonder if there are really two different things that we call prayer.  One is sort of a half-dialogic communion, a sort of extremely informal prayer that half occurs on the plane of sentiment, that can be and in my own personal experience often is directed at the the Father, Jesus, martyrs and ancestors, and even maybe living people, carried on through and sometimes to the Holy Ghost.  And the other is a more formal entry into the throne room of God and making your petition there.