Prayer and a Non-Interventionist God

One of the biggest conundrums of faith is the problem of "unanswered prayer." If God is a loving God who intervenes in our lives, why does God so seldom intervene? Or, why does God seem to intervene at some points and not others. We pray for good things to happen and rejoice at answered prayer, so what does all that mean?

I found "On Faith" posts by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan particularly interesting. Both take a panentheist (Process) perspective, and are worth considering as a way of praying to a non-interventionist God.

Borg writes:

So I don’t believe that God sometimes intervenes to answer prayer. But this doesn’t prevent me from thinking that prayer sometimes has effects, even though I can’t imagine how. I am very willing to think of other ways of imagining God’s relation to the world, such as speaking of divine intention and divine interaction. At the very least, I am convinced that prayer changes us – that it transforms those who pray. This has been my experience.

And Crossan writes:

Primary prayer, therefore, is a life lived in union with God. That is why Jesus in Mark's gospel, for example, spends so little time stopping to pray--he is already in a permanent state of prayer through that love-relationship with God. Matthew and Luke, on the other hand, are somewhat
embarrassed by that absence of prayer-acts for Jesus in Mark. So Matthew suggests prayer-in-the-closet and Luke mentions prayer-in-the-desert to explain why Mark so seldom mentions Jesus at prayer--it was always done where nobody saw it!

Secondary prayer is taking specific hopes and fears under the shadow of that divine love to let them be shaped by it, sheltered within in, and accepted through it. It is as valid as it is
secondary.

So, what is prayer? I like this idea of prayer as a "life lived in union with God." The entirety of the conversation is interesting -- with posts from Martin Marty and Tom Wright as well.