The Soul at Prayer

Abstract

Wittgenstein lists prayer as a distinct language-game, but leaves to others the investigation of its character. Formulating it as “conversation with God” is correct but potentially unhelpful, in part because it presupposes that we can understand what God is independently of knowing what it is to pray. But by situating the language-game in the context of our human form of life we make better progress. The discussion of this paper, the focus of which is Christian prayer, first reminds us of what it is to have a soul life—i.e., a life in which hope, conscience, and vitality are interpenetrating elements. It next sketches a more distinctly Christian anthropology in which our lives our understood as marred by pride, lack of trust and openness, and ingratitude. Against this backdrop, prayer can be understood for what it is as the soul coming out of its proud retreat, speaking in its own voice, owning its distortions, acknowledging its gratitude, and pleading its true desires. And God can be understood as (inter alia) that to which prayer is principally offered.

1. Introduction

What is Christian prayer? What is essential to the very idea of it? One answer might be: “The Christian understands prayer as conversation with God—with Father, Son, Holy Spirit—and, in a related sense sometimes also with Mary, the saints and angels—in which help is asked for, wrongs confessed, thanks are given, adoration and invocation and contemplation undertaken.” And this much, perhaps, is true. Even so, the answer has its limitations. An unbeliever who knows neither what “prayer” nor what “God” means is unlikely to be much helped by coming to know that “X” means “conversation with Y”. And, as will be discussed later, the answer may mislead if taken for reductive analysis—i.e., if it has us imagine that the meaning of “God” may be adequately grasped independently of, and so actually help deliver, an understanding of what it is to pray. Furthermore—and as elaborated in the Wittgensteinian literature on prayer considered below—what we might want to know is what it so much as means to have conversation with God or to petition or thank him. For, unless “conversation” is typically used in an identical sense in “conversation with the neighbour” and “conversation with God”, talk of the former will be apt to only disguise our lack of, or even confound, a reflective understanding of what it means to pray. If these concerns are on point—and the case for them will be made later on—then we must find some other way to elucidate what it is to pray.

In what follows the approach I take to elucidate the Christian concept of prayer derives from Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Wittgenstein himself, we should note, had little to say about the matter. In his early 1914–1916 Notebooks we find the conceptual non-starter “To pray is to think about the meaning of life”, and the equation of that meaning with God (Wittgenstein 1961, p. 73, 11 June 1916). In a 1933 lecture, we find him making some very cursory remarks on what it is for a petitionary prayer to be answered (Stern et al. 2016, p. 321, 1 May 1933). Later on, in §23 of his Philosophical Investigations, he gives a list of 24 different “language games” which go from giving and obeying orders, describing objects reporting events … making a joke … solving a maths problem … through to asking, thanking, cursing, greeting and, finally, praying (Wittgenstein 1958). The disparate conceptual characters of some of these linguistic practices is unpacked in his book, but he does not get to prayer. Taking prayer as a particular kind of language game has, however, since the work of D Z Phillips (1965), proved a fruitful avenue for philosophical research on faith by those working in a Wittgensteinian tradition. It provides us too with a method with which to answer the question with which this paper began—a method which will now be spelled out.

2. A Wittgensteinian Method

With his well-known comparison of language use to a game, Wittgenstein (1958, §23) directs our attention to what we do when engaged in linguistic activities. A word’s meaning is not, he suggests, often happily thought of as an object with which it is associated (Wittgenstein 1958, §1). Instead, it is what is grasped when we develop our living appreciation of what are and are not legitimate ways to use the word—just as we learn chess not by associating the pieces with objects but instead by learning how to correctly move them (Wittgenstein 1958, §31). And, as with games, our mastery of their rules is often achieved not by learning a list of them but instead by being shown, whilst we are immersed in the game, what are and are not appropriate moves. So too, we may note, the child is typically not told “praying is conversation with God”; instead, she is simply shown how to pray1. If she gets the hang of this, we may say, to develop the game analogy, that she has now “learned the rules of the game”. We philosophers, however, who are more interested in developing our reflective appreciation of what it is to pray, may further our interest by making explicit this “game’s” rules. … And yet, at some point, our analogy with games will break down—our word rule books, or dictionaries, are after all as much descriptive as prescriptive of correct word use. (Dictionaries may sometimes need to be corrected, that is, following our observations of how people actually use words.) It is also by no means straightforward to provide rules (such as lists of necessary and sufficient conditions) for the use of many terms. A language would after all be much impoverished if its sundry concepts were not largely sui generis but instead were neatly explicable by the marshalling of some other set of concepts. And furthermore, our sense of how to use our words and how to understand the rules for their use is itself contextually sensitive in ways which are themselves not readily codifiable. Even so, we may, by honouring paradigm uses, by appreciating the contrasts between our uses of different terms, and by describing the human contexts in which our words find application, come to a better appreciation of what Wittgenstein called our terms’ “grammar”—i.e., come to a clearer reflective grasp of their correct vs. their incorrect use (Wittgenstein 1974, §82). If theology is in the business of explicating the true sense of our religious concepts, then theology, Wittgenstein suggests, is a grammatical pursuit. (“Theology as grammar.” (Wittgenstein 1958, §373)).

