How to Think About Prayer IV

A Guide for the Perplexed

Nota bene: This is a significantly longer piece than the typical entry at APD. I have lengthened it to attempt to do full justice to the complex subject matter and to avoid having to take an extra week on this series. I have tried to add more pictures and break up the text for easier digestion. Best taken with a good coffee and a biscotti.

In the previous three entries, I detailed the history, evolution, and structure of Christian prayer, cataloguing its specific historical evolution, and trying as much as possible to give context and logic to the nature of the Church’s prayer life.

I have deliberately left untreated the relevant philosophical and theological question until this final, concluding post. Very simply: does prayer “work”?

I have delayed dealing with this question because the inquiry crosses so many theological frontiers with impunity, almost too many to keep straight even in a long-form essay. Prayer raises questions about no fewer topics than theology proper, the God-world relationship, whether God changes his mind or reacts to prayer, whether prayer is included within providence, and/or whether God intervenes, generally, in the world of nature and history; the question of whether prayer has miraculous or magical properties or abilities, which violate natural law, or whether it unlocks those potencies as they inhere in nature, which is a question that pertains to the “paranormal” or preternatural dimension of human consciousness and the material world, something that remains a controversial if growing topic of interest among philosophers of mind and science; and, finally, the question of the problem of evil, divine justice, and why prayer sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t, quo discrimine rīpās / hae linquunt, illae rēmīs vada līvida verrunt (Vergil, Aen. VI.319-320).

Any sane person should be hesitant to drop in on a topic of that level of complexity.

I’m also afraid that my own mind is not consistently made up on the it, and even though a lot of what I do here on A Perennial Digression is try to work out the various portions of my psyche into some kind of dialectical synthesis, or at least civil conversation, I am somewhat afraid that any answer I arrive at here will prove tentative and reversible, perhaps as soon as it is published.

This is a consequence of age. I really, really believed in prayer when I was younger. I assumed as a matter of course that when prayer failed to materialize it was, in some way, my own fault; at a slightly higher stage of consciousness, I decided that it was because God knew better than I did and simply didn’t grant my requests, even when they were for proper ends. And both of those selves are still there in me, and sometimes make their faces shown. Throughout my life, I have uttered prayers in moments of desperation, and often—but crucially, not always—seen provision for what I needed in response. I cannot fail to say so.

But having reached my fourth decade of life, I also confess that I’ve grown a bit cynical. I have lived to see faithful, moral people truly eviscerated by this world, pummeled by misfortune, crying out to God in faith and seemingly ignored by indifferent heavens; innocents mangled by Fortune’s uncaring wheel; and also truly wicked people have prospered in wealth and worldly power, with no degree of their arrogance given its just desserts. It is particularly hard in the present political climate to find myself believing very much in divine justice: in a world where the vices and lies of a very small number of people are currently affecting the destiny of nearly the entire world, it is difficult to confidently proclaim a simple faith in prayer.

I can’t find it in myself to think that dying children and bereaved parents, grieving lovers and lonely souls, simply didn’t pray enough or hard enough or correctly enough to merit God’s attention, nor that God has elected in his eternal wisdom that my prayers for, say, bill money or a new job (I’ve certainly prayed for both) outweighed in importance those of people struggling to make ends meet nearby or starving or suffering in war across the world. (An observation: those who insist on a God personally reactive to prayer seem to me very much to base their confidence in its efficacy on the fortunes of people in the affluent Western world.) It is in these situations actually the more charitable thing to believe of God that he does not answer prayer, at least not by direct intervention.

Nevertheless, I acknowledge that no treatment of prayer from a Christian point of view is sufficiently complete without tackling the whether, the how, and the why of prayer’s work. And probably, no Christian theology of prayer is capable of settling for the idea that prayer is merely therapy or outlet for our own souls. So we have to ask: we know what we do when we pray; why do we do it, and what does it do?

From a very empirical, material point of view, we can begin by saying that prayer works at least in this way: as we mentioned at the beginning of the series, prayer affects the brain and, in turn, the body, and changes our personalities when done consistently. Different prayer traditions, associated with different faiths or, within Christianity, different confessions, shape the psyche in different ways over time. Prayer works insofar as when done with intention it succeeds in changing our psychology, our neurology, our bodies, and possibly our lives. All Christian prayer is meant to transform our souls and bodies into Christ.

