From the Narrow Desert

A recent post by S. K. Orr (well, "recent" by my slow-thinking standards, anyway) has had the effect of eliciting some firm intuitions about prayer and getting me thinking about how best to understand them. The post is quite short and well worth reading in its entirety, but here are the essential bits.

For the past couple of years, I have daily passed a man on a bicycle on the way to work. . . . And for at least a year now, I have said a prayer for the bicyclist every time I pass him. As I near him, I lift one hand and usually whisper something like “Protect him, Father,” or “Bless him in his day, Father.” . . .

Sometimes in these quiet hours, I wonder what the bicyclist would say if he knew a stranger says a prayer for him every morning when briefly passing by. And I wonder if any stranger has ever prayed for me for no other reason than seeing me and feeling the nudge to do so. I like to think that someone, at some point, has done so. It is not for me to say whether or not I have been spared harm on a particular day because some unseen watcher lifted a hand and whispered some holy words on my behalf.

I am not a prayerful person, but this post convinced me that I need to be. Mr. Orr's daily prayers for the bicyclist are undeniably good and important; it remains only to understand why and how -- and, of course, to "go and do thou likewise."

The post touched on a lot of "problematic" issues regarding prayer and confirmed that, problematic or not, they are real and must be dealt with. Here I will lay out some of those problems, and the conclusions I have come to after dwelling on them for a few months.


God sometimes does, because he has been asked, things that he would not have done if he had not been asked.

Orr speculates that he may "have been spared harm on a particular day because some unseen watcher" prayed for him, and implies that his own prayers may have caused the bicyclist to be spared particular harms that would have befallen him otherwise -- that, despite God's goodness and his love for the bicyclist, he would not have protected him to the same degree had he not been specifically asked to do so.

I think we pretty much have to believe this. It hardly makes sense to ask God for specific things unless we believe that our asking affects the probability of those things happening -- unless we believe that we can sometimes change God's mind and persuade him to do something he would not otherwise have done.

But it seems strange that a loving God who is willing and able to help and protect us, and who "knoweth what things ye have need of before ye ask him," would make his help and protection conditional on being asked -- and asked by anybody, apparently, even a perfect stranger.

If God would help me only if I asked him to do so, that would be understandable in terms of his respecting my freedom and giving me ultimate control over my own life. One thinks of the famous line from the Apocalypse: "Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him" (Revelation 3:20) -- which presumably means that God will become active in a given person's life only if that person invites him to do so. If, on the other hand, God may also intervene in my life because someone else invited him to do so -- which is what the efficacy of petitionary prayer for a third party implies -- then it's as if he stands at the door, knocks, and waits for anyone, even a random passerby on the street, to open the door. If he doesn't need my permission to intervene in my life, why does he need anyone else's? If he is willing to come in without being invited in by the homeowner, why not without being invited by anyone at all?

(To be clear, I assume that God does often intervene without being asked, but we are here considering those cases in which petitionary prayer has made a difference -- cases in which God intervenes because he was asked and would not have done so otherwise.)


Even if we want the same things as yesterday, we still need to ask for them again today.

After hearing "Bless him this day, Father" every day for a couple of years, God surely must have figured out that Mr. Orr wants him to bless the cyclist every day, making further prayers of that sort unnecessary. But somehow, saying "Bless him this day" every day -- rather than saying "Bless him every day" once -- is the right way to do it. In most areas, repetitiveness tends to make things meaningless, but in the case of prayer -- despite the warnings against "vain repetitions" in some of the Gospels -- repetitiveness lies very close to its heart.

And just as it is right to pray for a particular day, it is right to pray for a particular person -- "Protect him, Father," not "Protect everyone who needs protecting."


God sometimes influences us to ask him for particular things.

"I wonder if any stranger has ever prayed for me for no other reason than seeing me and feeling the nudge to do so." The one doing the nudging in such a case would presumably be God himself -- which is pretty strange, if you think about it.

"Hey, that person could use some help. Why don't you ask me to help him?"

"Okay. Would you please help him?"

"Sure!"

Wouldn't that be a very strange conversation if it took place between two human beings? Why do we accept it as a normal way of interacting with God? It really makes sense only if the first person cannot act unless the second person asks him to. I hope it will be understood that no blasphemy is intended when I say that it reminds me of nothing so much as certain versions of the legend of Faust, where the devil can only do what Faust commands and is therefore always trying to persuade him to command particular things. In a Faustian context, that makes sense, but this is God we're talking about.


Prayer is expanded agency, serving as training for theosis.

It occurs to me that most of the philosophical problems associated with efficacious petitionary prayer are the same problems that are associated with ordinary human agency.

Why would God intervene in a person's life because I asked him to? If intervening is the best thing to do, God ought to do it whether I ask him to or not; if it is not the best thing to do, he ought not to do it even if asked. But we might with equal justice ask, Why would God allow me myself to intervene in anyone else's life? -- or, for that matter, to make decisions about my own life? If God knows best, why does he allow anything of importance to be decided by anyone else? Suppose I see a homeless man and, instead of asking God to bless him, I just give him a twenty. Will the effect of that gift ultimately be good or bad? Only God knows, and therefore (so the logic goes) God ought to be the one to decide, and ought accordingly either to force me to give or prevent me from doing so. But God respects our agency, or free will, and cares more about preserving that than he does about seeing to it that the Best Possible Thing is done.

In the gift of petitionary prayer, God has given us what we might think of as a sort of expanded agency, subject to "parental controls." If he granted each and every one of us unlimited magical power, so that we could literally do whatever we wanted, the result would obviously be disastrous, so he grants us direct and absolute control only over a few things -- but he also gives us the potential ability, through the medium of prayer, to "do" anything that God himself can do. We are far too ignorant, immature, and irresponsible to be given free rein with this kind of power, but we are encouraged to try out hand at it, as it were -- to ponder how we think the divine power might best be used, to put these proposals to God, and -- sometimes -- to see those proposals carried out.

By encouraging us to pray and ask him to do things, God is quite literally encouraging us to play God -- in the same sense in which little children play, and are encouraged to play, at being adults. To engage in petitionary prayer is to put oneself in God's position, decide what you think he ought to do, and then say to God, in effect, "If I were you, I'd so such-and-such." How jaw-droppingly presumptuous is that? And yet it's something God actively encourages, even commands, us to do. One thinks of the story (in Genesis 18) of Abraham, negotiating with God over the destruction of the cities of the plain: "That be far from thee to do after this manner . . . Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" Abraham seems to have been well aware that he was rushing in where angels fear to tread -- "Behold now, I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord, which am but dust and ashes" -- but he proceeded nonetheless. And he was called the Friend of God.

All of this makes sense if we assume that the primary purpose of prayer -- as of everything else in this life -- is educational. And what we are being educated for is theosis, becoming Gods. That is why God expects us, through prayer, to take an interest and an active role in how the divine powers are used and even, as ridiculous as it may seem, to give him our requests and recommendations. Probably the vast majority of those recommendations will be rejected, or implemented only in part, but that's all part of the learning process. "The servant knoweth not what his lord doeth -- but I have called you friends" (John 15:15).