This is a long post on
prayer – a subject that gets more mysterious and more fascinating the longer
you study and practice it. The nature of its power is what interested me here,
as well as the extent and nature of its denial.
In the first place, what is the “power” of prayer? It is a
form of spiritual energy. As energy, it has potential power but it also has laws:
you cannot, for example, usefully power a computer with coal. For those who
accept its laws, it is as accessible as wind-power to a sailboat; more, in
fact, because unlike the wind, the energy prayer taps into is there 24/7. Much
depends on the person praying, just as much depends on the person sailing the
boat.
What are
the laws? First, no fishhooks. Praying for things
is on the whole useless: not because God deliberately refuses them, but because
the energy doesn’t normally work that way. Second, prayer is always answered,
but the time-lapse and the modality of the response are to us unpredictable. God answers in His own time and manner, which
are by definition mysterious to us. Third, prayer is a spiritual energy that
works on, and in, a spiritual dimension. This is where it gets difficult, not to
understand but, for many, to accept. God does not micromanage the world. He
sees, it is true, every sparrow that falls, but He does not stop it falling.
Deists got it half right: God created the world and set it going, and He does
not normally interfere with the process. Only half, though: because He is
present in the world at every moment, He does care for his human creatures, and
He does try to guide them toward Him and toward His love.
This leaves two problems:
catastrophes and hatred. Why does God not stop an earthquake that will kill 500
people? Answer: because it is part of the physical creation, and that
creation’s processes He does not interfere with. Why does God not stop
massacres and other loathsome deeds? Answer: because God’s nature is love, and
the one limit to His omnipotence is that He cannot be untrue to His own nature.
Since that is love, He is bound by love’s law, which holds that one cannot
command reciprocity: if one could, it would kill love instantly. The nature of
love is that it can only be returned freely or not at all. And when it is not,
when it is trodden in the dirt, the lover may weep, but he cannot command.
There are times when one feels the earth must be drenched in the tears of God.
How does the power of prayer, this
extraordinary energy, work? Much of it, it must be said, remains mysterious.
The eighteenth century was skilled in the ways, and in the use, of wind for locomotion,
but its understanding of the physics was more rudimentary than ours. One thing
that can be said is that casual prayer is no more effective than renting a
sophisticated sailboat for an afternoon without even the minimum knowledge of
its operation: the inevitable failure may even have a negative effect.
Further, prayer for specifically
spiritual goals is likely to be more effective. If I pray to be enabled to give
up smoking, it may or may not be granted: the objective is still very much
anchored to the physical world. But if I pray, long and steadfastly, for the
power to become a more generous person, this may well, gradually and over time,
be granted.
Moreover, experience has found that
petitionary prayer of that kind is augmented in its power if it is liberally
combined with the other kind of prayer: thanksgiving. One cannot always be
asking. Cultivating a keen sense for things that are gifts to be thankful for
is in itself a form of healing.
All prayer is subject to God’s
Will. In fact, one might say that the one purpose and effect of all good prayer
is to align our being with His will, so that the former may become the
unresisting instrument of the latter. As Dante put it, in la sua volantade e nostra pace: in His will is our peace.
Much of this is illustrated by
Christ’s Passion. As it looms, in Gethsemane, Jesus prays for this cup
(understood: this bitter cup, this cup of hemlock) to be taken from him: he is
human enough to quail at the prospect. Yet at once he continues: “But not as I
will, but as Thou wilt.” But, we say, did God will this? Does God will –
intend, want, and cause – the nailing of an innocent to a cross? If so, He
would be a malignant God, a God who could will the extermination of millions of
Jews and of Russian farmers, the massacre of thousands of Syrians, and the
torture of prisoners everywhere. If, in the face of catastrophe or atrocity, we
say “Thy will be done” what we mean is that we pray for the strength and the
grace to undergo such things in the manner that His will intends us to and
hopes we will. His will is not that we be nailed to a cross; His will is that
if we are we will undergo it as Jesus did.
All prayer for ourselves is
contained in the Lord’s Prayer. What about prayer for others? This is an area
much more difficult to understand than prayer for ourselves, if only because
prayer for others is always already by definition generous and altruistic; this
being so, we cannot understand why it is so often not (or not in any obvious
way) granted. If my beloved, or my child, has cancer, or Parkinson’s, or
Alzheimer’s, or motor neurone disease, and I pray eight hours a day for that
person to be healed, and that person is not healed, it is understandable if I
feel rebellious. What, I ask myself, or God, is the point?
This problem is made worse, in some
ways, by what appear to be occasional exceptions that look like miraculous
healings. My own belief is that these are probably “sports”: oddities in the
process which are sometimes enabled by a particularly powerful spirit. We
cannot, and should not, expect these to occur and be offended or cast down when
they do not.
Prayer for others, I believe, is a
way of adding to their store of spiritual energy, the energy that emerges in
their own prayer. If it is directed to a specific situation, it augments their
own prayer energy for undergoing, or dealing with, such a situation. True to
the laws of prayer energy, we may pray for their increase in discernment, in
wisdom, in charity, in patience, in love. A multitude of such prayers may, and
probably does, create an energy field of great force that the beneficiary may
tap into.
Nevertheless, the laws of prayer
hold. My friend with motor neurone disease will not be healed by my prayers,
i.e. his disease will not go away. The prayers of Mary and John and the others
present did not make the Cross go away or allow Jesus to come down from it. But
their power very certainly helped him, in this most human of his hours, to bear
what had to be borne.
Another law of prayer appears to be
that the prayers of a community are more powerful and effective than those of
an individual. I can see that this might be so: six generators connected in
sequence will produce more energy that one solitary one. Moreover, it means
that a whole community with its energy is advancing God’s hope and plan for the
world. This should not, however, prevent the individual from praying, and the
longer and deeper the better.
Given all this, I find it very
curious to see how many people who do not deny climate change and its roots in
human activity are quite comfortable with denying the power, the efficacy, and
even the interest, of prayer. Climate-change denial is rightfully decried;
God-denial is accepted without a blink. It must, one feels, come from a
fundamental misprision as to the nature of the energy. It is not electricity:
you cannot get a bunch of experts to produce it in a form that lets a small
child press a switch and light a room. It is more like the power of the wind to
a sailboat, or the power of growth to a farmer: it has its own laws and rhythms
that must be attended to and cannot be forced. Yet why that should call into
question its existence is peculiar. Perhaps it is because many do not want it to be true. Why? Do they think
it would limit their liberty? Ten thousand things already do so, from traffic
regulations to polio. You can get from London to Athens quickly, by spending a
great deal of money, using vast amounts of petroleum, and causing a fair mount
of pollution, by taking an aeroplane. Or you can get from London to Athens by
using a skill you have patiently learned, working with the wind (that, we know,
bloweth where it listeth), in silence and cleanly, by taking a sailboat.
Finally, what are the rewards of
prayer? If it does not normally change the physical progress of things; if it
does not bring Huckleberry Finn his fish-hooks; if it does not make my friend’s
cancer go away; what does it bring me? You can read the answer in a hundred
books written by experts. Experts such as Augustine of Hippo, Juliana of
Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen, Juan de la Cruz, George Herbert, John Donne,
Thérèse of Lisieux, Thomas Merton. Very simply: it brings you (into) the
company of God. The God who is Love. The
lone sailor crossing the Pacific had to spend many years learning the ways of
the wind and the water; but he would tell you that it was all worth it. Prayer
also takes time to learn; to adapt a proverb, God’s will often moves slowly,
but it moves exceeding well.
Image credit: thanks to Zack Hunt.
