on prayer (part 1)

Blog posts have been rare lately. I have a lot of half-baked thoughts, but am in two minds about sharing them. This, however, I wanted to get off my chest, and is based on something I wrote last year which never saw the light of day.

Prayer is problematic. Someone remarked to me recently that they like to know who will lead/speak at church on the coming Sunday, so that they can pray for them. But presumably God knows who will be speaking: do I necessarily need to know, too? Is my prayer less effective if I don't?

In Richard Dawkins’ bestseller The God Delusion, he cuttingly tries to explain his problem with prayer:

“Remember Ambrose Bierce’s witty definition of the verb ‘to pray’: ‘to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy’. There are athletes who believe God helps them win – against opponents who seem, on the face of it, no less worthy of his favouritism. There are motorists who believe God saves them a parking space – thereby presumably depriving somebody else. This style of theism is embarrassingly popular...”

It would be easy to dismiss this as a strident dissenter woefully (wilfully?) missing the point, but sometimes I’m fearful that he actually comes close to the mark. Indeed, just a year ago, I heard a preacher in a pulpit say that he did indeed pray for parking spaces, and that God invariably came through for him. The preacher was Mark Driscoll: whether he also prays for his preferred winner in The Ultimate Fighting Championship, he did not say. I was struck, too, when touring the USS Midway (now a museum) in San Diego last year, by an exhibit in which the ship’s chaplain in a recording recalled the night before operation Desert Storm: he had prayed with the crew for “absolute victory”.

It’s easy to call out others, but I find myself confused as I approach prayer too, I confess: I would primarily talk about prayer in terms of relationship; in terms of opening my heart to God’s – wanting to be changed in the process; in terms of seeking that my will might become more like his. But all too often, a casual rider will be there – spoken or in my thoughts – that it would be most convenient if the laws of physics could be bent for a little while. When it comes to petition, my expectation of the orderly progress of the processes of chemistry and physiology seem to go out the window. More often, I suspect, my prayer is of a more vague character: for someone to be encouraged, or blessed, or to have wisdom or comfort – or is that really a request for an interruption in the normal processes of psychology?

I’ve lately become kind-of agnostic about most miracles: there are not a huge number in scripture – each is somewhat noteworthy, precisely because it is out of the ordinary. Maybe they really represent suspensions of the laws of the universe for a little while – or maybe they are about inspired timing and the lessons we can learn from the impressions of those who observed them. And maybe there are some of each kind: the resurrection of Christ is one which it is perhaps hard to fudge or be agnostic about. In any case, are we right, on the evidence presented, to expect to encounter lots of such miracles?

So therein lies my concern. A God who periodically grants wishes, a little like Aladdin’s genie (with some attendant capriciousness perhaps), is plainly not the God of the bible, but, as Dawkins says, that kind of God is embarrassingly popular. I sometimes find myself sucked into that way of thinking: it is very easy to do. An omnipotent God holds no philosophical problem for me, but a world in which the laws of physics are re-written every second, in answer to prayer, would.

That kind of approach is clearly more suited to a pre-enlightenment world when many of the laws of cause and effect were not so well understood: to appeal for a miracle seems not unlike appealing to a “God of the gaps”. And yet to do so is foolishly to dismiss the people of ancient times as simpletons: rising from the dead was no more common then than it is now; nor was the parting of seas or the turning of water into wine. Some would say that great events took place at pivotal moments – and did so with a purpose. That is almost a tautological point, however, I fear.

So where does that leave me with the supplication and petition aspects of prayer? I confess that I do not know – sorry to be negative – and that so far I have not encountered anyone with a constructive theology of this for the present age. I’m increasingly convinced that I need one, however, because the one I’ve received didn’t work very well in the modern era, and now looks far past its best.

If this is rather negative, I will try in Part 2 to be a little more constructive, though I'm concerned that I don't have much of an answer.