I think we are tempted—I am at least—to dismiss this as unimportant, or as a consolation prize: it falls far short, at least, of what prayer claims to do. But when you consider the paradoxical plasticity and intractability of the human creature—both how malleable we are, and how difficult it is to shift our behavior and worldview over the course of a lifetime—we should not fail to realize that this most basic thing that prayer does for us is no small thing. Humans are both highly adaptable creatures and highly routinized ones, who tend to become more rigid and set in their ways with age, especially their habits of thought. So the fact that prayer is capable of opening and changing our minds, rewiring our brains, calming our bodies in moments of anxiety, changing our viewpoints on the world, and possibly influencing our behavior, is really sort of amazing on its own. Prayer is sometimes what is left to a person experiencing cognitive and physical decline, the words of the Psalms or the Lord’s Prayer or the Ave Maria staying with them when their memory of friends and family have otherwise gone. Prayer can save addicts and the souls of nihilists and change marriages and the course of a life.

From an evolutionary point of view, that so much of our consciousness can achieve stability and integration through prayer and meditation, and that so much of our organism can be reoriented around the habits prayer enables and centers, is nothing short of incredible. While other animals may have some habits that are analogous to religion, no other creature that we know of has evolved prayer as a habit to perform this function other than humans.

I will come back to this apparently mundane explanation of prayer’s felicity by the end, by which time I hope to have reenchanted it somewhat. But before I do, I owe an answer on the three questions I pitched above: prayer in the God-world relationship, prayer and the preternatural, and prayer and the problem of evil.

First, to the question of prayer and the God-world relationship. Any theology of prayer has to deal with a paradox: on the one hand, scripture presents God listening to and responding to prayer, and encourages people to pray with the expectation that God will fulfill their requests; on the other, scripture gradually develops philosophical views of God that buck against the dynamic suggested by this theoretical framework, and that establish a trajectory towards a theology which ultimately renders it quite suspect.

In a nutshell, the more transcendent God gets, the less specifically involved in the world he is, and in Jewish writing of the Second Temple period, he sometimes disappears from view altogether. In Jonah, God speaks but is not seen; in Ruth, God is spoken about but does not speak; in Esther, God neither speaks nor is spoken to. Even in mystical texts, the Absence of God proves a point of profound interest for Second Temple Jews: in the Exagogē of Ezekiel the Tragedian, for example, which dramatizes in Greek fashion the Israelite Exodus from Egypt, God is seen in a dream sitting on a throne in regalia, before he takes it off, puts it on Moses, puts him on his seat, and leaves the stage.

Divine transcendence also leads to intimations of divine immanence, of course: in fully transcending the universe, God also, to that selfsame degree, in-fills the totality of the universe, and is present in everything, to everyone, everywhere. But for exactly that reason, the whole notion of special revelation, sacred history, and divine intervention come off the table as important means for knowing God’s will in this literature: per Benjamin Sommer, prophecy is only God’s simulated speech in the Priestly tradition; nature and history already reflect the Wisdom of God (Proverbs), albeit in ways that are inscrutable and inconvenient for humans (Job, Qohelet), and so don’t require extra apocalypse.

There are ways in the Bible to rescue the concept of special revelation after this philosophical critique of earlier revelation; but they have to do, typically, with taking the local, parochial forms of religion, the kinds that are awarded sacred status in the earlier tradition, and making the argument that their sanctity is really due to the fact that they correspond with the rational superstructure of the universe (Sirach, Wisdom of Solomon). In developed Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, this is the origin of Logos and “two books” discourse: God’s Logos or Speech is made present in the text (Torah, Qur’an) or human (Israel, Christ, the Church), or in the “two books” of nature and scripture (Torah, Gospel, or Qur’an).

Even in apocalyptic texts where the contention is that the world as it presently exists does not submit to Wisdom—where it has been corrupted in some fashion and requires reform and re-subordination to the divine imperium, and even where received scripture’s ultimate reliability is doubted (1 Enoch)—God himself is not the one who fixes things. God, in these texts, is possessed of a transcendent otium that cannot be bothered to personally intervene in the life of the world: this he hands over to angels. And when they fail or are thwarted by rebels among their ranks or their half-breed daimonic children, then God appoints a special deputy from among the higher class of divinities: Michael, the “Son of Man,” Melchizedek. Alternatively, or additionally, God may appoint one or more human messiahs, of prophetic, priestly, or royal character, to resolve at least the earthly, perhaps the heavenly, portion of evil; sometimes this character is the same as the heavenly one.

But in any event, God is not “personally” involved in the matter. A distant emperor, it is his lieutenants that accomplish this work; prayers and petitions do not even typically make it all the way to him, but are handled by his chief ministers, the angels and archangels, who also litigate with the accusers (satans) and make war with the demonic beings on Earth.

