Living on a Prayer? or, just Hooked on a Feeling?

Recently, more than one person has mentioned to me the concept of prayer as problematic. I have to agree with them. Not only has Deism made a great surge recently, especially among young people, who do not identify explicitly as Deists, but practically believe such ideas within the label of their various faith traditions (Don't assume this is a new idea here, Deism is a very Western view, many of our American "founding fathers" were Deists, not Christians. See: Thomas Jefferson); many Christians will have reasoned that the idea of intercessory prayer raises many questions of its own:

• If God is omniscient (all-knowing), why bother to tell God what is wrong?
• If God is omnipotent (all-powerful), wouldn't there be a "right" path laid out for everything already? Why would God change God's perfect mind?
• Is prayer just a placebo? What about all those times when prayer seems to "work?" What about all those times when it doesn't "work?"
  
• Or to put it another way, I was taught in Confirmation class something along the lines of "God hears all prayers, God is always listening, but that doesn't mean when we ask for something God will say yes." Is this any different from discerning God's will from "feelings" about events? Are we assigning meaning to coincidences as "answers" to our prayers?

I must mention that these are not the only kinds of prayer understood within the Christian traditions. One might center their prayer life on giving thanks, offering praise and other personal acts of worship, as well as the use of prayer in corporate worship services and other church body functions. These, at least for me, seem to function more as statements (or better yet, responses, as God is always the initiator) than questions, in cases when the prayer is not meant primarily to make requests of God.

I held onto the idea above, taught when I was confirmed Presbyterian, for quite awhile. "I can ask God for something, and sometimes I will receive it and sometimes not," I thought. "It's all according to God's will." This may be true, but if God does whatever God thinks is best anyway, from an all-knowing perspective of what is best, then why would my limited perspectives be adequate to make suggestions to God about what I want and need, who I want to be healed, who I want to find a job, who I want to continue living?

In college I did a project on C.S. Lewis, and while I am not one of those who usually falls back on Lewis (also by this time I had been a regular attender at a Brethren in Christ congregation for some time, and I'm not sure how sympathetic Lewis was to the Anabaptists), I did appreciate much of his understanding of prayer. One of his most helpful ideas to me, after presenting the problem as I have done , rests on the understanding of our role and identity (search for the words "making known," chapter IV is good) in prayer. The summary is this: God knows and sees all, and thus we shouldn't assume that we are making God aware of anything. When we pray, however, we consciously address God. We go from Things as in, "God created all things," to Persons, willing that God know us as such. We acknowledge our free will to pray to God, and become, in an oversimplified way, two Persons "meeting" instead of a Thing and a God-Concept. I think it's a good place to start.

As far as whether our prayers change anything, Lewis says this:

Can we believe that God ever really modifies His action in response to the suggestions of men [and women]? For infinite wisdom does not need telling what is best, and infinite goodness needs no urging to do it. But neither does God need any of those things that are done by finite agents, whether living or inanimate. He could, if He chose, repair our bodies miraculously without food; or give us food without the aid of farmers, bakers, and butchers, or knowledge without the aid of learned men; or convert the heathen without missionaries. Instead, He allows soils and weather and animals and the muscles, minds, and wills of men [and women] to cooperate in the execution of His will... It is not really stranger, nor less strange, that my prayers should affect the course of events than that my other actions should do so. They have not advised or changed God' s mind -- that is, His overall purpose. But that purpose will be realized in different ways according to the actions, including the prayers, of His creatures.

(Unfortunately I don't know where this comes from. Also, note that most Christians don't call those who practice other religions "heathens" so much anymore)
Prayer is, above all, an action, just as feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and imprisoned. As God makes us participants in His will (whether God "needs" us to do so is moot in this case) and in ushering in the Kingdom of God, our actions are, I believe, very much like sacraments. God's master plan may be set, but with free will our actions and the paths of our actions in the causal sense are not necessarily so. God works through each of our actions, including prayer, making good out of our mistakes and evils. Augustine said, "God judged it better to bring good out of evil, than to suffer no evil to exist" (anyone know the reference for this?). The concept of good coming from evil is found outside of Christianity as well, namely Buddhist thought.

So the action of our prayers is our participation in God's work, not changing the mind of God, but perhaps shaping the events of the world in the same way as our other actions as the Body of Christ, with Jesus as the Head. And, as Lewis indicated in Letters to Malcolm, we need not worry too much whether we are praying for the right things, because just as we intercede in our prayers for ourselves and others, the Holy Spirit intercedes for us.

Prayer is certainly part of the mystery of faith, but not so mystical and abstract as to render it practically useless if we make it active rather than passive, and part of our personal and communal relationship with the relational Triune God who has been made known to us, just as we relate to anyone else around us in action and direct communication.