Mention was just made of our need to be immersed in life’s contexts to develop our practical understand the meaning of our words. (See also: the “speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life” (Wittgenstein 1958, §23). “How words are understood is not told by words alone. (Theology.)” (Wittgenstein 1967, §144)). Our philosophical understanding of what it is to pray will itself then reflectively retrieve such contexts. We come to see what it means to pray not only by recovering the rules underlying prayer’s practice, but by seeing what place prayer essentially occupies within the life of the believer, what the predicaments are to which it is a response, and what the instincts are to which it gives expression.

An important difference here between what I am calling a Wittgensteinian approach to understanding prayer on the one hand, and that of a believer living out her faith on the other, is their opposite direction of travel. The Christian, that is, aims to illuminate the puzzles of human life—our struggles, relationships, foibles, terrors, joys, and pains—in a divine light. She refers all her joys and predicaments to this divine source, placing God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit at the centre of everything she does, and using its light to understand everything she finds precious, and everything she struggles with. To do this, on her religious story, is to reveal humanity in its fullest: to make maximal sense of our ethical struggles, our love lives, our deaths, and the lives before them. But our Wittgensteinian philosopher, aiming to illuminate the meaning of precisely those acts and terms which the believer presupposes, travels here in a reverse trajectory, referring us to (inter alia) our human struggles so as to make sense of our religious acts.

Now it has sometimes proved tempting to think that the contours of the form of life within which prayer essentially has its place can be adequately articulated in such affectless terms as “practices” or “activities”. And yet (as Heidegger also taught us), different moods disclose different worlds; our sundry sensibilities have inscribed within them an aliveness or deadness to disparate matters of value: “The world of the happy is quite another than that of the unhappy” (Wittgenstein 1922, §6.43). And prayer, as we will see later in more detail, is an activity situated in a distinctly affective context. For now, I will just briefly exemplify this with reference to a couple of remarks from Wittgenstein’s own life: (1) In 1937—in a characteristic reflection highlighting not only the centrality of practice to a living understanding of a thing, but also his own unhappiness—he reflects on how, whilst he perhaps rejects much in Christian teaching, he may not really know what it is he’s rejecting, since to do so with understanding would require first living differently than he lives: “I am not good and not happy. I am not saved. And thus how can I know what I would envision as the only acceptable image of a world order if I lived… completely differently. I can’t judge that. After all, another life shifts completely different images into the foreground, necessitates completely different images. Just like trouble teaches prayer. … But if one lives differently, one speaks differently. With a new life one learns new language games.” (Wittgenstein 2003, p. 169). The connection between inner tumult and prayer is one Wittgenstein draws again later in 1948 when writing to Norman Malcolm that “I have occasionally queer states of nervous instability about which I’ll only say that they’re rotten while they last, and teach one to pray.”(Malcolm 1958, p. 74). (2) During his trips to Norway (between 1913 and 1950 he spent perhaps a couple of years there, largely in the hut that was built for him at Skjolden) he reads the Bible, fasts, and prays (Kallenberg 2018). He is often troubled and, despite lacking fellowship and the guidance of a mother church, finds in his troubles a significant impetus to pray. What troubles him about himself is, in particular, his pride, and he is especially wary of making that step, so central to Christian faith, from self-reliance to vulnerable acknowledgement of dependency. Thus, in 1946, he writes: “I cannot kneel to pray, because it’s as though my knees were stiff. I am afraid … of my own dissolution … should I become soft.” (Wittgenstein 1980, p. 63).

In summary, the method taken up in the following to answer the question “What in essence is Christian prayer?” involves our becoming acquainted with the grammatical rules governing prayer’s practice. To become acquainted thus is to become clearer about what it does and does not make sense to say when praying and about praying. But such an enquiry involves no mere tabulation of decontextualised rules. Instead it requires us to become alive to the contexts in which prayer makes sense, contexts which involve fundamental human struggles. To add now a further methodological note: as John Cottingham (2014, chap. 1) persuasively argues, we do not do well to simply assume that the sense of religious practices and the human struggles to which they respond are ably characterised in non-literary, affectless prose. Talk of “philosophical analysis” is apt to conjure up an image of a detached quasi-scientific enquiry, as if emotion and imagination were only ever obstacles to rather than handmaidens of a clear reflective understanding. That, however, was never Wittgenstein’s approach and, as should become evident in aspects of what follows, it will not be ours here either.

3. Conversation with God?

To pray is, the believer considers, to converse with God. Thus we sometimes hear: “Put simply, prayer is communicating with God as you would with a friend.” This perhaps is a sound enough propaedeutic to help a novice overcome their intimidation and fears of “getting it wrong”. The emphasis on conversation also highlights the essentially personal, relational, nature of prayer. How to understand this relationality is something to which we must return later; for now, let us just note both that the idea of prayer is the idea of the soul’s converse not with itself, but instead with what in some sense is considered its source and ground, and that the form of this discourse is the personal address. But as a reflective explication of what it means to pray, to someone unfamiliar with it, the idea that prayer is “conversation with God” is unhelpful. If a believer is asked to explain prayer to a non-initiate, it is, as Dewi Phillips writes in The Concept of Prayer, “not enough for him to say that praying is talking to God, adoring Him, confessing to Him, thanking Him, and making requests to Him, since what the enquirer wants to know is what it means to do any of these things.” (Phillips 1965, p. 2).