Apart from the text of Wisdom of Solomon and, perhaps, the Deutero-Paulines and the Gospel of John, the Christian Bible presents no final synthesis between Wisdom and Apocalyptic as answers to the dialectic of transcendence and immanence. Early Christian theology, insofar as it grows up out of the transformation of apocalyptic hope in Christian communities, tends to favor the former over the latter. Christian theology also uses the former as a bridge to the integration of Middle and Neoplatonic philosophy into Christian faith. The apocalyptic disquiet of the earliest Christianity was, by the fifth century, scattered into premillenarian, postmillenarian, and amillenarian postures, with the amillenarian maturity of Augustine winning out as the normative perspective in the theological long-term. Wisdom, by contrast to Apocalyptic, allows for a God who, in being transcendent, is also intimately immanent, and therefore close to his creatures: even in their sufferings, even in the underworld (Ps 139:7-10), which previous God-concepts were incapable of (Ps 6:5).

But again, the point is that neither school looks to an interventionist God. At most, one of them is open to the idea that God’s divine ministers in the cosmos, the gods or godlings, angels, are interventionists; but they are finite beings that are part of the universe and subject to its laws (at least some of them), and susceptible to opposition by evil forces that might neutralize their efforts partly or entirely. Daniel, for example, has to wait many days for his prayer to be answered because Gabriel gets held up by the angelic “prince” of Persia (Dan 10:13). There can be “war in heaven” (Rev 12:7). Early Christianity’s realized, and verticalized, apocalypticism deals in this kind of patronal and intermediary form of intervention: Christ as God’s deputy, Mary as Christ’s deputy, angels and saints, living holy men, and finally relics all feature far more powerfully in the ordinary piety of most Christians of the late antique and medieval worlds than God himself, considered by himself.

All of this by way of saying: the theological question of whether prayer “works” is to a large degree a question of what sort of God one proposes. And in the developed theological perspective of Christians beyond the end of the biblical tradition, the transcendence/immanence issue is, if anything, more acute, not less. The God of Neoplatonism—the One, who emanates Mind and Soul, within which the physical cosmos comes-to-be from matter, or ex nihilo—is even less likely to “personally” intervene in the universe (if you can call the One personal) than the cosmic or mystical God of the later Hebrew Bible.

And insofar as late antique Christians identified the God of the Bible with the God of the philosophers, they adopted this problem as their own: the One itself, the supreme Source and Summit of reality, is inaccessible apart from a hierarchical myriad of intermediaries, the closest of which are benighted with the possibility of moral change due to their closer proximity to matter and their corresponding lesser degree of illumination directly from God.

Part of that problem is that God, as simple, infinite, and purely actual, both cannot change and, if he is aware of the particulars of the finite universe(s) (I think he is), he is aware of them in a non-reactive way, because his eternity means that he beholds them (in all of their intelligibles and sensibles) in one singular, transcendent moment. In the divine economy, we can say that God in-fills the worlds and to that degree is a co-agent with creatures; but at that point, what we are really saying is that God’s agency within creation is exercised in and through and as creatures, qua creatures, principally angels and secondarily everything else, rather than from outside in or above down. Because, insofar as God deigns to work in, through, and as creation, God does so kenotically, from a place of self-emptying, of having surrendered agency along with life, mind, and being to his creatures; logically, this would work in tandem with the world’s own development, such that the more complexly the world develops, the more and more God surrenders providential agency to it with respect to its enhanced degree of being.

This is not incompatible with the Platonic theology of providence, either, in which divine providence is the very relationship of the intelligible to the sensible worlds. It is to say: the more the sensible evolves to correspond to its intelligible archetype, the more divine providence can be active in the material world, and the less it conforms, the less active providence is.

Taken together, all of this leaves us with a God that, beyond time, does not and cannot react to our prayers uttered in time other than in and through the divine providential responsibility already ceded to creatures, including to angels, and thereby respecting the very freedom of creation in its unfolding according to its seminal principles.

Theoretically, this still leaves open the possibility that, as C.S. Lewis contended, God has accounted for our prayers uttered within time from beyond time, from his eternal vantage on the world, and so worked his answers to them into the fabric of the world order, without needing to intervene. This dusts off an older argument related to the miraculous itself: miracles do not represent irruptions or impositions upon the natural order, but specialized examples of the natural order that take place under providential auspices. Could answer to prayer be another iteration of the same logic?

That is, at least, intellectually coherent. I’m more sympathetic to this view, from a voice that has been so influential on my own mind and faith, than to the view that God reacts to prayer in real time, deciding yay or nay on each one uttered. But I still nevertheless think it creates various logical problems for divine providence. It makes God in se either impotent to answer every prayer or, alternatively, makes God a micromanager of time’s flow, who then becomes responsible for history’s many atrocities by the prayers he does or does not choose to answer. It also implies that, ultimately, history’s contingencies are necessary and not really free, accidental features of the cosmos. I struggle to see how Lewis’s view does not ultimately make God into either a weakling or a determinist: by answering prayers directly, whether within time or within eternity, with temporal responses, God determines history in ways that undermine freedom, or else God has limited options for whose prayers he can answer and how. And, honestly, that would be fine, provided that the prayers God seemed to answer were typically worthy ones: if, for example, every starving child or struggling mother’s prayers were answered, every time, that measure of preferentialism would be fine to me. That does not, however, seem to be in evidence.

