Amen
In a variety of books, movies, TV shows, comics, etc., a surprising number of intelligent people (both artists and characters) put forward what seems to me to be an unfairly simplistic idea of prayer. (I love SMBC, even when I disagree with the moral of the joke, but it was pretty convenient to illustrate my point.)
There seems to be this idea, one I encounter among skeptics and the faithful alike, that prayer is or has to be an entreaty to a Deity. Reciting, “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want” is a theistic version of going up to your parents and saying, “Heeeey, Mom and Dad, you’re the coolest, bestest, nicest parents I know…. can I borrow the car tonight?”: buttering up God with praise and compliments in the implicit or explicit hope that He/She/It will grant your requests. And, OK, yeah, that’s one way of interpreting prayer, an easy way, a way that’s often strongly tied to both its literal translation and the fact that in times of suffering, fear, or desperation, it feels good to many people to pray for a Divine intervention.
Many groups point out that this sort of prayer makes little sense, at least, not in Judeo-Christian-like traditions, combined with most similar traditions’ other tenets about God, namely, that He/She/It is omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-good.
It’s this last that poses most of the problem. In everyday life, we tend to consider people who respond to compliments to be weak in character: we wouldn’t think much of, say, a professor who handed out A’s to students who mentioned how much they loved her last journal article and C’s to those who didn’t. If God is really supposed to be the best there can be, why would He/She/It have this undesirable character trait of responding to flattery? Why does God need little hairless primates running around telling Him/Her/It how awesome God is? And wouldn’t an all-good God base any rewards and punishment on actions and faith (which, being omnipotent, He/She/It can judge directly) rather than what people are mouthing along with the group leader?
The plea-bargain view of praying also leads to the idea that if a person doesn’t get what he or she is praying for, then prayer doesn’t “work.” Likewise, if a person doesn’t believe in God, there’s no point to him or her praying, since that’s as effective as asking the wall or the kitchen table to make your life better.
Let me lay my cards on the table: I don’t pray, very much. Since I was a kid, I’ve said the Shma, or portions thereof, before I go to sleep at night, although at present, I often forget and practically never say it in the morning. When I go to a synagogue service, once or twice on the High Holidays and maybe once again if I happen to be home and happen to be up early enough for my parents to convince me to go with them on a Saturday morning, I follow along with the service. During the major extra-synagogue Jewish holiday observances, such as the Passover seder or kabbalat Shabbat, I’ll say the blessings or read the liturgy with my family, again, if I’m home. And occasionally, if I’m trying to distract myself from something unpleasant or frightening, I’ll recite in my head the familiar melodies and words I’ve known from childhood. That’s it for me.
But in none of those cases do I consider that I’m trying to beg a Supreme Being for something I want. Sure, when I was very small, I had the vague impression that praying was holding up my end of a deal in which I’d be a good person, and in return, God would grant me, I don’t know, entrance to heaven, or a good life, or maybe just lots of candy, sometime, hopefully in the near future. As an adult, however, I think differently. Because, in the end, the plea-bargain prayer is just that: a childish view*. It’s like writing a Christmas list to Santa Claus. Which brings me to what I think of prayer today.
See, it’s okay for adults to write lists to Santa Claus. Not because it’s generally okay for adults to keep on believing that (spoiler alert, Christian children: don’t read any further!) he actually exists and will bring them the presents they ask for if they’re good, although the reason it’s not okay has more to do with the disappointment they’ll experience and the frustration they’ll engender in others rather than anything about the idea in and of itself. But writing lists to Santa is worthwhile. Sometimes, it’s just fun to scrawl down things you might want if you had enough money or time; sometimes, writing a list helps you realize what you actually do want and what you’re glad you already have; and, sometimes, enumerating what you don’t have makes you more aware of what others don’t have, too.
The point is, prayer is like saying “How are you?” or “I’m sorry” in everyday conversation. You don’t have to literally mean every word for it to be meaningful**. True, if you’re getting nothing out of it, like someone who just unfeelingly tosses out a clearly insincere, “I’m sorry” for no reason other than to get out of punishment for hurting another person, then you might as well have said nothing at all. But just because you don’t really feel tormented pangs of regret and wish you could roll back time to take a different course of action doesn’t mean you shouldn’t say, “I’m sorry.”