The non-believer knows what it is to talk to a human being, but not yet what it is to talk to God, and it is perverse to imagine we might just export our understanding of conversation from the personal to the divine context. (Compare: “Surely √−1 must mean just the same in relation to −1, as √ means in relation to 1! […] This means nothing at all.” (Wittgenstein 1958, Part 2, §X).) What Peter Winch says of petition generalises also to prayer’s non-petitionary forms: ““Making requests of x” … is not a function which retains the same sense whether “God” or some name or description of a human being is substituted for ‘x’.”

(Winch 1977, p. 207)

Why is all this so? Because I can converse with both Charlie and Bill together, but not with Charlie and God. Because there is no such thing as lying to God, or asking Him to pass the salt. Because I cannot be mistaken about who it is I am conversing with when I am praying. Because there is no such thing as getting, or failing to get, God’s attention. Because talk of God the Father’s, or the Holy Spirit’s, mouth and ears does not amount to anything. Because the criteria for being understood when talking with Charlie—i.e., what he now says and does—are not met by God when he is the object of my address. And because there is nevertheless no such thing as God not listening or not understanding; God neither fulfils nor fails to fulfil the ordinary criteria for understanding my request (Moore 1988, p.185ff).

Furthermore, to return now to our non-believer, what he does not yet know—let us imagine—is what it means to talk of, let alone to, God. If we could first know what it means to talk of God, then—we might think—it would be more straightforward to know what it means to talk to God. But as the Wittgensteinian Thomist Herbert McCabe put it:

People feel that if only they could be a bit clearer about who or what God is they would see more sense in praying to him. Now I am afraid it is going to have to be the other way round. The problem of God is the problem of prayer. … I am saying that maybe we understand God as “whatever makes sense of prayer”. I would say: we understand God as the other end of the personal relationship which is prayer. (McCabe 1987, p. 217)

We shall return later to the conceptual relation of “prayer” and “God”. For now, though, let us take the lead from Phillips, Winch, and McCabe, and lay out the groundwork for our own positive analysis of prayer by beginning at the near rather than the far end of that conversation which it is, namely with the human being as brought under the concept of “soul”.

4. Soul Life

Marcus Aurelius, in his Meditations (book IV, XXXI), records Epictetus declaring “you are a little wisp of soul dragging a corpse about with you”. Wittgenstein also notes such a conception—albeit to dismiss it. Finding our souls to be nothing like physical organs, it can be tempting, he says, to style them “abstract” rather than “concrete”. But these terms will “never shed proper light because they suggest something like “solid” & “gaseous”—which are comparable. We want something not comparable like “chair” “permission to sit in a chair”; “railway” & “railway accident”. If I restricted use of “soul” to such phrases as “His soul is at rest” or “His soul is easily stirred”, you might say I’m denying that there is any soul: but you may mean by “Men have souls” simply that such propositions are true.” (Stern et al. 2016, pp. 318–19; May Term 1933).

In fact, however, there is a use of “soul” which references something “concrete”—namely its use for a human being. The King James Bible has “soul” for “nephesh” (Hebrew) and “psyche” (Greek) over 500 times, and in these uses typically intends a living person. We see this usage too in idioms such as “he was the only soul on the lonely hillside” or “230 souls went down with the ship” or “on that day about 3000 souls were added to the number of disciples” (Acts 2:41). And yet, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church also tells us, “‘soul’ also refers to the innermost aspect of man, that which is of greatest value in him” (CCC §363). In fact, we already see an interpenetration of these senses in the aforementioned idioms: we talk of 230 souls going down with the ship, and not of four or five souls standing before us in the supermarket queue, because we are, in speaking of a person qua soul, already considering them in a certain light. We are considering them, that is, specifically not just as a living being but as a being with a life—i.e., with a history, with a relationship to others and to a future, and with a vulnerability to death.

This sense of “soul” registers in the dozens of idioms in which the term figures, two of which were mentioned above in the above excerpt from Wittgenstein’s lecture. When the soul is that into which your eyes are windows, for example, what is then brought into view is your often concealed love and hope, fear, conscience, and shame. Your soulful glance or soulless eyes are those which betray your empathy and love or lack thereof. What is shown here are your feelings—but not any old feelings. If I bare or pour out my soul to you, I do not tell you of everyday pleasures or annoyances, but instead of what I am most ashamed about, what in my heart I allow myself to yearn for but fear to be ever unavailable, how I struggle to maintain hope, and so on. You then come to see who I really am—the fears behind the exterior assurance, the loneliness and need for affection drowned in a busy public life, the callousness behind a facade of respectability, the kindness or remorse hidden within a heart caught up in a life of vice. Or, to pick up now another soul idiom: when music stirs our souls, or when we say of a musician “he’s got soul”, what we have in mind is not any old, but deep, emotional expressivity. Especially in the inflection which “soul” talk receives in black America, soul music is expressive of a wisdom that comes from such suffering as has become at least partly transcended.

