Prayer is a form of bleeding, a wound which we may not staunch. Its source is in the incompleteness of the human person and its continuance depends upon that incompleteness, that wounding being maintained. To be a prayerful and spiritual person requires an affirmation and an acceptance of one’s incompleteness. It requires a realisation that the important thing about human beings is their incompleteness. Human beings are characterised by the unstaunched wounds within their nature. They reveal these wounds by being those who continually and consistently look towards the future, always seeking a new heaven and a new earth, always hoping, always moving forwards. Doing this is what makes us human. To settle into a final completeness of understanding is to accept an ideology. To believe that you have found a complete explanation, a way of seeing things that explains and welds into a complete pattern all of the inconsistencies of life, this is to lock oneself into a diminishment of the human person. To believe that you have finally uncovered and understood the means of human fulfillment is to embrace the roots of fascism. We are all radically incomplete, wounded at the centre. The Christian gospel is that which asks us to accept that incompleteness and to accept it as being, in itself, good news. Prayer then becomes the outpouring of the self which radically maintains and affirms our incompleteness, springing, as it does, out of our longing and desire. Prayer keeps us incomplete and to remain incomplete is the fulfilment of mankind.