If, instead, God only answers prayer in and through beings that, hypercosmic or encosmic, are all inferior to God, and therefore part of the order of creation, then the Christian at prayer must accept the possibility that answers to their prayers might be countermanded by the opposition, and that elements of fate, fortune, and freedom interplay to create the world through which providence is filtered in answer to prayer. This would be somewhat more acceptable: it exonerates God of the problem of preferentialism and also of prayer’s seeming ineffectiveness in many or perhaps most cases.

That’s a lot of words to say this: a theology in which God hears and answers our prayers from above is more emotionally satisfying (and that’s not meaningless), and it’s simpler, but it is ultimately less rationally coherent than a theology in which, at most, God answers prayers through the intermediaries of creaturely beings, including angels and humans.

And then we would have to consider that the capacity and competence of the angels, at least in our texts, is frequently challenged or counterbalanced, which is given in at least some of those texts as explanations for why prayers don’t work. It is that very claim, though, that gets even more difficult to manage when Christianity goes Platonic than it already was for many Jewish readers of books like Daniel, since in the Neoplatonic scheme that Christianity broadly adopts, it is less possible for the gods themselves to experience the ignorance or lack that enables change, evil, and failure. It is more possible for divine beings in, say, South Asian contexts; it is more expected in Zoroastrianism and Judaism and Christianity that everything other than the absolutely supreme God is mutable. But the Hellenes fairly asked: how could a henad, as a deity that is itself a persona of the One, fail to be perfectly good and holy? This was also Plotinus’s complaint to the Gnostics. How could it really be that the Demiurgic Mind of the universe was either evil or ignorant—what could be wiser and more intelligent and more holy than the intelligible womb of the universe?

So, I leave the philosophical and theological question of whether prayer “works” in aporia for a moment. I don’t know if God answers prayer directly. I know several reasons why he probably doesn’t, and I have several questions that seem fairly insoluble if it is definitively true that he does. I do believe that God hears our prayers and identifies with us in our prayers, but that the spiritual beings which respond to prayer, assuming such things exist and that that happens, are those that are lesser than the full divine infinity of God, and which dwell to varying degrees ever more ensconced by space, time, and matter, some quite close to us, some much further away. If we are going to think apocalyptically, that hierarchy, however we set it up, is our go-between with God.

If we are going to think sapientially, then we already live in the universe that manifests God’s Wisdom, then we could say that there is no real “go-between,” only the particular creaturely form in which the deity manifests to be available to us; but also, we would have to conclude that intercessory prayer to resolve the universe’s troubles is illogical. Either way, prayer is a response to Divine Absence, not Presence.

Incidentally, I will just note in passing that this is already to some degree implicit in Christianity’s historic preference to approach Christ, Mary, and the Saints and Angels as intercessors in prayer rather than God directly. The notion that such personae are more intimate or proximate to us than God the Father, while problematic if taken literally, reflects to my mind a legitimate phenomenological and philosophical insight: the divine grace operative in the universe is not operative in a vacuum, but in specific places, times, and entities, and so it is to them we go, to Deus sub specie eorum.

I have already hinted at answers, then, to the other two questions in working my way to this point. It is time to deal with them directly. Prayer also raises questions about the preternatural character of cosmic reality itself: whether, that is, there is a dimension to human experience and to nature that transcends our current scientific knowledge and verges on the magical and the miraculous, and specifically whether prayer unlocks such powers in at least those individuals who experience, or claim to, miraculous provision in response to prayer. Perhaps prayer works less by God answering from above, and more by the release of divine energies from below?

Something like this answer dances around the edges of sociological and anthropological talk in the study of religion about faith-healing and exorcism. The historical Jesus was certainly known as an exorcist and possibly also as a faith healer, if the Gospels are to be believed; and it is described on more than one occasion in the Gospels as though it is precisely the faith of those around him that enables or disables his ability to perform miracles (Mk 6:5). He’s not the first or the only wandering holy person from antiquity or modernity who codes in the minds of their audiences as a source of arcane power that can, among other things, restore health, multiply food, or create other phenomena, but whose ability to do so is in some way dependent on the faith of those around them. In a similar way, my argument here is that perhaps prayer is a psychic activity that unlocks dormant power in the individual or group that prays.