Talk of unquiet souls typically references our difficulties with love, hope, and conscience. To pray for a soul’s repose (“God rest her soul”; “may their souls, and all the souls of the faithful departed, rest in peace”) is to evoke an image of those you pray for as now freed from inward trouble. Soul searching involves us in the examination of conscience, and confessing is good for the soul (so we might say “by confessing his crime he lost his liberty but regained his soul.”). A shameful loss of dignity scars the soul (“Segregation is a blatant denial of the unity which we have in Christ. It substitutes an ‘I-It’ relationship for the ‘I-Thou’ relationship, and relegates persons to the status of things. It scars the soul and degrades the personality.” (Martin Luther King 1957)). But talk of a stain on the soul is talk of guilt rather than shame (“The stain … denotes a privation of the soul’s brightness in relation to its cause, which is sin.” (Aquinas 1920, I–II q.86 a.1 ad 3)). When we engage in soul-destroying work, though, it is our morale, our capacity for hope, that is damaged. A lost soul may either have lost morale or have become morally corrupt. When the soul is at a low ebb, the person lacks vitality; their life-giving germ has gone out; they will certainly not now be the life and soul of the party.

To summarise the above discussion, talk of the soul is talk of our in/capacity to hope, to love with a good heart, to remain alive to the fact of our transgressions, and to have life in us. The concept is, however, no mere disjunction of these; if it were, then there would be no point to it. Its meaning instead comes from it registering the interpenetration of hope, love, conscience, and inner life in our lives. In Psalm 23, King David sings “He leads me beside still waters, He restores my soul. He guides me in paths of righteousness for His name’s sake.” In singing thus he is not talking about two separate matters—the restoration of his soul life and being led in the paths of righteousness. To speak of confession being good for the soul is not simply to speak abstractly of a change of moral status, but to speak of the diminution of the pain of guilt and through that the recovery of hopefulness and vitality. In this way, we might say, the pusillanimous (pusilla anima: small soul) person once again becomes magnanimous (magna anima: large soul) (Barron 1998, p. 5).

5. A Christian Anthropology

We are working our way toward an understanding of prayer by starting at the near, human, side of that “conversation” in which it consists. (As will be seen later, part of the reward of doing so is our being able to found, rather than presuppose, a reflective understanding of that conversation’s far end, i.e., of God.) When we pray truly—“from the heart” as we say—it is our soul life which is given voice. (To talk of the soul at prayer is not to deny that we pray; it is to acknowledge that it is the human being qua hopeful or hopeless, etc. subject who prays.) Now, so far, our soul life has been described in terms which hopefully make sense to anyone alive to fundamental matters of conscience, hope, and love in human life. But to reveal the intelligibility of Christian prayer we must, I contend, place it against the more specific backdrop of a distinct vision of human life. That vision is given voice, one might say, in the contrite lament and joyful thanksgiving of lovable fallen sinners—where by “fallenness” is meant the basic dynamic of our sinfulness—our all-too human, defensively proud, and self-centred nature—mythically back-projected into the origins of our race (Genesis 3). And, in considering the grammar of “fallenness”, we quickly notice an intriguing feature which distinguishes it from certain of our secular ethical schemes. This is that pride—the deadliest of the deadly sins which, as an inflection of the soul, drives the others2—implicates not only their human relationships, but their attitude to their lives as a whole. (Considering this dual aspect to pride will also prove valuable later when we turn to the nature of that to which we pray).

The dismal features of human life met with in the first aspect of our fallenness have to do with how we treat others. We think ourselves special but take others for granted. We distort the moral fabric of our relationships by projecting our blameworthiness onto others, focusing on the speck in our brother’s eye but ignoring the beam in our own (Matthew 7:3). We can be quick to anger but slow to forgive. We imperfectly acknowledge our warranted guilt and shame. We say we love our friends and family but fail to so much as bring their distinct selves, their own most values and preferences, truly into view. The benefit of the doubt is sometimes nowhere to be seen. We are tetchy; we do not listen properly. Our hearts remain closed to others so long as we do not need them. Again and again, Old and New Testaments both warn against “a proud heart” (Proverbs 21:4) and promote instead its antithesis: “poverty of spirit” (Matthew 5:3).

The Christian concern with pride extends, however, into the matter of how we take for granted both our lives and the world as a whole. Pride’s second aspect concerns, that is, how, in subtle and not so subtle ways, we act and think as if we depend on nothing outside ourselves for our health, sanity, income, food, and shelter—for our very lives, for their beginnings and ongoing existence (Psalm 127:1–2). We forget that we cannot by ourselves bring a single atom of our flesh into being or sustain it in its existence. We push aside the thought that, even in our most self-determining active moments, we utterly depend on that which we cannot control—our bodies’ cooperation. The idea of our vulnerable dependence, that is, is quite forgotten (John 15:5). We take our days for granted as if we shall never die (Psalm 90:12), and indulge the illusion that in the future (but not now) we shall put right our wrongs (Isaiah 55:6). We chalk up our lives’ successes to our own agency whilst putting our failings onto the ledger of that which is outside our control. We construct flattering self-images and distort our moral vision by cleaving to grandiose visions of ourselves. We squander our talents (Ezekiel 16:17; Romans 12:6). A cynicism that pulls up the soul’s drawbridge triumphs over a hopefulness which, whilst rendering us vulnerable to the pains of loss, is required to bring us to life (1 Corinthians 13:7; Hebrews 12:15). We stifle the inner recognition of our true desires for fear of their fulfilment’s impossibility. We flee from the anxiety attendant on our recognition of our vulnerable dependency by indulging fantasies of self-dependence (Proverbs 3:5–6). We allow ourselves to know, at life-and-death moments, what most matters in our lives: humble pleasures which involve vulnerable loving connection. But then, when crisis passes, we go back to our bad habits. We imagine that we have far more control over our futures than we do, forgetting: that we “do not even know what will happen tomorrow”; that we are but “a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes”; to say “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.” (James 4:13–16).

