The selfish desire of hopeful prayer

While waiting for a bus, Henna Cundill contemplates how prayer transforms the uncomfortable into imaginative hope.

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

A woman leans against the glass of a bus shelter while waiting, she clasps a bag.

“Try praying” suggests the bus as it pulls up. Ironic, really, given how much of my life I’ve spent in this draughty shelter, earnestly praying that a late bus would just turn up. Well, here is a bus, but it is not the one I’m waiting for. However, its slogan has lodged in my mind. Perhaps I should pray anyway, just to pass the time? What would I pray for right now, beyond the bus I want? Are any of my other prayer requests something that God is likely to countenance? I’m all too well aware that there are some things on my personal wish-list that the Almighty is definitely not going to grant.

In 2022 a Church of England survey found that nearly half the population (48 per cent) claims to pray, and the numbers are apparently even higher among the 18-24 age bracket. In the breakdown of the statistics, it can be seen that the poll respondents prayed for all the ‘right’ things – for peace, forgiveness, guidance, and for those in need. So far, so pious. Would any of us really admit to a pollster that we pray for the other, slightly more selfish things – a convenient parking space, good weather on a holiday? Such prayers are suitably benign, but probably also pointless. God, surely, has better things to do. We still pray them though. Well, I do anyway. Maybe you are better than me, but I’ll go ahead and admit to all those little, probably pointless prayers – prayers revealing that inwardly I’m quite selfish, and a bit of a narcissist, a girl who just wants an easy life and an on-time bus.

Perhaps the uncomfortable truth here is that a lot of prayer is born out of a desire for ease and comfort. Prayers for peace, forgiveness, guidance, and even prayers for others in need can be no less a response to a sense of discomfort or discontent than the prayers to get me out of this draughty bus shelter. But such desires are entirely natural. After all, as humans we are programmed to maintain homeostasis. Within that, most functions can happen internally – so when the individual body is too hot, it sweats; when the body is too cold, it shivers (like me in this shelter right now). It’s all about control.

But sometimes the discomforts are emotional, and we are dependent on external factors to maintain or regain our homeostatic sense of peace – factors that are out of our (or any person’s) control. To pray is to make a cognitive response to that realisation, to seek some input from a higher power. There is nothing I can do to make the bus come on time, and in the absence of peace, forgiveness, guidance, or when contemplating the multifarious sicknesses and struggles of my fellow human beings – well, I realise that maybe damn near everything is out of my control. God, can you do something about this? It’s making me uncomfortable.

Oddly enough, even the most well-known of Christian prayers, the so-called “Lord’s Prayer” (Our Father, who art in Heaven… etc. etc.) makes no bones about acknowledging this. Part way through, like hungry children who loiter in the kitchen whilst mother is cooking dinner, unashamed the pray-ers cry out: “Give us this day our daily bread.” It is a daily moment of divinely sanctioned gimme, gimme, gimme. My selfish inner narcissist loves that bit.

I’m not generally praying for bread; I have bread. But to me the bread is a metaphor for all my inner needs and appetites. I think one of the early Christian writers, Augustine of Hippo, grasped this uncomfortable truth also. Reflecting on the brutal honesty of the prayers which are found in the Bible’s Book of Psalms, he wrote: “Your desire is your prayer, your prayer is your desire.” Augustine was not advocating that such desires should be uncritically indulged, but that pray-ers should be honest enough to verbalise their desires, to acknowledge them before God, and in that way allow sunshine to become the best disinfectant.

There is, perhaps, no bleaker statement than the words, “I haven’t got a prayer.” Where there is prayer, there is imagination, and imagination is a sign of hope.

How interesting that the Lord’s Prayer acknowledges this basic human need – this need to say, “God, life is uncomfortable, and I don’t like this feeling.” I wonder about the other 52 per cent of the poll respondents, the ones who said that they didn’t pray. What on earth do they do with their appetites, with their difficulties, or with their sense of malaise? Because I think Augustine was right: prayer is all about desire, and desire is about hope for satiety – be it physical, emotional, or cognitive. Prayer is anticipating that our desires can or might be met by someone or something, out there somewhere, and allowing ourselves to imagine how that might come to be. There is, perhaps, no bleaker statement than the words, “I haven’t got a prayer.” Where there is prayer, there is imagination, and imagination is a sign of hope.

It takes a bit of courage, sometimes, to admit to what we imagine, what we secretly hope for. It might be a world of peace and prosperity for all, but it might also be for the demise of an enemy or for a successful and stress-free life. Psychologists Ann and Barry Ulanov observe that in this way, all prayer is confession, even the prayers where we are asking for stuff. By coming face-to-face with God, we also have to come face-to-face with ourselves, including our selfishness and narcissistic longing.