To suggest such is to open up epistemologically to the idea of the “paranormal” or “super” dimension of reality as a real thing. For anthropologists of religion, qua anthropologists of religion, this is typically out of bounds; yet, as Carlos Eire argues in They Flew: A History of the Impossible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), good historiography often creates the awkward situation of vindicating events that transgress the ordinary boundaries of science as historical, forcing either a respectful, and pregnant, silence about the event or else permitting a conversation about “the impossible” or the “super natural,” to use Jeff Kripal’s language. It is confrontation with this “super” dimension, in the humanities, in the sciences, in popular culture, in reports of the “paranormal,” in conversation around the alien and the sacred, that does the most to undermine the modernist worldview that often causes what Kripal elsewhere calls “the Flip” in one’s worldview, and engenders a critical openness to the super and a deconstruction of the nice and neat modernist universe that has governed the late 19th, 20th, and 21st century worldviews.

Admitting the “super” as a category of experience and potentially of reality reframes the question of prayer and whether God answers it. On this read, basically, whether and whatever the divine or sacred dimension which prayer taps into—perhaps God and/or angels hear and answer prayer, perhaps they don’t, at least not directly or completely or all the time, whatever—prayer’s psychocorporeal effects on the person praying have the potential not merely to change one’s neurology, body, or behavior, but also perhaps to enhance one’s physical and cognitive abilities to influence the material world itself.

Why doesn’t that happen to everyone, all the time? Some of us may well be genetically or evolutionarily predisposed this direction, as Dale Allison suggests in the book imaged above, and as Kripal implies in talking about the “X-Gene” from Marvel’s X-Men. Certainly, it seems to be a rare trait: those who cultivate these psychic and paraphysical abilities through prayer, meditation, and other mystical/spiritual exercises often enough become our avatars, demigods, prophets, saints, and gurus that populate our religions. Perhaps, in the future, this will be something all of us can do, and that’s why our modern mythologies—science fiction, fantasy, comic books, and the like—imagine us all in the future being able to do things as extensions of our being that presently we see as miraculous or magical, and often enough, we still use that idiom in imagining those future thaumata. Perhaps, evolutionarily, we just are not yet the sort of creatures who possess these powers—yet.

There’s a lot to favor this way of thinking about prayer’s efficacy, including from our textual data and traditional practice. Anthropologically speaking, this is why prayer is not fully distinguishable from magic: both operate on the logic that the person at prayer or the functioning magician must make an effort, in the spiritual and imaginal realms, to influence the physical universe. Scripture itself makes frequent injunction to combine prayer with asceticism, focus, intention, and constancy for efficacy, and this kind of thinking animates Jewish, Christian, and Islamic advice about prayer in the mystical tradition.

These are also the components that make prayer transformational for us personally, and so that puts personal transformation and the miraculous on the same spectrum. This is the opening insight I made in this post about prayer’s measurable effects, but on steroids. Prayer affects our consciousness and our bodies, and perhaps, in some instances, unleashes energies or powers in our bodies and in others—perhaps even in nature abroad. Every so often, so it would seem in this way of thinking of things, the prayerful and meditative efforts of a particular individual are excessively fruitful in these ways, usually to the selfsame degree someone has taken the effort to cultivate the othered consciousness of prayer—or perhaps as they are forcibly initiated into it. Or perhaps some people are simply special.

Or perhaps they are especially pious and ascetical. I don’t like asceticism, which is not quite the same as rejecting its power. Even when I have made a hard practice of it, I have resented it: as someone who grew up a child of divorce in two lower socioeconomic situations, it’s always seemed to me that much of life was already one Great Lent, so the need to withdraw from meat and cheese and oil and so on for reasons other than those of health or sympathy for animals has always emotionally struck me as somewhat punitive, even though I rationally know that it isn’t, and that dedicating myself more to it might well make me more otherworldly. I’m not praising myself here: it’s an area to bring under control in my own spiritual life, or to accept the boundaries that refusing to participate outline. But I raise the topic here at all to say this: asceticism is a controlled setting in which to inflict trauma on the body for the sake of its discipline and the soul’s healing and empowerment, and so it is not accidental that many people, as Kripal details at length, who have “paranormal” or superhuman kinds of experiences tend to be traumatized people, people who have been wounded and shaken out of the ordinary realms of human experience. Jesus himself says that some demons can only be exorcised by prayer and fasting (Matt 17:21). It’s probably not accidental that many of the greatest miracle-workers in religious history were also profound ascetics. And it’s probably not accidental either that such people are often weird. The kind of consciousness that can manipulate the raw fabric of the universe is not the kind of person you want to let babysit—or, as Kripal humorously says, he wouldn’t want his daughter to date a saint. I think that’s the right take.

At the same time, though, there’s countervailing evidence here, since plenty of avatars and demigods and thaumaturges and so on that we see in the historical and mythical record seem to have been people of great vim and zest for life. I don’t want to make too much of this argument, but it seems to me that for every wandering desert ascetic in whose footsteps flowers grow, there’s a powerful kshatriya or liminal Wild Man or conquering son of Zeus fighting monsters, whose powers vie with those of gods, nature, and demons in our myths, and who are somehow anti-ascetics, people drawing spiritual power from the universe precisely through their unbridled hedonism. Or, another logion attributed to Jesus: “For John came neither eating nor drinking and they say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is vindicated by her children” (Matt 11:17-19).