As well as offering us a picture of human wretchedness, a Christian anthropology also offers us a conception of the infinite preciousness of human life. Understood religiously this amounts to our having the imago Dei within us: we are “made in the image of God” (Genesis 1:27). The implications of this, according to the Christian, are that we are to understand ourselves as astonishingly lovable centres of value with an infinite preciousness; another part is that, God being love itself, we are made to love (1 Peter 1:22). Whilst there is “no health in” those who aim at spiritual self-sustenance (Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer (1549); cp Paul’s Epistle to the Romans 7:18), and whilst a soul which is incurvatus in se (as Augustine and Luther have it—i.e., involuted, relating only to itself) is closed off to love, we are, when we come to love the good of the other for her own sake, when we give of ourselves out of ourselves, yet able to participate in the divine life. Furthermore the “gospel” or “good news” which the Christian proclaims contains at heart the idea that we are, despite our wretchedness, utterly loved: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son” (John 3:16); “we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.” (1 John 4:16).

For now, however, let us leave aside reference to God as coming too early in our argument, and focus instead on the sensibility which these remarks reveal. This sensibility is, we might note, one which Wittgenstein himself acknowledges, albeit that, in his pessimism, he tends to emphasise the despair and downplay the salvation3. And, in the analysis here on offer, what makes for the intelligibility of Christian prayer, what provides such prayer’s “conditions of possibility” if you like, is its occurring against the backdrop of such a sensibility. Against the backdrop, that is, of a form of life which is distinctly alive to both our wretchedness and our blessedness. Thus every Catholic mass, for example, involves the prayerful rehearsal of these spiritual dynamics to the end of vivifying them in the soul of the believer (The Roman Missal 2010).

6. The Soul at Prayer

Having clarified what is meant by “soul”, and outlined the Christian’s vision of the human condition, we are ready to say something of what it is for the Christian to pray. It is the person qua soul who prays, and when praying she is confessing—i.e., declaring with all the integrity and openness that she can muster—her particular condition. The person who prays, that is, prays out of a living understanding of herself as a lovable sinner, redeemable but not through her own merit—and in praying she offers expressive acknowledgement of her deepest desires, her helplessness, her guilt, and her joy. True prayer, we are told, is simple and expressive, and comes straight from the heart and soul, not only from the mind. (So-called “mental prayer” is not prayer which stems from the intellect or will; it is simply prayer that is unvoiced.) Prayer may be instinctual (some of Wittgenstein’s include “God give me strength! Amen!”; “God be with me!”; “The spirit be with me!” (McGuinness 1988, p. 221)) or rote (as in the repeated Jesus Prayer of the Orthodox (“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Have mercy on me, a sinner”) or the Hail Marys that largely make up the Catholic’s prayers of the Rosary). It cannot, however, be deliberative, for as Thérèse of Lisieux put it: “Prayer is a surge of the heart, it is a simple look towards Heaven, it is a cry of recognition and of love, embracing both trial and joy.” (Catholic Church 1994, §2558).

That true prayer, because it is the soul’s own discourse, is of necessity both humble and honest is emphasised in the Philokalia, i.e., in Orthodox Christianity’s collection of ancient spiritual writings: “Unless humility and love, simplicity and goodness regulate our prayer, this prayer—or rather, this pretence of prayer—cannot profit us at all.” (Palmer et al. 1986, p. 293; emphasis added). John Chrysostom, the fourth century Church Father, put it like this: “prayer… made in earnest… comes from an afflicted soul and from a contrite heart. This is the kind of prayer which mounts up to heaven.” (Chrysostom 1982, homily 5, §46; emphasis added). The parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector offered us by Luke (18:9–14) also makes clear the difference between bogus and sincere prayer: “He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt: “Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’” And Peter Winch noted the same theme in Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: “So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn’t come. Why wouldn’t they? … I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing…but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie—and He knowed it. You can’t pray a lie—I found that out.” (Winch 1966, p. 56).

The conceptual requirement for genuine prayer to be humble shows itself too in the adoption, in certain prayer, of a humble pose. Internal to the very idea of kneeling to pray, that is, is that such kneeling helps mobilise, or enacts, this requisite attitude of humility and devotion in the praying subject. Wittgenstein was wrong to write “What helps in praying is not the kneeling, but one kneels” (Wittgenstein 2003, p. 191; 19 February 1937), but nearer the mark when (as quoted above) he confessed: “I cannot kneel to pray, because it’s as though my knees were stiff. I am afraid … of my own dissolution … should I become soft.” For prayer, being in part the inwards practice of existential humility, as such requires that we relinquish the proud fantasy of being able independently to sustain ourselves4.

