The very question “Does prayer work?” puts us in the wrong frame of mind from the outset.
Rereading C.S. Lewis’s 1959 essay in The Atlantic “The Efficacy of Prayer,” a couple things come to mind:
- Bruce Waltke’s book, the title of which says it all, Finding the Will of God: A Pagan Notion? We might also ask, “A scientific notion?”:
Ever since the Enlightenment, the Western world has held a faith in the power of the human mind and of the scientific method to know “truth.” It has sought to understand and control nature and has believed, almost without question, that anything that could not be understood by unaided human reason and validated by science was not to be taken seriously. We can know absolutely, however, only if we know comprehensively. To make an absolute judgment, according to Cornelius Van Til, humanity must usurp God’s throne:
”If one does not make human knowledge wholly dependent upon the original self-knowledge and consequent revelation of God to man, then man will have to seek knowledge within himself as the final reference point. Then he will have to seek an exhaustive understanding of reality. He will have to hold that if he cannot attain to such an exhaustive understanding of reality, he has no true knowledge of anything at all. Either man must then know everything or he knows nothing.” - Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke of essentially the same thing in a letter from prison to Eberhard Bethge, dated 5 December 1943:
I think that under the guise of honesty something is presented here as “natural” that on the contrary is a symptom of sin; it [is] really quite analogous to open talk about sexual matters. “Truthfulness” does not at all mean that whatever exists must be uncovered. God himself made clothing for human beings, that is, in statu corruptionis many aspects of the human being are to remain concealed, and when one cannot root it out, evil is likewise to remain hidden. Anyway, exposure is cynical; and even if cynics appear particularly honest in their own eyes or act like fanatics for the truth, they still miss the decisive truth, namely, that after the fall there is a need for covering [Verhülling] and secrecy [Geheimnis]. For me, [the novelist Adalbert] Stifter’s greatness lies in the fact that he refuses to pry into the inner realm of the person, that he respects the covering and regards the person only very discreetly from without, as it were, but not from within.… It impressed me once that Mrs. von Kleist-Kieckow told me with real horror of a film in which the growth of a plant was portrayed with time-lapse photography; she and her husband were unable to bear that as an illegitimate prying into the mystery of life.
Exposure is cynical; prayer is human.
Someone recently quoted a line from Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow: “If they can keep you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.” For us, it could just as well be said, “If we can keep ourselves looking for answers, we don’t have to worry about having asked all the wrong questions.”
And now more things come to mind.
- From A. R. Ammons wonderful essay “A Poem Is a Walk”:
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing. If we remain open minded we will soon find for any easy clarity an equal and opposite, so that the sum of our clarities should return us where we belong, to confusion and, hopefully, to more complicated and better assessments.
Unlike the logical structure, the poem is an existence which can incorporate contradictions, inconsistencies, explanations and counter-explanations and still remain whole, unexhausted and inexhaustible; an existence that comes about by means other than those of description and exposition and, therefore, to be met by means other than or in addition to those of description and exposition. - From Patrick Kavanagh’s “Canal Bank Walk”:
O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web
Of fabulous grass and eternal voices by a beech,
Feed the gaping need of my senses, give me ad lib
To pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech
For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven
From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.
Exposure is cynical; prayer is human.
One more:
- Prologue to Christian Wiman’s Survival Is a Style (no doubt inspired by Ammons and Kavanagh):
Church or sermon, prayer or poem:
the failure of religious feeling is a form.
•
The failure of religious feeling is a form
of love that, though it could not survive
the cataclysmic joy of its inception,
nevertheless preserves its own sane something,
a space in which grievers gather,
inviolate ice that the believers weather:
church or sermon, prayer or poem.
•
Finer and finer the meaningless distinctions:
theodicies, idiolects, books, books, books.
I need a space for unbelief to breathe.
I need a form for failure, since it is what I have.