Prayer changes things, even if the thing is you

Neo-neocon points to an excellent piece by Vanderleun, on the power of prayer.

They both have good things to say.

Vanderleun says: It is only recently that I’ve come, in my dotage, to see that prayer — even unheard or unanswered — can be a powerful intellectual force in one’s life. And by this I mean prayer in its most personally humiliating and elevating form: down on the knees and speaking out loud. Daily. Very abasing and very uplifting at one and the same time.

For most of the time, answers come there none. But that’s the way of prayer. If prayer were the vending machine of God, we’d spend all our time on our knees between meals and lovemaking and let basic maintenance of roofs and refrigeration go to Hell. Nope, prayer as a constant begets random answers, and not always the straight-forward ones we were looking for, because we are a very simple Smart Monkey.

Indeed, it has occurred to me, in my very dim monkey brain, that prayer can work even if God Himself does not exist. Yes, He’s just that clever. Prayer seems to be a need hard-wired into our limited cortex. If you doubt this, please go out and sit under an artillery barrage for an hour or two and then come back to continue this discussion.

As I was saying, prayer — with or without God — makes us stronger and our desires and abilities more focussed just by happening. As a result, things you pray for tend to happen to you more often than things you don’t pray for simply because your abilities are more concentrated on the outcome. Pretty clever wiring for a God who does not exist.

Neo responds: …my interpretation of what happened to the author of the article was that he changed on the behavioral dimension, and it sparked a change on the fourth dimension, the spiritual one, and probably on the others as well.

This certainly is not an attempt to take the mystery out of the process of prayer. I think there’s still plenty of that left. But it is a framework for understanding part of the more mundane human dimension of what might be happening when a person undertakes a practice of prayer.

Feeding the spirit involves so much more than watching Oprah Winfrey. It involves thought and prayer and silence and it requires having the humility to admit how much you don’t know…which is a lot.

“Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit.” Bidden or unbidden, God is present.