WHAT IS PRAYER?
Three-quarters of Americans pray, and most of them pray daily. (1) Based on this statistic, prayer is a remarkably common activity, and most religions around the world include some kind of praying.
Despite this ubiquity, the practice of prayer also generates a fair bit of confusion. What is prayer? How does it work? Why might a person pray? When, how, and what should a person pray? And what does all this say about God?
We might think that turning to a specific religious tradition would help alleviate these questions, but when we take Christian prayer as our case, we see fascinating variety. Christians pray ancient words, invent new words on the spot, or use no words at all. They sing, stutter, groan, paint, or type their prayers. They also pray alone, in a congregation, in the grocery line, or over a family meal. Moreover, their prayers may communicate any number of things, including thank you, please help, I’m sorry, I love you, or I don’t understand. Some Christian groups even specialize in certain kinds of prayer, like the silent waiting of Quakers, the Gregorian chants of Benedictine nuns and monks, the endless repetition of the Jesus prayer by the Eastern Orthodox, the humming glossolalia of Pentecostals, or the common prayer of Episcopalians reciting from a prayer book.
What unites all these prayers, however, is this: prayer responds to the God who has come near. The Holy One has approached us and, in awe and love, we whisper, “You.” (2) Prayer, then, is looking, listening, and conversing with the God who is with us, within us, above us, below us, and at our side. The sixteenth-century Spanish mystic Teresa of Avila puts it this way: prayer is “nothing else than an intimate sharing between friends.” (3)
Praying with the Trinity
The Catechism of The Book of Common Prayer (1979) emphasizes prayer’s relation with the Trinity, the Christian belief in one God in three Persons. “Christian prayer is response to God the Father, through Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit” (856). Prayer not only replies to God but also depends on the triune God. Each divine Person plays a role in human praying. (4)
Christian prayer responds to God the Father. When Jesus teaches his followers about prayer, he tells them, “Pray to your Father” (Mt 6:6, cf. Luke 11:2). He invites us to call on God in the same way that he does, as a loving parent. Jesus also explains that prayer is how we ask our divine Parent for good gifts, just as little children request things from their parents (Mt 7:10). To pray, then, is to be God’s children, asking for what we need and delighting in God’s care. (5)
Christian prayer happens through Jesus. Jesus encourages his disciples to pray to the Father in his name (John 14:13-14, 15:16, 16:23-24). Jesus is our intermediary who makes possible our approach to God (cf. Heb 5). In his resurrected body, he is at the Father’s side, praying for us in love (Romans 8:34). And so, we pray through Jesus.
Christian prayer happens in the power of the Holy Spirit. The indwelling Spirit helps us pray, crying out to God the Father from inside of us (Romans 8:15). The Spirit also prays for us “with sighs too deep for words,” because “we do not know how to pray as we ought” (v. 26). The Spirit also joins her voice with the church’s cry, “Come, Lord Jesus” (cf. Rev 22:17). Thus, the Spirit pivots us towards God, empowers our praying, and prays for us when we cannot.
Taken together, we pray with the Trinity, and we need the Trinity to pray. The fourth-century Turkish monk Evagrius puts it this way: “If you wish to pray then it is God whom you need. He it is who gives prayer to the man who prays.” (6) We receive prayer as a divine gift.
What does prayer do?
But why does God want us to pray? And what does prayer do? When prayer is asking, and most prayer is, these questions gain particular importance. Why does an all-knowing, all-powerful God want us to make requests? Doesn’t God already know what the world needs? Can’t God do what God wants without us asking for it? How we answer these questions about prayer says something about what we think about God – in particular, what God knows and how God acts. Over the centuries, Christians have not always agreed on how to answer these questions. But, there are broad areas of consensus.
First, prayer is not about giving God new information but moving toward God in intimacy. Christians believe that God already knows everything, including what the world needs and what we need. However, by praying, we freely share ourselves with God, naming our hopes, desires, frustrations, and sorrow. As the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas puts it, prayer is when “we unveil our mind in His presence.” (7) We converse with God as a friend, putting into words whatever concerns us.
Second, God has freely chosen to wait for and respond to human requests. God is all-powerful, and prayer does not manipulate, cajole, or control God. However, the Psalms are full of hope in God’s answer to prayer, and Jesus, too, insists that God will “grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night” (Luke 18:6). Christians explain the unity of God’s sovereign freedom and God’s responsiveness to prayer through pointing to God’s own decision. God has decided to incorporate human praying into how God cares for and directs creation. In this astonishing move, God welcomes human beings to participate in God’s rule. Another way of saying this is that God wants prayer to cause things (including God’s own action), and so it does. (8) Thus, when we cry out in desperation, “Your kingdom come, Your will be done,” we labor with God in bringing about the world’s healing.