That either asceticism or non-asceticism can be the context for the miraculous might well imply that it’s a question of how such powers are unlocked in the individual, which is irreducibly personal and specific, rather than being a one-size-fits-all situation. Or it might be a matter of the stage of one’s development of consciousness: perhaps in a stage of original participation, one has a Herculean vigor, and in a stage of withdrawn participation, one can only find the spiritual energy by withdrawing from the world. I don’t know; I’ve never cast out a demon, to my knowledge, and I’m not an especially talented summoner of angels, either.

As explanations go for prayer’s efficacy, we have to admit that at the very least, this is one that is much more agreeable to a traditional notion of the problem of evil—Lewis’s “problem of pain,” whose optimism must always be counterbalanced by A Grief Observed—than a picture of a God who either deigns to answer some prayers and not others, or which defers the whole question to an angelic hierarchy that is largely as pigeonholed by gridlock with demonic foes as the American Congress, however attractive either picture may be for other reasons in other contexts. For here the purposes and possibilities of prayer receive a reframing that preserves some providential intention—God gives us prayer as a way to cultivate our relationship with God, and thereby to gradually unlock, at least in a few, the deeper potencies of our human nature that remain unactualized in most of us, most of the time—without attributing to God either the direct causation of evil (if God were to reject some prayers and favor others, and, clearly, reject some prayers that were perfectly licit and good in intention and execution) or impotence (through the ability to answer only some, but not other, prayers). This is admittedly a somewhat more naturalist, if super-naturalist (again, to invoke Kripal), attitude to prayer, but it is a theological naturalism, a theistic naturalism, that undergirds its outlook, rather than an atheistic or materialist one.

In other words, on this model, prayer is less “answered” than sometimes, for reasons that are mysterious to us because of ignorance and slow progress in our understanding of the res divinas, potent to facilitate the superhuman. If not a proof, then at least a suggestive aid to this argument, would be the notion I’ve argued for progressively on here periodically over the last couple of years, that the basic activities of human life, material culture, and imaginal achievement are in fact already acts of communion with the Divine Mind that result in the cultivation of the divine image into the divine likeness. (See here, here, and here.) After all, something as mundane as making art or inventing tools is already kind of an incredible activity if we pause and think about it: we imagine and then we make what we imagine real, even if only in symbolic or verbal form, and then sometimes we live long enough to see those symbols, visual or verbal, achieve real three-dimensional physicality. That’s not quite the fantasy levels of magic we ordinarily hold as the standard of what counts as magical, but it’s also not nothing; and it provides the basic model by which those other sorts of powers might someday come into the world.

This theory would also dovetail nicely with the fact, as expressed by Kripal, that “Reading is mysticism,” that the work of writers, readers, and interpreters in scripture and other literary endeavors is an inherently mystical thing; and in that respect, the decidedly literate and literary quality of the Hours, as regular appointed prayers that are most often read by Christians from books, and which are heavily scripturalized, takes on new significance too. Literature and the literary are another sort of deep cognitive, para-cognitive, trans-cognitive activity of the kind I describe above: through reading and writing we create vehicles of the imagination that can reciprocally influence the real world and sometimes shape it indelibly, and we can permanently change our own consciousness through what we read or through the act of writing. Speaking from personal experience here: I, David, am a different human than I used to be both from a life of more or less regularly praying the Hours (it comes in and out in different seasons) and from a life of writing (especially through this dispatch).

The destiny of all human consciousness, from this perspective, is to become in every waking thought that which prayer is meant to and sometimes succeeds, usually only partially, in engendering in our minds: for the Christian, that is to say, we are to come to the point where our whole mind is the Mind of Christ, whereby also we can exercise those thaumata that Christ did. Nor would prayer be the only such method to this consciousness. Meditation can do it too; yoga, tantra; so can what I can only describe as “aesthetic baptism,” the kind of transcendent consciousness that active communion with the world’s beauty and goodness elicits.

So can asceticism and its opposite: “spiritual hedonism,” so to speak. Or sometimes the transition to this sort of consciousness is completely involuntary and perhaps even unwanted. Indeed, we should keep reminding ourselves that the kind of human being whose consciousness is transparent enough to God to affect the physical cosmos is not a “normal” person. They are not a “safe” person. If we imagine a future society of such superhumans, it is also to the same degree a society very different from the values that structure our own. “They neither marry nor are given in marriage,” after all (Matt 22:30). For ethical and social reasons, such people are not the norm and cannot provide the norm.

