Why Pray?

 

“The man who prays is the one who thinks that God has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct God how to put them right.”

Many, many critics have elaborated on the harmful and, more crucially, futile effects of praying. In what follows, I interrogate that verdict. How is it possible that simple letters strung together by our mouths can somehow influence the vast cosmos, which is destiny? Furthermore, Richard Dawkins has stated that “nothing fails like prayer
.” And it’s not invalid. I didn’t get the mountain bike I asked for today. Praying for it also made me believe in the power of just syllables, and, consequently, the lack of need to earn the money and buy it for myself. This is just a mountain bike. 

What if I had requested for a loved one’s medical difficulties to go away? I would have just stayed in the delusion that my spell would be cast, that fate would grab my hand and walk me up the stairs without me tripping over a single step. I had prayed, had I not? I had pleaded to the man above, had I not? I had believed in it completely, had I…?

It is well known that a shell can never truly imitate or comprehend the belief of a religious, devoted person. Empty prayers are exactly that: empty prayers.

“Because this people draw near with their mouth

and honor me with their lips,

while their hearts are far from me,

and their fear of me is a commandment taught by men.”

This critique of hollow faith from within religion itself raises the question: what, then, could a genuine prayer look like, especially for the people who don’t believe?

The definition of a prayer states that it is communication with the divine. Not requesting help from the divine, nor asking for advice. It’s interacting. But for a healthy relationship with anyone, you need to believe in that someone. A prayer is nothing for a secular person. It means absolutely nothing. Believers feel that a prayer is more of a duty to God than anything, having disciplined routines which provide motivation. In a religious community, one prays because it will be noticed if you don’t (God will know, God is always watching). You take those threats away, and a secular prayer is just pretending. You can get bored by it, or maybe one day you had to eat lunch in your room so you didn’t say grace; the road leads to the person dropping it. It isn’t necessary. Sure, one could derive some calm from it, but the essence, the powdered down relational dimension of a prayer is to interface with a higher being. You can’t do that if the being is invisible to you.

“A ‘secular prayer’ is nonsensical because prayer requires both subject and object… people pray about something to someone. Take away belief in the someone and you’re left talking to yourself.”

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that I start to believe in God. I want to. It will help me cope with grief, with heartbreak, with joy, with everything. It will be a walking stick for me, giving me support in all the tough times.

But is the walking stick really useful if I have the threat of being watched and judged all the time? Those scientifically supported methods like journaling or therapy have all the goods with none of the baggage.

These methods work because they are based on evidence and what we currently understand about the human brain. What works about them is that they are perfect cures for stuff people have already gone through. Stuff people have already gone through. 

There comes a point in everyone’s life where you just… can’t. When the odds are zero, when despair is everywhere, you don’t need stats. You don’t need facts. You need something absurd.

You need hope.

But what even is this “hope”? The past me would look at the stats, shut my mind, and say, “it’s nothing more than a fleeting feeling.” And I would be right. Hope is defined as “a feeling of expectation and desire for a particular thing to happen.” However, let’s try and dig deeper. Hope is more than just a feeling.

It’s a practice.

Some people just have this energy where they believe everything is going to be alright. It feels… invigorating. It leaves us wanting. It’s because they practice hope. The research into the utility of prayer suggests that hope is a muscle, and praying is a potent training ground. When we see these people pray, we’re not witnessing self delusion; we’re observing hope being built, the tangible polygon forming before us. These people are not plagued by propaganda, but in fact are subject to the phenomenon known as “The Absurd Hero” effect.

Let’s take an example: In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus famously concludes that “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Condemned to push a boulder up a hill for eternity, Sisyphus became the symbol of hopeful persistence without rational hope existing. He was described as being the master of his own fate, through both lucid acceptance and rebellion.

“Our hope lies in the capacity to bear one another’s burdens, and thus endure the absurdity of life together. A stubborn hope that begins through the lenses of tear-soaked vision, but eventually gives way to joy and laughter, if for no other reason than we won’t give up.”

Theological studies have shown that prayer is about being attuned to God or a higher deity, rather than asking or instructing someone you think has already done something wrong.

Simon Weil, a French philosopher, once said:

“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”

For Weil, prayer has taken the form of the total focusing of the soul on what is real and good. This kind of prayer is not asking for any particular outcome at all. It is an act of listening and self-surrender. Through such prayer, we come into harmony with what is (God or (what Weil believes to be) the fundamental Goodness of reality). In practical terms, this shows that the value of prayer lies in how it changes our perception and character. Tangible, but not physical. It quiets our egotistical demands and opens us to acceptance, grace, and insight. Prayer, says Weil, is a form of “consent” to God’s presence. You allow Him to see you. You are allowed to see Him.

Drawing on J.L. Austin’s Speech-Act Theory, the very purpose of a prayer is accomplished by saying it. It’s a performative act, like a play or a movie. To pray for strength or hope is is to perform it. To give it a medium through which it can strengthen one’s soul. 

Psychological research supports this idea, finding that prayer has often activated positive emotional states. Psychologist Michael McCullough hypothesized: prayer engages health-promotive psychological mechanisms such as structure, meaning and hope. This effectively changes how individuals appraise stressful events. In other words, when one says their problems to The One Above All, they put their burdens on someone who can take it, acting like the outward flow of negatively charged electrons, where the positive charge automatically flows in the opposite direction. The resulting relief is like the conventional current that physicists map in the opposite direction: a powerful human construct, but one that makes sense of a real and visible effect.

But this framework, no matter how powerful it is, has one flaw: what is that thing to which we pray?

The act of prayer, the focused articulation of hope, requires an object. For the devout, that object is unequivocally God. But the history of philosophy reveals this is not the only possible answer. For the Stoic, it was a dialogue with Reason or the Logos that governs the cosmos. For the 18th-century moralist like Adam Smith, it was a consultation with an inner 'Impartial Spectator’, also known as the voice of our own conscience which we wish to manifest. For the modern atheist, it may be an address to the best part of themselves, their most cherished values, or simply the abstract ideal of the Good they wish to see in the world.

So how is it possible that simple letters strung together by our mouths can somehow influence the vast cosmos, which is destiny? It’s not. You can’t change anything by just saying sentences, or even believing in Good. Odds are, you won’t heal your relative with a prayer. Odds are, you won’t find a mountain bike on your doorstep with a request. But odds are, by having a conversation with the man above, you’ll be okay without it. You’ll learn to deal with grief, with fear, and most importantly, you’ll learn to hope.