There are tons of alternate ways to view those words that make you a better person for having said them that don’t necessarily have to do with their literal meaning. Maybe you aren’t sorry you did whatever it was, but you do acknowledge that the other person’s hurt feelings are fair and reasonable. Maybe you don’t feel sorry but you still know what you did was wrong and are taking the difficult step of admitting it in public. Maybe you regret absolutely nothing and think the other party is being silly and over-sensitive, but “I’m sorry” still means “I’m willing to swallow my pride and do what it takes for us to be friends again.”
Likewise, maybe for some, the literal meaning of the prayers, the enumerating of God’s positive attributes and the pleading for good outcomes is enough for them to find the prayers meaningful — good for them. But in the end, for many others, prayer isn’t something they do for God: it’s something they do for themselves.
Maybe sometimes it’s healthy to be humbled by the idea, whether it’s reality or not, that there’s someone out there who’s so much better than you that you can’t even hope to measure up. Maybe you find it psychologically useful to be reminded that it’s time to take inventory of yourself, a good hard look at whether you really have been as virtuous as you pretend. Maybe you simply gain spiritual benefits from being part of a larger community or from being prompted to ask the tough questions, like “How do I be a better person?”, “Is there a God?”, and “What do I need to change about my life?” Or maybe you just find it meaningful to be tied to history in this audible, speak-able way, with verse and prose and melodies written hundreds or even thousands of years before you were born, connecting our way of life to theirs and reminding us that no matter how independent and free-willed we think ourselves, we are both the products of our past and will be supplanted by our future.
Yes, ideally, prayers would be written to prompt these things in people without anyone having to think deeper about their meanings. But no single prayer is going to have meaning for everyone, and that’s okay. (Phew, it’s a hard thing for someone who likes to write to admit the ultimate fallibility of words!) I’m also not saying that everybody should pray because that’s the only thing that has meaning. People can find meaning in lots of different places. What I am saying is that it’s wrong to dismiss prayer based on a literal reading of the text.
Maybe a final analogy with acting class will help. A lot of the time, an acting instructor will tell you to do something that sounds utterly stupid, like ,”get on all fours and pretend to be a box, and then have your partner trip over you, and then talk about how that feels.”*** And sure, it can feel just as utterly stupid as it sounds, and everyone has to draw their own “too stupid for me” line somewhere.
The thing is, 99% of the time, the instructor isn’t handing out assignments like this for kicks. She’s doing it because, somewhere back in the past, she learned something important from or while doing this exercise. And you have two choices: you can sneer about how stupid everything is and get nothing out of it, or you can say, “Okay, I can’t get behind this the way it stands, but what angle can I take to learn something?”
And you know what? The people who make the first choice are wasting their own time. If you really can’t get anything out of it, then, sure, that’s fair, go ahead, say that… but say it afterwards, after you genuinely tried. Or else just don’t sign up for acting class, because if you do, and you insist on staying aloof like that, then everyone’s losing out. There’s nothing wrong with not being an actor or actress, and there are lots of other activities out there that are good and important in different ways — some are even better and more important. But understand that just because acting class isn’t for you doesn’t mean that the students who stayed aren’t experiencing something real and getting important new knowledge they can apply practically. And it certainly doesn’t give you good reason to call them stupid, misinformed, or wrong.
In the end, from my perspective, prayer isn’t about or for God at all. It’s about and/or for me.
* From the outside, I mean. If the plea-bargain style of prayer is one that has deep resonant meaning for you, that’s as valid as any other idea of prayer I’m going to bring up here.
** For you. Whether it’s meaningful to the person to whom you’re saying it is a different question. It’s my point of view that although one can always find hopeful meaning in another person’s words or actions, the speaker or do-er still usually has a moral responsibility to act or speak with the other person’s dignity, needs, feelings, and/or wellbeing in mind.
*** True story.