Why People Do Not Pray
I
IT has never been possible to be religious, in any adequate sense of the word, without prayer. If religion means ‘living with God,’ — and no other definition is either sufficiently definite or competently vital, — then there must be involved in it a manner of communication between man and God. Normally that way includes words, because speech is almost indispensable for the attainment of a normal comradeship between persons. It is not necessary that speech shall always continue to accompany such a comradeship, once it is established. Everyone knows how satisfactory it is to be with certain people, or more often with a certain well-loved person, and to speak for hours on end not one syllable. But even in such delightful human relationship there must continue an active spiritual outgoing of the persons each toward the other; heart speaks to heart in a silence of fellowship. Nothing flowers in a silence that is born of absentmindedness and indifference. A man can hardly expect to hold the love of his wife if he addresses to her only casual and formal scraps of speech, directs toward her only vague and distracted thoughts. Everybody understands that about earthly comradeships; but there are many who seem to suppose that in the case of friendship between a human person and that person who is called God there is no need for making any particular effort in the way of constant intercommunication.
Most modern people hardly pray at all; and all too many of those who still do bother to address the Almighty are content to do it in what is little more than a patter of words long since become mechanical. Few there are nowadays who are sufficiently proficient in approaches to God to find enjoyable, or even possible, the higher reaches of ‘mental prayer.’ How religion can again assist in giving to man solace for sorrow, strength for weakness, illumination for dullness, courage sufficient to drive out languor and surrender of spirit, without more reality in prayer than is generally apparent, it is a little difficult to see. While current Christianity needs many things for its revival, there is required most of all that Christians shall again know how to pray, then in fact pray, and by what prayer evidently does for them persuade other people to pray.
Why has prayer become ‘ the great lost art’?
Probably the chief reason is that even those who call themselves Christians are more impressed than they are willing to admit by a current insistence on the part of the general multitude that it does no good to pray. ‘Science has plainly shown us how everything moves according to invariant law,’ the common argument runs, ‘and therefore recourse to prayer is infantile. God, admitting that there is one, will not change His infinite plan in response to the feeble command of microscopic human ants who crawl about on some second-rate planet which moves round an insignificant star in a universe vast beyond computation, and law-abiding from one end of it to the other (if indeed it has any ends).’ So the Christian is always being told; or sometimes his friends do not feel it polite to remind the poor obscurantist of his folly, but simply smile wisely when he speaks of prayer, as they might smile at a little boy who spoke of writing letters to Santa Claus. The Christian is apt to resent the imputed slight to his intelligence; but he too often feels, it may be only in the subconscious mind, that possibly there may be something in what these people say; and so the first thing he knows, or even without knowing it, he has stopped praying or has, at best, reduced his talk with God to a vestigial routine. It is not that he has ceased to believe there is a God; he may not doubt even that God cares for him in the midst of his tragic mortal extremity; but he has come to think that, care or not, God is so self-limited by the inexorability of law that he can do nothing to help.
Every Christian ought to face the problem of miracles, their possibility or impossibility, fairly and squarely and with knowledge of how other Christians have faced it. If he would do that, he would speedily discover that in all ages the greatest theologians have recognized the inevitability of the action of the universe according to unbreakable law, recognized it as truly and as gladly as does any citizen of our generation. The scholastics of the Middle Ages, indeed, were fond of proving logically what the empiric scientist now observes experimentally, that such law is invariant, immutable even by God Himself. Their argument ran: (1) God, who is all-wise and therefore knows how to do anything perfectly, has made a universe, which operates according to the laws that God had laid down for it; (2) no universe the laws of which need breaking and revision by the maker thereof can be the product of a perfect intelligence; (3) therefore, the laws of the universe do not need to be, and cannot be, broken even by God. Yet the scholastics and the other learned theologians, for all they saw this necessary fact, went on praying just the same, with mind and heart and will. Why? Because they knew that, without God’s breaking a single law governing the universe, God can nevertheless, if He desires, work miracles.
