Gonzaga Witness

Issue date: 4/28/09 Section: Faith

What exactly is prayer, and what is the point of it? Supposedly we do it all the time, but do we really know what it is or what we are doing? There are a myriad of questions revolving around prayer that have been spoken about for centuries. What is prayer? Do we actually cause anything to happen through prayer? Are there dangers in prayer? What is the best kind of prayer: individual, communal, pre-made, spontaneous?
One suggestion that C. S. Lewis gives for a definition of prayer is an attempt at union with God. By this, he does not mean unity in the sense that we are trying to become gods or be God. Rather, he is speaking of a unity of wills. In his Letter to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer Lewis says, "Where there is prayer at all we may suppose that there is some effort, however feeble, towards…the union of wills." But what exactly do we mean by attempting to transform our wills to God's? I think there is a serious danger here of putting on a mask of holiness in an attempt to be more holy. Of course, there is something to be said regarding the old phrase "Fake it 'til you make it," but we need to make sure that in prayer, we are not using holiness as a costume that we can take off when we are done praying. Lewis reminds Malcolm in his letters that "the ordinate frame of mind is one of the blessings we must pray for, not a fancy-dress we must put on when we pray." What is the point of putting on a mask of holiness in front of God when he can see right through it? Part of the purpose of prayer, in my understanding, is to humble oneself in the face of God.
I like the comment that Malcolm adds from his wife in one of his letters to Lewis. She says prayer is "irksome." Indeed it is irksome and it must be irksome if we are to strip down to our naked souls in front of God. Lewis reminds us that we will always feel a certain "reluctance to pray" because it makes us uncomfortable to "lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us," and what is in us is filthy by our very nature. I'm sure every person reading this article can admit that he or she quite often, or at least every so often, feels an unwillingness or even an aversion to prayer. I, for one, feel it almost every time I sit down to pray. If you have not felt this unwillingness, then I say you are an extraordinarily lucky person and possibly a saint. But a reluctance to prayer seems, to me, perfectly normal considering the vulnerability and surrender that comes with the humbling experience of prayer.

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