ArticleAs a young Christian, long before the Internet, let alone Internet memes, I saw a slogan that tickled me: “why pray when you can worry?” It’s a satirical version of what the Apostle Paul tells the Christians in Philippi: don’t be anxious but take every circumstance to God in prayer.
If God remotely matches the Judeo-Christian concept of all-good, all-knowing – and I believe he does, as we have this conception only through his self-revelation – then why does he tell us to pray? He doesn’t need his self-esteem boosted by human praise, he already knows our needs before we can think to ask, and we are not trying to change his mind as though he were undecided or uncertain.
He is not, as some have charged, a capricious God who needs to be appeased. Nor is he some cosmic vending machine: request in, desired response out.
In an almost infinitely complex world, how do we even know how to pray for others? How do we avoid platitudes?
This complexity is highlighted when prayers can conflict with each other, as in this amusing quatrain: The Duke of Rutland urged The Times to pray/For rain: the rain came down the following day./The pious marvelled: the sceptics murmured: “Fluke!”/And farmers, late with hay, said: “Damn that Duke!”
The answer, of course, is that we pray not for God’s benefit but for our own. For a Christian, at the most basic level asking “why pray?” makes no sense: it is as natural an impulse as to converse with a spouse.
Prayer brings all sorts of benefits, physical, psychological and spiritual. It can calm anxiety and lower blood pressure, provide stillness and reflection, and lift one’s focus beyond oneself.
Prayer brings one closer to God, closer to the people for whom one prays – it is much harder to hate people if you pray for them – brings more awareness of the needs in the world and builds better relationships. It builds faith and trust.
That said, prayer is not merely a therapeutic exercise – to make it such would be self-defeating. And despite what I say above, there is a mysterious sense in which God does indeed respond to our prayers.
We do indeed empty our hearts to God, yet knowing that our understanding is tiny – and understanding that “no” is also an answer.
The absolute model for prayer – simple, beautiful and profound – is the one Jesus taught his followers: the Lord’s Prayer. It sets out our priorities and needs in a context of hope, our ultimate redemption and God’s glory. For, as Paul reminds us, God is “able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think”.
Barney Zwartz is a Senior Fellow of the Centre for Public Christianity. This article was first published in The Age.