II
We must not forget that we human beings, limited as we are in intelligence, do not know and understand all the law of God. We know only a very small part of that law. The part which we do understand we call natural law. The part which we do not understand we may call supernatural law. The boundary line between them is movable. Three hundred years ago the laws governing electricity were all unknown to us, and the manifestations of electricity were therefore regarded by everyone as supernatural. When lightning struck, it was a mysterious and direct interposition of the hand of God. But we learned some of the laws governing electricity. Although even yet no living man knows what electricity is, its manifestation we now recognize as controlled by natural laws. At this present time certain laws governing mental processes are gradually becoming incorporated into ‘natural law’ from ‘supernatural law.’ God’s law is one. To us it has two parts, that we know and that we do not know.
A miracle, so called, is not an impossibility. That miracles should be is the most scientific of statements. A socalled miracle is merely the putting by God, over against forces the laws governing whose operation we at least partially understand, of certain other forces the laws governing whose operation we do not comprehend. I can, in a limited way, act similarly myself. Here is a book. Suppose I drop it out of my hand. It will fall until it hits the ground, by operation of the law of gravitation. But when it is halfway down I thrust out my hand and catch it. Have I broken the law of gravitation? Is it violated? Do the sun and the moon and the stars stop acting according to that immutable law and vanish into everlasting chaos? They do not. The old law is still working. I have, however, interposed a force, my arm moved by my will, a force not otherwise released than by that will, a force which in this instance supersedes gravitation. Personality has overcome impersonal force. So it is in infinite degree with a God who is all-knowing. He has at His command innumerable forces the laws governing the operation of which we do not comprehend, according to which laws His Supreme Personality can interfere with the normal effects of the laws which are within our small and imperfect knowledge. To bring about results incomprehensible to us He needs to violate no laws at all. That this is the normal theological argument for miracles seems strangely unknown to the man in the street, or even to many learned professors in secular universities.
It is, however, a poor kind of praying in which approach to God is regarded only, or primarily, as a means of inducing miracles. Though God may indeed perform miracles, it is no part of man’s privilege to demand them. To do so is to be practising, or trying to practise, not religion at all, but magic; and magic is as absurd as religion is reasonable.
The magician has been at work whenever and wherever religion has appeared in human history (and that has been always and everywhere), manhandling the truths of religion and selling them in a perverted form to the gullible crowd, frequently fooling in the process his own silly self. The difference between the religious man and the magician is simple but profound. The magician seeks to get into contact with God in order to force, or induce, or persuade God to do or get for him, the magician, what he has not wit or power to do or get for himself; the religious man seeks to get into contact with God in order to find out what, in terms of a given situation, God expects him, the worshiper, to be and do, and to procure from God the strength and courage to perform the Divine will. Magic is egocentric; Religion is theocentric. In aim they are opposites the one to the other.
So omnipresent is the magician, so easy his appeal to the conceit and selfishness of men and women, that if a casual observer of the human scene is not careful he will confound religion with magic; in which case, if that casual observer has the slightest common sense, he will despise them both. This happens all too often for the good repute of Christianity. It is not hard to understand why it is so, for there is a tremendous deal of magical hocus-pocus — irreligious, absurd, even blasphemous — which masquerades as Christian prayer. Magic is nonsense, whether one finds it in the African jungle or in a Catholic cathedral; whether one listens to its promulgation by a medicine man or by a pious Protestant clergyman. Who is man that he should seek to coerce God? No Christian, Catholic or Protestant, who understands his religion, ever thinks of doing any such thing. But there are many professing Christians, both Protestants and Catholics, who do not understand the God-centredness of all things, who do not perceive that the conformity of human wills to the Divine will is both the essence of wisdom and a prerequisite for peace; and the poor man in the street is by them often led astray. For the good repute of Christianity, the man in the temple must not be encouraged or even permitted to foster magical nonsense under the pretense that he is promoting religion.
