Habits of mind and emotion, cultivated in a particular community, are connected with that community’s understanding of God. For example, a group that views the Holy as intimately connected with nature might develop affections of reverence for the Earth.
Prayer is a practice that forms affections in those who pray, and those affections cohere with how the one who prays understands God. This coherence is part of a multi-directional dynamism. The one who prays does so in a certain way because of her understanding of God (God is just; I will pray for justice), and praying in such a way shapes her understanding of God (I pray for justice; I see justice as holy). This might seem circular, but it is not a vicious circle, for there are lots of influences and checks that come into play. For religious communities, the tradition itself guides this dynamic with prior affirmations of who God is and isn’t. Some of these most basic affirmations are in the form of exemplary prayers. Faithful Jews pray daily, “Hear O Israel, the LORD is our God, the LORD is One.” Faithful Christians recite, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.” Learning how to pray with such examples teaches those who pray about God. These prayers, themselves, are rooted in Scripture, which also teaches Jews and Christians about God. Sacred rituals and writings from other traditions function similarly to convey a vision of the Holy and form members of community in affections that cohere with this vision.
Another element in this dynamic is God. When we reach out to relate to God in prayer, God does not leave us hanging. God responds. This means the dynamic of prayer is not a vicious circle, but a back-and-forth of increasing familiarity. Some people hear God audibly; others sense God’s presence; some see visions; others simply experience a lessening of burdens or a bit of calm. For most who pray, the received communication varies, and often includes long periods where it seems that God is not present to the conversation at all. Often, prayers for particular outcomes lead to disappointment and feel like rejection or absence. And yet, somehow, for many of us, stubborn persistence in prayer subtly influences our daily lives and our vision of God. We become aware of God as a permanent co-resident of our lives. Drawing again on McCord Adams’s analogies, we become aware of God rattling around the house with us, like a spouse or a parent, and we get a sense of God’s own habits and peculiarities. They start to rub off on us.
My mother delights in seeing beauty. Her tendency to stop and notice a skyline or to be moved to tears by a sculpture seemed a bit odd to me as a child. As a teenager, I found it ridiculous. Then I started thinking, when I saw a particular tree or painting, “I bet Mom would love this.” Now I stop and stare like she does. Furthermore, when I get choked up over a painting at a museum, my tears about the beauty of the painting are also part of my relationship with my mom. Similarly, after years of praying, we are shaped by God’s own preferences and quirks. We start to “feel” what God feels and to experience, in some small ways, God’s passions.12 We start to love what God loves. Our hopes and desires imperfectly reflect who God is and what God intends for the cosmos.
Intercessory Prayer
Of course, this can be dangerous to the status quo. Being shaped by prayer can make us unsatisfied with all that contradicts God’s loving creativity. McCord Adams says that as prayer attunes us with “divine delight in Truth and beauty, with God’s hunger and thirst for joyful life together with all created persons, with God’s blessed rage for justice,” it also aligns us with “God’s apoplectic intolerance of human cruelty and degradation.”13 Intentionally relating to God in prayer heightens empathy—makes us perceptive to the love and beauty that surrounds us and sensitive to the pain and suffering in our world.
The combination of empathy and intentional relationship with God leads to the particular kind of prayer that the virtual community I’m describing engaged in throughout 2017—intercessory prayer, often including specific requests for aid, blessing, protection, or healing for the person who is the subject of the prayer. At other times, it can be a matter of holding a person “in the Light” or in the presence of God. One can imagine the practice of intercessory prayer as standing in the space between God and a person and bridging the distance.
One of the first questions to arise whenever intercessory prayer is mentioned is “does it work?” What’s meant by this question is something like “does what the intercessor asked for actually happen?” Does the person recover from illness, get the job, have a child?
But is this the primary question? Theologian Howard Thurman says that a person who prays does not first calculate whether or not intercessory prayer will be pragmatically effective and then choose how to proceed. A person who prays brings their concerns to God, including concerns for those he loves. In Thurman’s words, “[a] man prays for loved ones because he has to, not merely because his prayer may accomplish something.”14
In my year of political prayer, I let my own intercessory prayers go public. A community of prayer developed in response, as people prayed with me, made prayer requests, and responded. This afforded me a glimpse into the intercessory prayers of others. I’ve come to believe that intercessory prayer (expansively defined) is extremely common and almost instinctual. When we learn of someone suffering, we want to channel all the goodness of the universe in their direction. We want to comfort them, shield them from harm, and surround them with healing. Our desire for their well-being means that we connect the person, in our thoughts and emotions, with all that we know of goodness and love. And we use whatever language we have at hand—given by religious communities, borrowed from science-fiction, salvaged from a past we barely remember, or invented on the spot—to bring that person to God.
Although we aren’t likely motivated by efficacy, we still have the question, “does it work?” Thurman and others agree that, in some sense, it does.15 However, it is important to be careful about exactly how this is affirmed. There are two major missteps to avoid. First, God is not Jeeves. Prayer does not work in the same manner as Amazon Prime, and God is not a house elf. Eternal God, Creator of the Universe, cannot be coerced, manipulated, or forced to do anything. This goes back to the discussion earlier about the ways in which McCord Adams’s relational analogies do not fit perfectly because God is not another human person. With a parent or a partner, it might make sense to bargain and persuade and expect reciprocity in many ways. “If you do this, I’ll do that,” or “if you love me, you’d. . .” But our relationship with God is far more asymmetrical. God’s perspective is not ours and God’s ways of being in the world are not transparent to our observation. In other words, when we act like God is our wish-granter, we diminish God and set ourselves up for disappointment. The second misstep to avoid is understanding how prayer works in such a way that the logic can be read backwards. For example, the statement that prayer can work miracles, without further nuance, can easily slide into the conclusion that someone who did not receive a miracle didn’t pray enough. That is the logic of charlatans. It is victim-blaming masked in religious language. It lies about God (making God our wish-granting servant) and about people (translating suffering into inadequacy). Both of these problems arise from giving our prayers too much power in shaping events.
Theologian John Calvin was adamantly opposed to overestimating our power in relation to God. Emphasizing the glory and sovereignty of God, Calvin said that our prayers do not change God but they can change us.16 Our pleas will not, so to speak, change God’s mind. Another author, Ole Hallesby, makes a similar point but highlights how our prayer does have an important role to play. God always cares for all persons and is always eager to “employ His [sic] powers in the alleviation of our distress.”17 Our prayer does not change God’s mind, for God always wills to help us. Praying simply gives God “access to our needs.”18 For Hallesby, God knocks at the door