I posted this on Facebook not long ago…
A couple of people posted comments to the effect of “Please say more about how prayer changes things.”
That’s a great question and so here are a few thoughts in response.
First, I don’t believe prayer is magic. I once heard Episcopal priest and writer John Westerhoff define magic like this: “Magic is anything you do to get God to do something that God would not otherwise do.” Now, I have Pagan and Wiccan friends who bristle at this definition, but that’s because they viewed magic as more about the self than about God. But when we are talking about prayer, Westerhoff’s definition is brilliant. If you are praying in an effort to make God do something God wouldn’t otherwise do, then your prayer is actually a type of magic. And I think anyone who’s honest will acknowledge that we can pray all day long to win a million dollars, or grow back an amputated limb, or have a congenital disability magically disappear. And it’s just not going to happen. That’s not because God doesn’t exist (never mind what the atheists say), but rather it’s because God is not our celestial butler, who exists to work wonders at our beck and call.
As another person (who, ironically, I met in a different class taught by Dr. Westerhoff) was fond of saying, “God is not in the habit of breaking God’s own laws.” That’s not to say that extraordinary miracles never occur; they do, but about as frequently as winning the lottery. Probably even less frequently. Sometimes cancer goes into remission; sometimes an improbable chain of events results in an unexpected financial windfall. Yay for such wondrous events, but I’m humble enough to recognize that extraordinary miracles are pretty rare, and that seems to be the way our universe is organized. God does not typically break God’s laws. You lose a leg in an accident, then probably the best miracle you can hope for is good therapy and a prosthetic — which, frankly, can still be pretty miraculous in a grounded sort of way.
So I don’t believe prayer changes things in a magical sort of way — but then what do I mean? How does prayer changes things?
In the song “Rejoice” from U2’s second album October (released way back in 1981!), Bono sings “I can’t change the world, but I can change the world in me.” Which, of course, is reminiscent of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer:
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
So when we say prayer changes things, we need to filter that through the serenity prayer; prayer changes the things that it can change. Prayer doesn’t change God. Nor does prayer, by itself, change external circumstances. But I believe that the act of prayer does change us from the inside out. And that’s where the miracle happens.
To pray is a gesture of humility, of hope, and of love. It is a gesture of humility because prayer requires belief (or at the very least, openness to the possibility) that we human beings are not in control, but we are part of something larger that does have an impact on the world we live in. Call is Spirit, call it God, call it “the Force.” But prayer is also a gesture of hope, based on the trust that even in a world where we control so little, we can still make a positive difference, especially when we are in alignment with that bigger-something that we believe creates us, loves us, gives us life, and wants what’s best for us. To pray is to say “I hope for and trust in positive outcomes, no matter how bleak or bad things might be at the present.” And finally, prayer is a gesture of love, because — at least for those of us who are students of the mystical tradition — God is Love, love-with-a-capital-L. To pray to God is pray to Love. To say yes to God is to say yes to Love. To place our hope and trust in God is to place our hope and trust in Love.
So right away, the act of praying changes something inside us. It forges a new neural pathway in the brain, a pathway grounded in humility and committed to love, to hope, to trust, and to possibility. Every time we pray we become just a tiny little bit closer to being a saint — to being holy, which is to say, a person whose entire being is immersed in Love.
For contemplatives, praying “for something” (like requesting a blessing, or a healing, or a change in one’s fortune) is only a tiny aspect of reasons why we pray. Yes, petition and intercession (asking for blessings for one’s self or others, respectively) are good and valid reasons to pray. But we also pray to seek guidance from God, or intimacy with God, or to confess our wrongdoings and seek forgiveness from God. And we pray for no other reason than to love and adore God (Love), seeking greater intimacy with the source of all Love.
No matter what is motivating you to pray, the very act of doing so makes a difference in your heart and mind, just like the act of going to the gym and working out makes a difference in your physical health. If you’re out of shape and overweight, one trip to the gym will not restore you to peak fitness. But if you go to the gym and work out faithfully three times a week for an entire year, you’ll be transformed and people will start to notice. Prayer changes us the way working out changes us.
So prayer is a spiritual workout. It’s a way of opening our entire body, mind and soul to the loving and transforming presence of God in our lives. As the literature for Centering Prayer puts it, prayer is a gesture of consent to the action of the Spirit in our lives. That action, that presence, is always oriented toward healing and love and positive transformation. To be a regular person of prayer is to be someone who perseveres in the slow act of giving ourselves fully to Love, so that we may become united with love, One with Love, from the inside out.
“I can’t change the world, but I can change the world in me.” The contemplative corollary to this: “I can’t change the world, but through prayer I know that God changes the world in me.” And when my inner world is transformed, this empowers me to make a positive difference in the world at large, the world we all share. Prayer may not make me perform supernatural miracles (see my comments on magic above), but it can inspire subtle shifts in my consciousness and my behavior that can transform my state of mind, my relationships, and what kind of difference I make in the world. That may not be magical, or especially supernatural, but it is miraculous. A miracle, after all, is simply a “mirror-image” of God at work in the world (see the similarity between mirror and miracle) — and so most miracles tend to be very small, very ordinary, and completely in alignment with the laws of nature. But they still manifest God’s love and grace. That’s what makes them miracles.
Prayer is saying “yes” to miracles, big or small. And then living a life committed to creating small miracles (by God’s grace). Therein, my friends, everything changes. It changes in love, and hope, and grace. And it all starts with prayer (actually it all starts with God, for it is God who inspires us to pray. But on our part, prayer is the catalyst).
Thanks for a wonderful and thought-provoking question. Hope this helps.