Petition, to be religious and not magical, must be clothed in words something like this: ‘Behold, O God, me, your servant, in my need. If my own wisdom were sufficient to understand this situation in which I find myself, if my own will were to determine what is to be, so and so would be done about it. I therefore ask, naturally, that in that fashion things may come to pass. Nevertheless, O God, I am an ignorant person and a willful one; and it may well be that I am quite wrong in my desire. If it be so, then act not as I request but as your greater wisdom deems best; in which case, give me patience and strength to do what you want done, no matter what that may cost me. Amen.’
That was the sort of prayer taught and practised by Jesus Christ. The Our Father, for example, has in it from end to end not one single bit of magic or attempted magic. Every word in that prayer is religious, God-centred. The only material blessing asked for is bread, sustenance that one may do one’s part in the carrying out of God’s will, as in Heaven, so on earth. And of the two tremendous prayers recorded as offered on His own behalf by the Divine Son to the Divine Father, neither the intercession for the Church (St. John XVII) nor the agonized petition in Gethsemane (St. Luke XXII. 39-44) is magical. The latter in particular is a perfect model for all religious asking. In the garden, Jesus faced with the coming sunrise — and well He knew it — rejection, unjust condemnation, utter aloneness, beating, reviling, exhaustion, the Via Dolorosa, hot and horrid hours of agony on a cross, death at thirty-three. Naturally His whole human nature shrank from it. His distress of mind was so great that, we read, the sweat dropped from Him to the ground, as if it had been drops of blood. And what did He say? ‘Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless, not my will, but thine, be done.’ The cup could not be taken away till He had drunk of it. He knew that as He rose from prayer; and He went forth to do what it was necessary in the Divine plan that He do, utterly unafraid.
Christian asking must be done in that fashion. All the saints have known it. ‘What makes you so joyful in the midst of your pain, here in this cold and leaky barn? ‘ they once asked the dying Francis of Assisi. ‘I wish what God desires,’ he replied. And there is the more modern story of the boy who prayed for the electric train. He had seen it, in November, in a shop window; and he much desired it. He was ten years old. He told his mother he was going to pray every night that he might get it from someone for a Christmas gift. His mother trembled a little as she listened to him, for she was a poor sewing woman with several children to feed. He could never have that expensive toy. Would the asking God for it and the eventual disappointment upset the child’s faith? She said nothing, she could say nothing; and every night she heard the boy’s simple appeal to his Lord. Christmas came. There was no train. That night, as her son knelt down by her side to pray, the mother said, ‘I hope, John, that you are not terribly distressed because God did not answer your request for the train.’ The child looked at her in a sort of wonder. ‘Why, Mother,’ he replied, ‘God answered me all right. He said “No.”’ It is hard to put the matter more simply than that, or more adequately.
So much, then, for ‘miracles’ and ‘magic’ as deterrents from prayer.
III
It is certainly true, also, that many people today find prayer difficult because they lack a clear idea of what that one is like with whom they would converse. Nobody, it is true, knows or can know completely the nature of God. No man has seen Him face to face at any time; but though none has beheld Him, yet, thanks to the Incarnation, the Father may be truly known by those to whomsoever the Son hath revealed Him (St. Matthew XI. 27). When Philip said to Jesus, ‘Lord, show us the Father, and it sufficeth us,’ the answer was, ‘Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? He that hath seen me hath seen the Father. . . . Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me?’ (St. John XIV. 8-10). The God to whom a Christian prays is within the power of man’s wit to grasp hold of, even if not to comprehend. The God to whom and through whom a Christian addresses himself is Jesus.
