Categories: uncategorized
Date: 14 October 2008 16:38:46
I stopped praying.
Not stopped completely, I should say, but drastically revised my approach to praying. As with most of my revelations this grew out of some things I read, and probably the roots lay in a comment, by someone I respect a great deal, that it's very easy to attend prayer meetings as a substitute for actually doing things. Maybe he, or maybe someone else, prompted me to the idea that it is possible to pray too much. All such thoughts would have been heresy in the environment I spent my early Christian years in, and wouldn't go down too well in many Christian circles now. So I'd better explain.
Actually, before I do that, I realize that the roots of this go much further back, and back to the basic explanation of how it is that God answers our prayers. Naively, the idea of God answering our prayers is absurd, suggesting as it does that the omnipotent creator of all should bow to our whims and fancies. And absurd, indeed, is that view of things. A key to my early understanding of this was the quote that the prayers of a righteous man availeth much. I forget which ancient said it, but somebody explained that as the fact that the righteous man prays for the right things, not the wrong things. In essence it almost boils down to the notion that if I ask God for what he already wanted to do, then he will answer that prayer, but if I pray for something contrary to his will, then he won't. That makes it sound like God doesn't actually respond to our prayers at all, and so there is a little more to it than that, but that sounds to me like a good starting point for understanding prayer. The essential thing is to pray for the right thing.
And so that thought grew in my mind, spurred on by comments of others much wiser than I, that we should actually be fairly selective about what we pray for. In particular, we shouldn't pray for something if we don't actually care about it. That doesn't sound too unreasonable, does it, but it doesn't match what most of us do. We have a gossip prayer chain in our church, whereby when one person hears some juicy items for prayer, they phone someone else who phones someone else and so on. And each member of the chain is supposedly going to go away and pray for this. Ignoring the problems of this appealing to our gossipy nature, and the problems of Chinese whispers, this seems calculated to ensure that more and more uninterested people harass God with the same (sometimes verbatim) prayers. Is that really a good idea? If, while chopping carrots, I suddenly remember that I'm supposed to be praying for what I heard on the chain, and so rush off a quick "Oh God help so and so" prayer, is that really any use to anyone? Is my utter lack of interest going to persuade God to act in a way he otherwise wouldn't?
I suppose at heart what I'm saying is that we should feel our prayers. When news comes down the chain that someone I really care about has leukaemia or some such, then be assured that I pray with utter seriousness. And my feeling is that God responds to where my heart is on this matter, and not where my mouth is. Which is why I stopped praying unless my heart was in my prayers.