Although I come from a Christian background and feel I have a very strong sense of the divine, it’s probably true that I grew-up in what many would call a Post-Christian society. I have no connection to organized religion and I guess I see myself essentially as a secular, if agnostic, liberal humanist.
When Rachelle and I were in West Pennsylvania last month, we attend a Sunday church service. I think it was the first time since I was a boy that I had been to a religious service that wasn’t for a funeral, wedding or christening.
The service started out with the Pastor asking the small congregation if there was any aspect of their lives that they would like prayed for. This was touching, even beautiful and it felt conversational and intimate, like group therapy rather than dogma. People, who by circumstance or choice were leading remote lives, came together on Sunday and shared with one another their troubles in the form of prayer—some asking for help finding a job, others to excel at school or that a relative might be cured of bone cancer.
Since then it seems that prayer, or the necessity for it, has been cropping up a lot in my life.
I don’t believe in an interventionist God, and if my theological understanding is correct, the omniscience of the Christian deity– where all lives are preordained– combined with mortal free will, renders our earthly petitions to the divine hopeless.
But still, we all pray, we are compelled to from inside, and we all feel better when we find out that people are praying for us. As C. S. Lewis says, “Prayer doesn’t change God, it changes us.”
I’ve always seen prayer as the ordering of love.
In my mind it’s a meditative and concentrated exudation that supports something, somebody, other than oneself. In the eternity that stretches limitlessly past our intellect, imagination and even feeling, praying that your sore tooth goes away or that you find your Blackberry, seems ridiculous.
I see prayer as an act of humility, an acknowledgment that each one of us is not only dwarfed by the unknowably divine, but by the vast and deep reaches of the lives around us.
Prayer is love, and surely it is that energy, that disposition, that flows outward into the world and the hearts of people– and the acts born from that love– that is responsible for the miracles that are manifest in the world, rather than the favour of an omnipotent being who has decided to intercede, supernaturally, on our behalf.