Of Prayers

The philosophers of antiquity debated whether the gods could be moved by prayer, and their doubts were reasonable ones: a god who changes his purposes in response to human petition is a god whose purposes are less than certain, and a god whose purposes are uncertain is not quite the god most theologies require. But I am not a philosopher examining theology; I am a Christian examining my own practice, and what I observe in my own prayer is more troubling than any philosophical objection. What I observe is that I do not, in practice, pray for what is good for me. I pray for what I want, which is a very different thing.

We all do this. We pray for the recovery of someone sick whom, perhaps, God has disposed to take; we pray for victory in a contest whose justice we have not examined; we pray for the success of a project whose wisdom we have assumed without sufficient evidence. The prayer is sincere in the sense that we genuinely want these things. But sincerity of desire is not the same as wisdom of request. A man may sincerely want poison and sincerely pray to be given it; the sincerity does not make the prayer well-directed.

“The prayer that asks for a specific outcome is, at bottom, a prayer that God will correct his judgment and adopt ours instead. This requires, in the person praying, a confidence in his own judgment that genuine humility should make impossible.”

What remains of prayer, once we have stripped away the petitions for specific outcomes? A great deal, I think — perhaps everything that matters. There is the expression of gratitude, which requires no response and asks for nothing. There is the acknowledgment of one’s own smallness and dependence, which is itself a form of truth-telling. There is the attention directed toward what is good and holy rather than toward what is merely desired. And there is the submitting of one’s will to a judgment greater than one’s own — which is the whole art of living rightly, expressed in the form of address to its source. This, I believe, is the kernel of prayer, and it survives every philosophical difficulty.