However, as anyone who has tried asking God for things knows, we live in a great delay. Despite our fervent praying, the damage of our world runs deep. In the midst of illness, poverty, oppression, war, ecological destruction, and death, answers to our prayers are often hard to find. Out of our confusion and suffering, we also can pray prayers of lament, like the prophet Joel charges Israel in the wake of national devastation: wake up, weep, wail, mourn, be dismayed, and call a fast! (Joel 1:5-13). We remember the world’s wrongs before the Lord, and we keep returning to God, rending our hearts (Joel 2:12-13). (9)
Our need & desire for God
Even when we cannot understand what prayer does, our need for prayer remains. Our lives depend on God, who is, in the words of the fourteenth-century English mystic Julian of Norwich, “the lover, the maker, the carer.” (10) We are creatures, fragile and finite, and when we pray, we confess our dependence on the God who holds us in existence.
Our praying also professes our desire for God. While we ask for all that we need, we also ask for the one necessary thing: to live in God’s house, to behold God’s beauty, and to speak with God (Psalm 27:4, Luke 10:42). God alone satisfies the desires of every creature (Psalm 145:16). This longing propels us into prayer and, according to the fourth-century African bishop Augustine, becomes our prayer. Augustine suggests that through desiring God without interruption, Christians can pray always, as scripture exhorts (1 Thes 5:17, cf. Eph 6:18, Phil 4:6, Col 4:2).
Christian praying, then, responds to the God who has approached us, and it also depends upon God’s great mercy. Our stuttering petitions, praises, and confessions point to the eternal God drawing us into union, pulling us with “a leash of longing” (a phrase found in the fourteenth-century Cloud of Unknowing). (11) Thus, whether we pray alone or in a crowd, with shouts or groans or songs, while kneeling, walking, or working, it is the triune God inviting us into friendship.
According to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, over 75% of Americans pray, and almost 60% of adults pray daily. See “‘Nones’ on the Rise: One-in-Five Adults have no Religious Affiliation,” (Washington, D.C.: Pew Forum, 2012), https://www.pewforum.org/2012/10/09/nones-on-the-rise/. and “Religion Among the Millennials: Introduction and Overview,” (Washington, D.C.: Pew Forum, 2010), https://www.pewforum.org/2010/02/17/religion-among-the-millennials/.
I draw this account of prayer from Karl Rahner, The Need and Blessing of Prayer, translated by Bruce W. Gillette (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1997), 10.
Teresa of Avila, Autobiography in The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Availa, Volume One, translated by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (Washington: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1980), 8.5 at 96.
As we reflect on the different roles of the divine Persons in prayer, we must also cite a classic principle of Trinitarian language: the external works of the Trinity are undivided. This means that whenever God relates to what is not God (namely, creation), then it is always the Father, Son, and Spirit acting as one and not three separate agents. However, in the language of worship and prayer, we may speak of prayer to the Father, through the Son, empowered by the Holy Spirit.
The mid-century Swiss German Reformed theologian Karl Barth explains that in prayer, the human creature expresses “his great surprise that God is his Father and he is a child of God.” Church Dogmatics III.3, translated by G. W. Bromiley and R. J. Ehrlich (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1960), 265.
Evagrius Ponticus, The Praktikos & Chapters on Prayer (Trappist, KY: Cistercian Publications 1972), chapter 58 at 64.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Westminster: Christian Classics, 1981), II-II.83.1, reply 2.
A classic formulation of this is that prayer obtains what God has already appointed to happen. This is called impetration. For more, see Aquinas, Summa Theologica II-II.83.2.
I am grateful to Kyle Lambelet for suggesting the inclusion of lament in this essay. For more on lament, see Emmanuel Katongole, Sacrifice of Africa: A Political Theology for Africa (Grand Rapids: Eerdmanns, 2011), 99-101 and Dorothee Soelle, Suffering, translated by Everett R. Kalin (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1973), 70-74.
Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, translated by Elizabeth Spearing (London: Penguin Books, 1998), chapter 4 of Short Text at 8. For more on how prayer confesses creatureliness, see Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.3, 240.
The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works, translated by A. C. Spearing (London: Penguin Books, 2001), chapter 1 at 20.