From the Salmon

Way back at the beginning of the month, my friend Shanna asked if we could get a bit of a conversation going about prayer: its purpose, its place, its usefulness, and so on. I solicited your ideas a few times as I took a bit of a break from writing, and I certainly appreciate the thoughts that y’all offered. So I guess it’s my turn to put some ideas out there.

Let me tell you, as I’ve thought about where to start with this, I’ve been a bit overwhelmed by just how much I’m not the guy to go to if you want to know what prayer is all about. In many ways, prayer is still a big-ol’-capital-m Mystery to me, one that my trite sunday school answers and late night ruminations fall far short of understanding. But if I were to write only about things on which I was an authority, well, this would be a pretty empty site. So take my ideas for what they’re worth and please feel free to add your own thoughts, fill in the gaps in mine, or even outright disagree with me.

I guess this is as good a place to start as any: Why pray?

Well, one answer is that you can’t read the Bible and not come away with the idea that prayer is a fundamental part of living a life of faith. (For that matter, prayer of one sort or another is a foundational part of many of the world’s religious traditions, but I only feel qualified to talk about what it means to Christians.) Jesus himself prayed and even took time to teach others how to pray.

But of course it’s insufficient to say we pray because it’s important to pray. There must be a reason why it’s important.

I think there are many answers you could give here, but I wonder if one of the main reasons is that prayer has a lot to do with our orientation. In a very basic sense, regardless of the content of our prayers, prayer involves us turning towards God. Sure, that’s more or less self-evident, but I think it’s still significant. Most of the Biblical story involves people hiding from God, running away from God, even forgetting God. And this isn’t just Israel’s story. This is my story. Prayer requires that, at least for a moment, I put aside everything I use to distract myself from God, that I stop running, stop hiding, and turn towards God.

But when I say that prayer is about orientation, I mean more than just prayer is about where our attention is directed. It’s deeper than that. As you read through the examples we have in the Bible of people in prayer, particularly in the book of Psalms, one characteristic that runs throughout all of these prayers is a profound longing. And I think that prayer is about turning towards God and presenting the deepest longings of our heart.

If we’re honest about it, this often starts with our own desires and longings for ourself. I’m tempted to say that this is the wrong approach, that this leads to the idea that God is some sort of cosmic vending machine. But I don’t know if it’s so much wrong as it is incomplete. Flip through the Psalms and you’ll find example after example of David, “a man after God’s own heart,” pleading with God about his own situation. So I think that we are right to pray about our own desires, but only if our prayer doesn’t end there.

We’re also called to pray for others. Jesus said that we should even pray for those who do us harm. I think it’s interesting that while our prayers may be initially shaped by our deepest longings, as we become more comfortable with prayer, our prayers actually begin to transform what we long for. As we turn to God and concern ourselves with others, it becomes a little easier to love those we pray for. And as we begin to love others, it becomes a little easier to pray for them.

Yet it seems to me there’s even more to prayer than this. Ultimately, I think that prayer helps us cultivate a deep longing for God. It is, as Dallas Willard writes, “the method of genuine theological research, the method of understanding what and who God is.” I’ll admit that I’m still figuring out what that means, but I’ve found that a simple and yet extremely challenging place to start with this idea is found in Psalm 46: “Be still and know that I am God.” Or, for another place to start, Flannery O’Connor writes:

“Lord, I believe; help my unbelief” is the most natural and most human and most agonizing prayer in the Gospels, and I think it is the foundation prayer of faith.

As our prayers more and more reflect a longing to know God, our prayers for ourselves and for others will also change. How we live our lives and how we treat each other will change as well. This relationship between the internal and the social effects of prayer is an old, old idea. Kathleen Norris writes about how the sixth-century monk Dorotheus of Gaza imagined our world:

He saw it as a circle, with God at the center and our lives as lines drawn from the circumference toward the center. As Dorotheus relates it, the closer the lines crowd in toward God, “the closer they are to one another; and the closer they are to one another, the closer they become to God.”

I like that image. But I know that there’s an awful lot of line left in front of me.

That’s probably plenty for now. You’ll no doubt notice that I punted on the eternal question “Does God answer prayers?” I don’t feel qualified to answer that with any sort of certainty. And I’m not completely sure that getting answers is even the point. Kathleen Norris again: “Prayer is not asking for what you think you want but asking to be changed in ways you can’t imagine.”

That, it seems to me, is a prayer worth praying.