So, have I got the courage to verbalise my personal wish-list? To take this idle moment and allow my imagination to present God with all my deepest, darkest desires? Well, it sounds like it might be good for me, whether God is listening or not. Prayer, it seems, is an opportunity for some gritty self-reflection and deep personal growth. So why not? Here goes:

“Dear Heavenly Father…

…Oh, never mind, my bus is here.

Amen.”

Article

Belief

Creed

30 September 2024

4 min read

Are miracles real?

In miracles, as in much of life, you see what you're looking for.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A woman sees her reflection in a mirror and hold a finger up.

Ivan Lapyrin on Unsplash.

Recently, I heard a remarkable story about a friend of mine who happens to be a vicar. He had been diagnosed with a serious cancer, and the diagnosis was bleak. He was preparing himself for a difficult few months, readying himself, and his parish, for the end before too long. His body was reacting poorly to chemotherapy, and the prospects did not look good. However, he continued to try to get a balance of rest and work through the tiredness, praying when he could - little and often - but without too much discomfort.

A short while ago, during a routine visit to the hospital to receive the results of a scan on how the cancer was progressing, something puzzling happened.

The surgeon showed him the scan related to the original diagnosis. He asked, "Can you see the tumour?" My friend replied, "Yes, of course, it's right there," pointing to the black mass. The surgeon then showed him another scan.

He asked again, "This is the most recent scan we’ve just taken; can you see it on this one?" My friend peered closely into the scan and said, "Hmm. I'm not sure I can." The surgeon then responded, puzzled, that somehow, between the two scans, the tumour seemed to have disappeared.

He added: “To be honest, in my world, we don't really have an explanation for things like this. But I suspect in yours, you do.”

Besides being delighted for my friend, since hearing the story, I've pondered what it means. Of course, miracles are by their nature rare and we cannot automatically predict them, My friend was in the kind of church that doesn't routinely demand God for miracles but simply carried on gently praying that somehow God would be with the vicar in his struggles, hardly daring to hope that the cancer would in fact vanish.

Was it a miracle? Or was there some other explanation? It seems to me that the answer you give to that question depends on the framework you bring to it. If you are a believer in a God who might do this kind of thing from time to time, and consider that such things can and do happen occasionally, not regulated by the usual course of cause and effect, but by some extra dimension of reality unseen to us and immeasurable by the methods of science, you will probably simply accept it as one of those occasional interruptions to the normal course of things. And then give thanks to God and rejoice with my friend at this sign of God’s goodness.

Of course, it raises the question of why this cancer was healed and others aren’t, but that takes us into other territory, which I’ve examined before in relation to Donald Trump’s narrow escape. Would we rather a world in which such things as this never happened, and my friend’s cancer had taken its usual deadly course? Or a world where just every now and again, something delightful and unanticipated happens, like stumbling on a gloriously unexpected view of rolling hills and a dramatic sunset at the end of a routine walk on a summer’s evening?

Belief in miracles doesn’t mean an irrational rejection of science and its benefits in favour of an entirely random world. it simply means an acknowledgement of the limits of our reasoning.

An honest doctor like the one treating my friend, might recognise that the methods of medical science, for all its brilliance, value and wisdom, on which we all depend so much, has to shrug its shoulders at this point, realising that it doesn’t have the categories to explain it, reverting to a kind of agnosticism. A more thoroughgoing materialist would say: “Of course we know there are no such things as miracles, so that’s the one thing we know it is not. There must be some other explanation, and science will one day discover why such mysterious things happen.”

What we believe about such things is determined not by the self-evident ‘facts’, the bald evidence of what is before us, but by our pre-conceived mental map of the world, our framework of faith, what we think the world is, and what, or who we think God is, (if he exists at all). We are all believers in the end – the difference is what we believe in.

Belief in miracles doesn’t mean an irrational rejection of science and its benefits in favour of an entirely random world. it simply means an acknowledgement of the limits of our reasoning, open to the possibility of an extra dimension of enchantment that occasionally shows its face, and that there is a bigger world out there than we with our small minds and spirits are able to comprehend.

GK Chesterton once put it like this. "Somehow or other an extraordinary idea has risen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles except them only in connection with some dogma. The fact is quite the other way. The believers in miracles accept them, rightly or wrongly, because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them, rightly or wrongly, because they have a doctrine against them."

In miracles, as in much of life, you see what you're looking for.