Now prayer may be characterised with reference to what we might (following Wittgenstein 1958, §664) call its “surface grammar”—in terms, that is, of its seemingly disparate forms of praise, adoration, thanksgiving, petition, confession, and invocation. What this risks overlooking, however, is the existential character of prayer which is revealed by the unity amongst these forms when it comes to prayer’s depth grammar. For the claim here on our conceptual table is that what makes intelligible all and any these sundry forms is the sinful condition of the soul that prays in any of them. In short, it is because I have bent my soul out of shape by taking my life, and others, and the world, for granted, by trying to live too much on my own terms, by cooling to love, by indulging an unhealthy pride, that it now makes sense to pray in all such ways. Thus the one who prays acknowledges all of this: when she praises (not now herself but instead) her Maker; when she shows contrition before Him (for her soul-distorting pride); when she offers thanks to Him (rather than takes her life for granted); when she (lives not in mindless unloving isolation but instead) invokes His Spirit; when in her petition she acknowledges that she will need external aid if she is to achieve what, for better or worse, she confesses she truly wants. The very same words, then, may sometimes be described as petition, invocation, praise, adoration, confession. We see this in the Jesus Prayer beloved of the Eastern churches: “Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Here we have invocation, the practice of humility, confession, petition, and adoration all in one.

Let us summarise the argument so far. The question we have been addressing is “What is it for the Christian to pray?” The approach we have taken up looked at the rules of the language game of praying, revealed the contrasts of it with other linguistic practices, and discerned its intelligibility-conferring context of life. That prayer is essentially “conversation with God” was not denied. Even if talk of God is delusory, the concept of prayer is still the concept of conversation with Him. (Even if unicorns do not exist, the concept of a unicorn is still the concept of a horse with a large pointed horn protruding from its forehead.) Even so, the differences between prayer and ordinary conversation make reference to prayer analytically unhelpful. (The reference to God here will also shortly be argued to be similarly unhelpful.) What, however, proved more fruitful to the analysis was instead a recovery of the meaning of talk of our “soul life”—namely, an understanding of ourselves as beings who struggle to hope, to love with a good heart, remain alive to the facts of our transgressions, and to have life in us. This picture of human life was supplemented with a more distinctly Christian anthropology which focused both on our lovability and on the ways that our “fallenness” or existential pride bends our souls out of shape. Prayer’s intelligibility then rests on our prideful nature in something like the way that the piano tuner’s occupation is only intelligible given that pianos regularly go out of tune.

7. God—To Whom Prayers Are Offered

It is time to come to prayer’s object, namely to God. It is, after all, God to whom even the unbeliever sometimes cries out in desperation when fearing for the life of his desperately sick child. It is God, too, to whom thanks are offered for good fortune (“Thank God!”) including the fortune of being alive at all. And it is God who is praised and revered (in that attitude the Hebrews called “The fear of the Lord”) when we relinquish our self-satisfied, centre-of-the-universe, attitude. Above, however, I wrote that too ready a reference to God will be unhelpful to the philosophical analysis of prayer, one mystery being unpacked by reference to another. (And even the truly faithful, let alone the unbeliever, takes “God” for the name of a mystery, a mysterious “I am that I am” (Exodus 3:14).) Since then, however, the Wittgensteinian analysis of prayer as a movement of the soul has hopefully done something to demystify it. The hope then arises that this analysis may in turn shed some light on the nature of prayer’s object.

To this end, it will prove useful to elaborate a contrast between a character who shall be called the “theist” and another styled the “believer”. (“Theist” is to get its sense here from its contrast not with “atheist” or “deist” but instead with “believer”.) The theist thinks that it is because he first knows what God is that he can understand what it means, and why it is right, to thank, plead to, and praise Him. He thinks, that is, that his understanding of the proper use of “God” precedes and paves the way: for an intelligible disposition to pray, for intelligibly experiencing and giving voice to his gratitude for life, and for the meaningful sinfulness of existential pride. He may even go so far as to think that there could be no such thing as a meaningful gratitude for life itself, or for the cool spring water found on a long hot dry walk in the hills—or, for that matter, a meaningful hatred for how one’s life is going—unless there were someone to whom such attitudes were directed. The believer, by contrast—and our discussion here is to the end of making out the intelligibility of the believer’s stance—thinks that if you want to know what “God” means, then understand that He is that to whom one inter alia offers prayers and existential gratitude, and that which is wronged when one is caught up in existential pride. The believer finds her way to belief in and through such acts and attitudes; she does not take a living faith to involve prior assent to the existence of “a deity” followed by the direction toward that “deity” of prayers and gratitude. (We might imagine too that whereas the theist takes the creation story as an explanation of the world’s existence, the believer is instead involved in bringing all of nature under the concept of, or seeing nature as, creation.)

Above I quoted McCabe—who, I suggest, is not a theist but a believer—saying “I would say: we understand God as the other end of the personal relationship which is prayer.” We may perhaps contrast this with a line from Elizabeth Anscombe: “I am not … following those who explain deity as ‘the object of worship’. That definition is useless, because they have to mean by ‘worship’ ‘the honour paid to a deity’.” (Anscombe 2008, p. 18). However, whilst it is a doctrinally sound part of Anscombe’s Christian faith that only God is worthy of worship, it is surely not hard to imagine a child learning the meaning of “worship” primarily through being presented with live examples of it, and learning the use of “God” as part of that practice. So, too, for prayer: the child learns first how to pray and, as part of this, learns that God is that to whom prayers are offered. McCabe’s suggestion regarding “God” may here be usefully compared with Wittgenstein’s regarding “length”: “What ‘determining the length’ means is not learned by learning what length and determining are; the meaning of the word ‘length’ is learnt by learning, among other things, what it is to determine length.” (Wittgenstein 1958, p. 225). So too, the believer—and I—suggest, what “God” means is learnt by learning, among other things, what it is to pray to and worship Him.