If Christians would remember that, both their own spiritual life and their teaching of the elements of the same might be more satisfactory. Too often they seem to be afraid of the fact of Christian experience (so notably expressed in the Creed of Athanasius) that, in God, the Son is with the Father and the Father is with the Son, without confusion but indivisibly; and that equally at one with both is God the Holy Spirit, the Strengthener, the Comforter, the Lord, the Giver of Life, He who is closer than breathing, nearer than hands and feet. The way for man to reach the Father is through the Son and what the Son in Himself reveals; and the Holy Ghost comes into man from the Father through the Son. In the Son incarnate, in Jesus Christ, the meeting of man and God is made possible; in Him the otherwise incomprehensible God becomes knowable, to be loved as well as feared. ‘God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son . . . the brightness of his [God’s] glory and the express image of his [God’s] person.’ So writes the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews (I. 1-3). Saint Paul puts it even more bluntly when he tells the Colossians that ‘in Him [Jesus] dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily’ (II. 9).
In the face of such teaching and in view of the whole long range of Christian experience down the centuries, it is hard to see why any Christian should blink at praying direct to Jesus, or fail to perceive that in doing so he is getting through to all of God, at least to all of God that human wits are able to comprehend. Anything that makes this objective centrality of Jesus plain to him who would pray is helpful: pictures, a crucifix, the sacramental Presence. To concentrate on Jesus in one’s praying may perhaps be conducive to superstition, once in a while, among the ignorant; but such error may easily be guarded against if the clergy has a mind thereto. In order to prevent superstition it is certainly not necessary to deprive the ordinary man of his greatest facility to reality in prayer; and yet that is what to a large degree seems to have been done. Prayer to the Christian who acts in harmony with Christian experience down the ages is frankly Christocentric.
IV
Still another thing which for many people has helped to take reality out of praying, and thereby has removed it from among man’s normal activities, is its one-sidedness as ordinarily practised. Too often it consists almost, if not quite, wholly of what man says to God and too little, possibly not at all, of what God says to man. The masters of the spiritual life, if we read what they have written on prayer, will be found to teach that in it the messages of God to man are much more important than those of man to God; but common practice would seem to be based on a belief to the contrary. This is odd. To meet a friend, to search the mind for what to say to that friend, to continue to speak until one can think of nothing more, then to conclude with ‘So be it’ and immediately go one’s way, is not conducive to the long continuance of a satisfactory human relationship. No more is a similar procedure helpful in commerce with Deity. If that be all we do, how can God possibly give comfort in sorrow, solace in loneliness, strength in weakness, poise in prosperity, or guidance when perplexed? No room is left in the mind for even a drifting fragment of Divine reply. There must in prayer be silence and receptivity. All the masters of spirituality, Catholic and Protestant (not to speak of those of other than the Christian way), have known that. It is unlikely that we and our children will do much praying until we too discover that the chief joy therein, and the major usefulness, come not so much by way of what we offer to high heaven as from a listening to the cosmic Being who searchingly and patiently and wisely makes answer when we have spoken and at length are still.
V
Finally, there can be little doubt that it would help if people generally could by Christians be shown how deep and living a thing is prayer when one has sufficiently mastered its technique to get past the plodding hindrance of words. Modern people are untaught in such matters; most of them have never heard of any but vocal prayer. The saints — which means not only the heroic martyrs and confessors but also the millions of simple souls who have known God and enjoyed Him — have had a deeper knowledge, a knowledge not esoteric but possible to any man who is willing to learn.
Vocal prayer is a necessary but somewhat elementary stage in approaching God. It is not to be despised. There are those who have such spiritual pride that they deem mere words beneath their notice. They would spring in one great sweeping flight from things of earth to the innermost courts of Heaven. There may be some who are able to do this. I have never met one such; and I observe by reading spiritual treatises of old time that none of the saints has ever run across them, either. Vocal prayer must always be continued — if for no other reason than that by it there is maintained a wholesome comradeship with what may be, perhaps, the more pedestrian brethren. Vocal prayer is an antidote to pride and a preventive of the dangerous flights of an undisciplined and fanciful imagination. But for all its necessity, vocal prayer rarely unlocks any but the outer chambers of reality.
