On the Virtues of Prayer and Why It Is More Needed than Ever
Recently, I had a friend ask me in good faith “how do you think that prayer can actually impact our world today?” And this is a legitimate question — whenever a tragedy strikes and people offer “thoughts and prayers,” there is always someone who points out that prayer isn’t going to do anything, and that it is direct action that is needed to address the problems of our world. In response to my friend’s question, I tried to give a largely secular, psychological argument of how prayer can provide a basis for the kind of virtuous acts so needed in our present situation, and also addressed some anticipated counterarguments from an atheistic perspective with recourse to tradition.
Let’s start with the secular argument for prayer—namely that it is a mindfulness practice that works to develops care and attention. When someone pursues prayer, what they are doing is making a conscious effort to identify and contemplate 1) things that are out of order and 2) things that are valuable.
In general, it seems to me many people in our society hold the assumption that they have already perfected their cares and that this is not so much an active project but more a disposition. This position is both inaccurate and arrogant. When you sit in prayer, you are yearning for the salvation of other human beings, the world, and yourself. In traditional prayer, this is something in which the entire human being participates — the body, the emotions, the mind, and the spirit. This unitive quality of the experience can be very powerful, and considering powerful experiences necessarily stick in the mind more than mundane experiences, this refines the person’s sense of caring.
A person with a robust prayer practice will be more attentive to both evil and goodness as they walk through the world, since their contemplative practice focuses on these things and thus keeps them more accessible in the mind. As such, the prayerful person will be more nimble in responding to evil with virtue, and goodness with gratitude than the non-prayerful person.
There’s this idea among many atheists that prayer is nothing more than a person asking God for personal benefit, as a child would ask a parent for gifts, and that in this, personal responsibility for one’s own lot and the state of the world is dissolved. Unfortunately, prayer has been reduced to this crude manifestation in certain Protestant circles (and other Christians have picked this up unconsciously), but this is a radical reduction of the practice.
Prayer is basically a universal practice in religion. It is the essential act of contemplation and orientation. When an individual prays to God (or the equivalent ultimate reality within another religious tradition), the person is turning their being towards what is considered the highest good. In this relation, the state of dependence of the human being becomes clear — tragedy and destruction can occur at any moment, and yet there is still so much that is beautiful and good. To describe this situation, Christians will use the word grace, Muslims will use the word mercy, and atheists will use the word luck, but these are more semantic differences than anything. The underlying precarity of life and existence is recognized beyond the words. In light of contemplating the highest good, which is essential, unchanging, and everlasting, the transience of the world is set in stark contrast and the necessary response here is that of gratitude for those things which are good and precious in the world (as this discloses or emulates the highest good — i.e. God — in some way) and striving to “restore the world” (to use Jewish language), as in doing so, you yourself more fully emulate God as the highest good.
I anticipate an atheist critique here would be that this is nothing but mere subjectivity and thus what is to stop someone from choosing how to view God and thus what is good and in so doing, only reinforce their ego and arrogance? And I would say this is a fair critique when looking at prayer as mere “asking God for things,” but a big part of what makes this a distortion of prayer is its disconnect from tradition.
In all the major religions of the world, prayer is connected with the emptying of oneself — the depletion of the ego and a belief in separate selfhood — and through so doing, cultivating humility and objectivity. This is perhaps most explicitly emphasized in Buddhism (especially Mahāyāna), but Luther also exemplifies this, as does Meister Eckhart, so this is certainly not some foreign idea in Christianity. In Islam, the language of submission / peace is used, as this is the meaning / connotation of the word Islam itself. The larger claim here is this: if one is operating within the traditional structure of a religion, one’s theological conceptions and spiritual practices are delimited by the tradition. There are social structures that provide orthodox guidance which have developed for the express purpose of turning spiritual cultivation into a systematic path — traditionally the word “science” is even used here. As such, signs of arrogance and mere subjectivity in one’s practice of prayer would quickly be spotted and redressed, as the scholars, monks, and mystics of the world’s religious traditions are extremely and universally clear on points of humility.
Unfortunately, there are legitimate concerns here as these types of traditional institutions have all been eroded (or at least marginalized) to a certain degree by modernity, so this type of real guidance is harder and harder to access for many people — especially westerners. The chaotic New Age spirituality we see is a symptom of this. So sadly, much of what passes as prayer nowadays does not necessarily fit the framework I just described and is likely largely ineffective when it comes to developing care and personal transformation. But we ought to be prudent — dismissing prayer outright as a powerful spiritual practice due to modern deviations would be careless and likely further contribute to the contrived antagonism between religion and secular society that has played a large part in eroding the aforementioned traditional institutions and lead to radical subjectivism in religion.
Frithjof Schuon, the great 20th century metaphysician, once said that if his entire life’s work did nothing more than help someone discover the profundity of prayer, he would be exceptionally satisfied. I can’t help but agree. The environmental lawyer Gus Speth has a great quote which is all too pertinent: “I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that with 30 years of good science we could address those problems. But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy… and to deal with those we need a spiritual and cultural transformation.” A rediscovery of prayer in the west would go a long way to address these spiritual ills.