A useful analogy at this point may be drawn with Wittgenstein’s philosophy of psychology (Gier 2007). The logical behaviourist hopes to explicate reductively belief, desire, intention, etc., in terms of their characteristic behavioural expressions. Contrast he—we may as well follow Wittgensteinian tradition and call him the “private linguist”—who instead thinks that what it is to believe, desire, or intend can be apprehended quite in abstraction from their expressive manifestations (Gipps 2021). Wittgenstein takes neither approach: we cannot understand what it is to desire, say, if we have severed the constitutive relations between desire and those of its manifestations in which it is immanent, but we also cannot reduce desire to some particular decontextualised set of these manifestations (Gier 2007). So too, my suggestion goes, for divinity’s immanence within lives of prayer and worship. We cannot reduce “God” to, say, “that to which prayers are offered” and/or “that which the Christian worships”. But neither do we do well to presume we can adequately understand “God” in abstraction from this—as the philosopher’s “first cause”, for example. In both (psychological and religious) cases, our understanding of what is meant by “desire” and “God” arises as we progressively find our way about in broad, ramified, categorically distinct, intelligible orders of psychological or spiritual being, orders that abide immanently within their manifestations. We encounter this spiritual order as we deepen in our lives of prayer and worship, as we progressively inhabit a perspective on the cosmos as creation-in-action, and are further attuned to the sense-providing antithesis to divinity provided by our shabby predicament. To be sure, analogies have their limits: there would be no getting on at all with a recognisably human life without the concepts of mind, whereas non-believers, at least, take themselves to be able to pursue a richly formed life whilst availing themselves of no religious categories. (It is an essential part of the Christian story too that God is “hidden” in such a way as makes atheism a live possibility; if He were not hidden, then true faith—the thought goes—would itself be impossible.) But the life of faith involves the believer in coming to an increasingly internal relation with God, one that progressively brings the moments of a life under religious concepts that interrelate our moral and cosmic concerns in a manner unavailable to the non-believer (Cottingham 2024).

Now the ordinary use of the word “God” by believer or unbeliever is sometimes taken to indicate their possession of a concept (“God”). There is no doubt an innocent version of “concept” that will make of that a truism. But there is also a sense in which concepts essentially delimit a term’s scope of application in something like the following way: the concept “cat” includes these, but excludes those, furry quadrupeds; these things here count as paradigms of the beautiful, those of the ugly; this here is yellow, that there is blue. And “God” famously does not work like this: He is not a this here as opposed to that there kind of being; He is not a species of any genus; He is the site of the blowing apart of such of our cognitive ambitions as aim at getting a handle on life in such concept-wielding ways. And believers and non-believers are not, the theologians tell us, to be distinguished by the former thinking there is one more being in existence than the latter (Shortt 2024). Even those who believe “God” may be positively defined (through lists of positive perfections: “omniscience”, “omnipotence”, etc.) typically maintain that God’s transcendence requires the use of these terms in an analogous manner. And those of an apophatic persuasion hold that what “God” means can only be understood negatively, i.e., through grasping what He is not. This is not the place to enter further into such discussions. What I want instead to point to is the significance, for the believer’s sense of how “God” shall be used, of understanding Him to be: that to which one’s petitions and praises, apologies and gratitude are directed when they have no worldly object and when they manifest the existential humility discussed above. McCabe, quoted above, had it that “The problem of God is the problem of prayer. … I am saying that maybe we understand God as ‘whatever makes sense of prayer’”. The wrong way to take this, I am suggesting, would be to try to answer “Well, let’s see, what would make sense of prayer?!” and to look through our catalogue of beings until we find one that fits (as we might when looking for what made certain footprints on the forest floor). That, at least, is the way of the theist, not of the believer.

As redefined above, the theist thinks that our belief in God makes for the intelligibility of our prayer and worship. And God is typically said to essentially be creator, sustainer, and love and truth themselves. The believer does not dispute the theist’s understanding of God’s nature, but thinks that intelligibility is here conferred in the reverse direction. Our sinful natures make sense of our prayer and worship, and our prayer and worship make sense of “God” (God: inter alia that to which prayers are offered; that which we worship). Now it is perhaps not so difficult to see how an understanding of God as love and truth might emerge from an experience of sin as being cut off from these. But what of the idea of God as creator and sustainer? Can such essential qualities be reconstructed from the dynamics of sin and repentance?

The attitude of the soul which was above described as existential pride is one which involves us in indulging fantasies of self-sufficiency. These involve us in a wholesale, if subtle, distortion in our recognition of the scope of our agency and power (Mulhall 2015, chap. 2), along with shades of denial of our dependency on our spatiotemporal and social surrounds. We may fight time’s inexorability, not acknowledging that its passage is a sine qua non for us doing anything at all. We may similarly cavil at our earth-bound and corporeal natures, quite ignoring the everyday miracles of our flesh and our earthly home. We bemoan the gradual corruption of our senses without first having given thanks for them. We ignore the ways in which even our most personal thought relies for its stability and meaning on our speaking a shared language with norms on which we do not individually get to decide (Gipps 2021). And we fail to accommodate to the fact of death because we continue to indulge latent fantasies of immortality. We are, in short, prone to indulge latent narcissistic fantasies of being—in the sense just elaborated—lords rather than servants, masters rather than denizens, of nature. The idea of “God as creator and sustainer”, then, may emerge as the antithesis of these grandiose movements of thought as they become undone. (“It is He that has made us, and not we ourselves”, Psalm 100:3; “Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, But to Your name give glory”, Psalm 115:1.) “If you want to know what “God” means”, says the believer, “know that God is: that on which the honour we spuriously accord ourselves as originators and sustainers of being, truth, and love is properly bestowed”.