Such does not, I can’t be clear enough, remove God from the equation: it simply changes the manner in which God is present in the process and results of prayer. God is not distantly, and dualistically, involved in hearing petitions and accepting or denying them like the head bureaucrat or like an ancient emperor: or at least, since that image was accessible to ancient people, it is one we have outgrown. Instead, the God who utterly transcends the cosmos is also utterly immanent to it, and it is “the very Spirit” that “intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words,” and “God, who searches hearts, knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God” (Rom 8:26-27).

That Spirit which is also our spirit, in other words, the life force of God himself in us, is the true source of prayer, of which all our prayers, whether performed by bodily rote or with psychic intention, are participant effulgence; and on some level, their success is the success of opening a channel for the Spirit in us to act on God’s behalf in the world, our making ourselves a conduit for providence, and on some level their failure represents the “groaning,” or the struggle of creation in childbirth of the true and future cosmos by metamorphosis from within rather than replacement from above (8:22-23).

Here, by rejecting a crudely literal portrait of providence and of intermediary assistance and resistance, we arrive at a more philosophically coherent and meaningful version: yes, God does in fact orchestrate that “all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose” (8:28)—not exclusively for them, but so that they may then be the conduits of God’s redemptive activities in the world. And prayer is one of the mechanisms, the vehicles, of that providential activity in the world: the more it changes us, the more it grows our spiritual and psychic capacities, the more it turns us out into the world both to perform spiritual and corporal acts of mercy and, perhaps, to manifest growing powers of synergy with the divine will for the universe.

Nor does such a view of prayer necessarily exorcise the gods, angels, and demons who contend over the fulfillment of our prayers from the picutre. It could still well be that specific, nameable beings of the cosmos are responsible for us, and fight with one another to answer prayer, even if the primary, contingent source of prayer’s efficacy is the potency of the individual as outlined above. Again, by rejecting the crudely literal, a new vista is opened in which such beings contend not in outer space or in the upper atmosphere (though, of course, such regions may well know gods we know not and can only imagine), but in which the divine intelligences meet us on the imaginal plane, which touches the material precisely in the depths of our own consciousness. Here is to be found the meeting place of the classical demonology of the Church and the modern psychotherapeutic tendency to identify demons with mental illness, disorder, and psychological complexes of all kinds. For what final difference is there, truthfully, between some distorted, darkling thing that inhabits the psychic wastes of one’s mind and wanders, should the crevice open at the back of its cavern, into the waking mind of the possessed, rendering the mind tenebrous, the body broken, and perhaps all kinds of phenomena we find difficult to explain in orbit, encounters of the third kind that raise hairs on our necks—and a demon?

Conversely, why else would prayer, a verbal and psychic effort, be efficacious in expelling such a thing—and why, for that matter, would psychology be too?—unless it were something that exists in the psychic, imaginal realm, and achieves material instantiation only rarely and with tremendous difficulty?¹ Is this not, after all, where jinn live?² Why else would it be, too, that reports of demons and instances of demonic possession are most common in regions and populations afflicted by profound, and profoundly material, traumas: a Roman-ruled Judea and Galilee where Legions possess demoniacs in the graveyard wastes, a colonially devastated Africa or Asia? Hungry ghosts lurk on battlefields and in houses haunted by intergenerational sins and profound tragedies; demons roam deserts and liminal, watery chaos; angry ancestral spirits terrorize communities experiencing forced transitions from traditional ways of life. What superficially seem like competing answers about demons and the demonic are not so incompatible if we think about them deeply, and we admit the reality of the psychic and the spiritual alongside the physical, material, and historical.

Likewise, I suspect that angelic beings might have some difficulty coming in answer to prayer, or coming into the material world, apart from the very labor of prayer itself. After all, so says Gabriel to Daniel, “I have come because of your words” (Dan 10:12, italics mine). The angel only comes to Jesus once he is sweating great drops of blood (Lk 22:43-44; admittedly, of questionable originality to the text of Luke). There is an apotropaic quality to prayer that keeps demons away; there is also a theurgic quality to prayer, by which the invocation of heavenly beings with words and by ritual activity in some sense makes them present in a material world where they otherwise are too big to fit. When the petitioner at Jewish prayer blesses, “In the Name of the LORD: May the angel Michael be at your right / And the angel Gabriel at your left / And in front of you the angel Uriel / and behind you the angel Rafael / And above your head the Shekhinah,” this is not the expression of a wish, or at least a mere wish: it is a reality that one seeks to create by speaking the words forth with intention (Heb: kavvanah).³

There is finally no meaningful antipathy between a theory of religion which sees religion as a human response to the experience of the numinous sacred irrupting into the consciousness of the individual from outside and which sees religion as the outward projection and indeed creation of the sacred by the ritual efforts, spellbinding myths, and focused consciousness of the worshiper, for each describes the relationship from different points of view. The angels illuminate us in our prayers so that we, by our prayers, can create a space for their light to shine in the world, a path by which they can influence the world providentially. God creates us so that we can return the favor. This is the dignity afforded to the human being that, although he is created “a little lower than the gods” or “angels” (Ps 8:5) in the order of creation, is nevertheless the recapitulated source and center of the whole created order, for it is to the human being that God has ultimately ceded the providential agency of prayer as part and parcel of his royal priesthood, his eucharistic anthropology, which lifts the material world back up to God as a sweet-smelling offering of praise, an incense more delectable than any offered at Olympia or Jerusalem.