For further penetration into the courts of God, there is also to be followed discursive or meditative prayer. In that sort of prayer, one takes some event, utterance, or character from the records of God’s dealings with men — from the Bible, from the lives or writings of the saints, sometimes from the daily newspaper or from one’s remembered experience — and brings into play upon it every activity of the mind, in an attempt to ascertain and understand and accept and rejoice in God as He is revealed in terms of the event. The imagination is called upon to re-create, in its every aspect, that which is being meditated upon, until one lives and moves and has one’s being in terms of it. The reason is then brought into play, that one may inquire what the meaning of all this may be, its significance in the plan and will of the Infinite. Then the emotions are called upon. One asks, ‘What do I feel about this, toward God in this, if anything? And if I feel not at all, why is that? And ought I to feel about it?’ Last of all, one summons in the will, and forms a resolution such as comes naturally out of all that has gone before, a resolution which God has helped one to make, a resolution which can be presented, as a full and vital act of adoration and fealty, before the throne of Heaven. There are various ‘methods’ for doing this sort of thing. Which of them may be followed matters little; but that meditation should be made in some fashion is a necessity for him who would know prayer for what it is.
Deeper still is affective prayer, the going out of the heart. Such prayer flows freely, without direction of the mind or will. It needs no words. Children are given to its easy exercise. ‘Heaven lies about us in our infancy.’ A priest had advised the boys and girls of his parish to stop each day in the church, on their way to or from school, to pray a moment before the Lord in His Sacrament. One afternoon, as the good father went past the church, an urchin of twelve or so ran out the door, a baseball in his hand. ‘ Been praying?’ inquired the priest. ‘Yes, Father.’ ‘And what were you saying to Our Lord Jesus today, my son?’ ‘Nothing, Father. I was just loving Him awhile.’
It is hard to recover such simplicity later on in life. It is not easy so to become as little children that we may enter the Kingdom of Heaven. What makes it, even for an adept, a difficult thing to do, and sometimes a dangerous thing, is the facility with which such affectionate outgoings, heart speaking to heart, can degenerate into a maudlin sentimentality. Too easily one becomes concerned with the outgoing not of what one does feel but rather of what one thinks one ought to feel. There is nothing more unreal than a whipping-up of laggard love. Children may safely begin with affective prayer and go from it to words; but adults had better do it the other way about. From a base of vocal prayer, one may from time to time, as genuinely moved, rise to an outgoing of the heart. When zeal of love grows cold, the lesser, formal prayer may be at once resumed until such time as the heart is ready for a new affectional departure. But if prayer never emerges from the custody of words into a commerce of pure affection, how dull a thing it is, how empty of joy.
Highest of all is contemplative prayer — prayer truly mystical, prayer in which one wholly loses one’s self and is taken up into a complete and absorbing unity with God — the end of heart’s desire, an earthly impartation of all that makes up Heaven. That sort of prayer is a thing not to be attained by anyone’s desire, however long and diligent his practice, however true his belief. It is, rather, a gift of God Himself. God gives it only to those who are willing to plod on according to the vocal, meditative, and affective disciplines; but not always even to those. Not often does it come to anyone, nor should we think of demanding it.
Who are we to insist, as of right, on tasting here and now what is that end toward which we move? One may learn the bliss of contemplative prayer, at least a little, from what others have experienced and then stumblingly have tried to describe; but no one may require it for himself.
Reach on reach toward God our fathers knew how to go, and many though not most people still know how to go, along the spiritual path. To help in the prayer life of a Christian, preventing extravagance, an antidote to vagueness or sentimentality as well as, it may be, to things far worse (things which may in other than Christian prayer easily become upsetting to sanity), there stands the stern, kind figure of one who is of men and yet of God, at once the object and the teacher of prayer, the unchanging Christ. He is not so much a figure of debate as He is the way to God.