Religious readers of this site periodically rebuke me for misunderstanding the nature of prayer. Prayer is a way of communing with God, they say; no informed believer would ask or expect God to intervene on their or others’ behalf. Thus, I am wrong to be puzzled by the self-centeredness of believers who credit God with curing them of cancer, say, seemingly oblivious, if not indifferent, to the fact that hundreds just like them die every day from the disease; contrary to all appearances, no believer really thinks of God as a Friend (as Michael Novak puts it) in High Places who can, if he chooses, protect the believer from the vicissitudes of fate. I am also wrong to wonder at believers’ lack of interest in trying to understand systematically which prayers God responds to and which not, why he rescues some children from natural disasters and not others, because no one would ever say that he does so respond to human need.
I have no doubt that prayer is often a communion and not a petition, an expression of gratitude and not a request for help. But I have never been persuaded that believers do not in fact also look to God for assistance and, when the thing hoped for arrives, attribute that development to God’s empathy. The attribution of positive events to God’s intervention is simply too standard a trope in religious rhetoric.
And now here is Joseph Bottum describing the semester’s end at Notre Dame University:
All across campus, the flowers have begun to bloom, their dull Indiana roots stirred by the spring rain, and the grass is almost green again at Notre Dame. Beneath a 16-foot statue of the Blessed Virgin, the main administration building sits, as always, its gold dome sparkling in the warm spring sun.
. . . The Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes flickers with candles, lit by anxious students as they prepare for final exams.
If anyone would be doctrinally correct, you’d think it would be Notre Dame students, but they mustn’t have gotten the message about prayer and God’s power on earth, either.
I usually have sympathy with your observation about the uneven expectations that tend to go along with prayer, but
is a little much. Candles and anxiety before exams should be categorized as a tradition (in which anxiety is more properly the issue than expectation) rather than as a collection of earnest prayers for good grades. You can say something like “stupid kids should spend that time studying”and you might even be right, but that doesn’t really have anything to do with it.
And you can’t really be serious about Notre Dame students and doctrinal correctness, can you? Good joke.
Perhaps they believe in God’s intervention because Jesus explicitly guarantees it in our only source of information about the operation of Christian prayer. Sophisticated users of religion will have noticed it doesn’t work, and thus attempt to explain away this failure of the Bible as they do so many others. You must learn to view the book as either a user’s manual or an allegory, depending on the circumstances of the moment.
It should be pretty obvious that prayer can be both a communion and a petition, and since the latter is both selfish, religious types tend to play up its communion aspect and play down its petition aspect.
Along the lines of what Tony wrote, couldn’t the prayers and candles been seen as efforts by students to find peace amidst the anxiety of exams? Also, couldn’t the prayers be for the grace to handle the outcome of their exams rather than for an actual change in the exam scores.
Back when I was in law school, I used to meditate prior to exams, and as part of that meditation I would pray. But I never really prayed for an “A” — I prayed that I would have the grace to do my best, and if my best wasn’t good enough, to be able to deal with that reality. I wasn’t trying to “game the system,” so to speak — I was just trying to do my best. Not quite “thy will be done,” but also not quite “Santa, can you hear me?”
Heather you should go to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, or respected Catholic websites like Catholic Answers etc. Believers should go there more often also to prevent confusion.
If it’s not Virgin Mary, it’ll be aturtle!
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“Prayer is a way of communing with God, they say …”
Is this an admission that God doesn’t already know their thoughts? I thought God was supposed to be omnivorous or something.
What point is there to send God a communique of any kind? Adding information to an infinite database like God is redundant, and it must bore the Hell of Him.
Good observation, Phil. And it serves to highlight the competing “modes” of the God-concept that people operate under. Pascal Boyer, among others, has done a fantastic job showing how this all works:
http://www.amazon.com/Religion-Explained-Pascal-Boyer/dp/0465006965/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1245344739&sr=1-1
In the ND example, despite the intellectual sophistication of catholic theology (and you can concede that it IS sophisticated, even if it also is, at bottom, a house of cards), actual practitioners of the faith revert back to the more simplistic, intuitive versions of God(s) that infuse all religions. This is natural and inevitable.
Even the Pope is susceptible to this, despite his theological acumen. It is part of his inheritance as a human that he shares the same cognitive machinery we all have. Machinery that calls forth magical thinking, intuitions about root-causes of various phenomena being social in nature, and the efficacy of supplication to the invisible string-puller in achieving difficult ends.
The ND students lighting candles and praying for success in their tests is no different, at bottom, than a rain dance. Both are ridiculous on their face, upon reflection, but both are manifestations of our all too human nature.
Are Rube Goldberg devices sophisticated, or exercises in naiveté? I suppose that depends on whether you view them as intentional jokes, or seriously-intended designs.
Which is Catholic theology?
Caledonian: I just mean that Catholic theology is sophisticated in comparison to other supernatural belief sets/systems. Are they all, at bottom, unjustified? Yes. Can Catholic theology been seen as only so much smoke and mirrors? Yes.
But Catholic theology is *sophisticated* in the same way the contortions used in Ptolemaic astronomy to describe the motions of the planets were *sophisticated*. Much like the Rube Goldberg example, more parsimonious explanations/designs are available, and Occam’s Razor comes into play here.
You can substitute “complex”, or just “complicated” for *sophisticated* if it suits you.
Regardless…my main point is that the way most people operate, most of the time with regards to religious beliefs is non-theoretical, but rather better described by the cognitive machinery that folks like Boyer and Atran have laid out.
Peace.