I do not expect this answer to be fully satisfactory. I’m not even sure it fully satisfies me. What I want, after all, is for God to do something, to come down from heaven with the lightning strike of glory and set things to right, to save children from death and to reunite long lost friends and family and lovers and to punish the wicked and save the suffering, put-upon righteous. And I don’t want to suggest that it’s anyone else’s job to fix the universe: I don’t even want it to be my job. It’s too big for me, and collective action these days seems to move too slowly for it to be a job even for all of us together.

I do believe that God knows us and loves us, each and every one, in the specificity of who we are, and that God is present to us, with us, and for us in our sufferings, and identifies with us as his beloved and his children. I do believe that whether God answers prayer or not, God is there with everyone at prayer, Christian or not. So are the angels and the saints and the prophets—all of them, each and every one.

But some account has to be given that can resolve the scandal created by the relatively simple fact of our experience, that prayer goes unanswered all the time, that claims to answered prayer are often self-fulfilling prophecies that are circular in their justification, and that prayers especially for justice and provision and rectification are so often seemingly ignored, as well as that the union of the God of the Bible with the God of the philosophers raises natural questions about the efficacy of prayer. Some account also has to be given that can leave room for the real possibility of the miraculous and the uncanny, the paranormal or super-natural or superhuman aspect of reality, which is adumbrated already by the ordinary Christian at prayer, which has as its most quotidian afterglow simply the change in consciousness and moral disposition created by the act of prayer in the body and mind of the individual, and at its most extreme and unusual and spectacular might well look like miracles. To my mind, this is what remains when one accounts for those parameters.

Perhaps I should close by saying, though, that hefty theorization of prayer serves some purposes; but it is no substitute for the act itself. Like any of the most fundamentally human things—food, exercise, comedy, being outdoors, reading, sex, and so on—at a certain point, you have to stop reading and writing and talking about it, and eventually just do it. There’s a similar sentiment expressed in South and East Asian writings on meditation: over-theorization of meditation, meditative technique, and meditative goals ends up being a distraction from meditation itself, which is the relatively simple act of sitting, leaning into your own awareness, and becoming gradually absorbed in active contemplation. It’s possible to read too many self-help books, too many dating advice books, too many cookbooks, and in the process, to become in a way divided from the thing by the conceptual apparatus of the thing. This is also true of God. To experience God and to talk about “God” are different, and the latter can get in the way of the former.

In a similar way, I’d contend that the most basic way to figure out whether prayer works is to experiment. Pick a rule of prayer, in conversation with a trusted elder if you have one and feel it necessary, stick to it, and see how it goes, what it gives you and where it takes you. And while you’re at it, pray for me, a sinner.

Conclusum

1. I cannot resist mentioning a forthcoming volume, Dunja Rašić, The Nightfolk: Ibn ‘Arabi Behind the Veil of Night (Berkeley: UNC Press, 2025), in this vein.

2. Amira El-Zein, Islam, Arabs, and the Intelligent World of the Jinn (Syracuse University Press, 2017); Robert Lebling, Legends of the Fire Spirits: Jinn and Genies from Arabia to Zanzibar (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2011); Rašić, Bedeviled: Jinn Doppelgangers in Islam and Akbarian Sufism (New York: SUNY, 2024).

3. Martin Buber, though he disputes that kavana requires the miraculous, nevertheless writes that there is “a kavana of giving,” one that “binds worlds to one another and rules over the mysteries,” that “pours itself into the thirsty distance,” “gives itself to infinity,” and that “Its path is creation, and the word before all other forms of creation. From time immemorial speech was for the Jewish mystic a rare and awe-inspiring thing. A characteristic theory of letters existed which dealt with them a with the elemnets of the world and with their intermixture as with the inwardness of reality. The word is an abyss through which the speaker strides…He who knows the secret melody that bears the inner into the outer, who knows the holy song that merges the lonely, shy letters into the singing of the spheres, he is full of the power of God, ‘and it is as if he created heaven and earth and all worlds anew.’” Buber, Hasidism and Modern Man, ed. and trans. Maurice Friedman (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 106-107.