Relatedly, a feature of Christian belief which can be mysterious to the atheistic humanist is why it brings together, within a single scheme, matters ethical and cosmological, matters so seemingly different as those of love and those of impersonal existence. To be sure, the theist’s scheme explicates this conjunction (God is both lawgiver and creator; he creates out of that same love which gives ethics its point), but this will hardly help out the atheist in question who finds that very conception peculiar. Now, the theist is not, of course, obliged to be helpful to such an atheist. The point I wish to make here however is just that the believer does have an answer: the ethical–cosmological unity of “God” has its origin, the thought goes, in the unity of our pride. For it is our pride that gets in the way both of our loving openness to one another and of our acknowledging the cosmos’s independence from our wills.

A worry about the believer’s position is their ruling out by fiat the possibility of praying to what is not God5. If “God” means, in part, “that to which true prayers are offered”, then how is it that Roman Catholics, say, can pray to angels and to Mary and the other saints? (The Protestant—who prays only to God—may applaud the implication, but even so rightly worry that securing the putative impropriety of this other prayer has here been bought on the conceptual cheap.) God may be that alone which is truly worshipped (Mary et al. are venerated rather than worshipped: offered dulia not latria), and it may well be true that “prayer is addressed above all to the Father” (Catholic Church 1994, §2665). Even so, bona fide prayer may still (the non-Protestant contends) be addressed to a few who are not above all. Here, however, our words may mislead us. For prayers to Mary et al. are either invocations by which her presence to the one who prays is vivified, or requests that she petition God on one’s behalf. (The Catholic includes, amongst those who one does well to ask to pray for one, those such as the saints who are no longer alive on Earth but who are understood as now residing closer to God.) Such requests may be called “prayers”, but their intelligibility as prayer is still derivative of the idea of petitioning God. So to now rehearse and finesse the believer’s claim: if you want to know how to use the word “God”, know that God is that to which (inter alia) prayers are directed—excepting when the word “prayer” is used in a broader sense to also include our invocations of and requests, to those no longer with us, to pray for us in the narrower sense.

8. Petition and the Care of the Soul

Petition, diverse Christian writers tell us, is of prayer but “a small part” (Lewis 1960). Despite this, it is on the petitionary form that much of the literature on prayer and Wittgensteinian philosophy has focused. This is perhaps because D. Z. Phillips, the most prominent Wittgensteinian philosopher of religion whose first work was the 1965 The Concept of Prayer, has sometimes (e.g., by Allen 1971; Helm 2001; Radenovic 2024a, 2024b) been said to ignore the sense in which asking things of God in prayer is supposedly done not only in the hope of receiving them, but in the hope of thereby receiving them. (Compare petitioning your MP. Perhaps you might do so out of principle? Or maybe you would not bother if you knew that she would take no notice?) None less than Aquinas (Summa Theologiae, 2a-2ae. lxxxiii.2) might have had it that “we do not pray in order to change the divine disposition, but that we may ask for that which God has arranged to be granted”—so that the point of prayer as he sees it involves the cultivation of a humble and receptive spirit rather than taking for granted that which God grants. And a conception of the divine will as immutable is anyway simply orthodox. (To put this in the register of what Wittgenstein (1958, §373) styled “theology as grammar”: nothing counts as “changing God’s mind”). But doesn’t the very form of petitionary prayer (“Please God may my little girl be saved from this illness!”) tell a different story? Phillips (1965) is no doubt right that honest petitionary prayer must necessarily involve me in: acknowledging my desires, confronting my helplessness, recognising that things may go other than I wish, and accommodating myself to all this by placing myself instead in God’s hands. (Jesus—this is just before the betrayal that leads to his crucifixion—provides the model: “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.” (Luke 22:42).) But can it really be that “The only reason why the believer doesn’t simply pray ‘Thy will be done’ is that he wants to name the desires that occupy his head and heart”? (A question van Herck (2007, p. 130) asks Phillips). Is it really mere superstition to think otherwise? And surely we must not doubt the possibility of “divine intervention”? This, then, is the concern of this final section: what is the point of petitionary prayer if not to change the divine disposition?

It cannot be denied that many people simply do petition their maker in the hope of thereby prompting His intervention. Thus, vast “prayer efficacy” studies for the healing of strangers, studies which presuppose just such a model, have after all been conducted. (For anyone interested: the results suggest that such prayer “produces” no, or trivially positive, or mildly negative, results (e.g., Benson et al. 2006)). And the “prosperity gospel”—the idea that a worshipful and prayerful life will rebound into material abundance—is widespread in charismatic and Pentecostal circles (Coleman 2000). Even so, it is not easy to make out a theologically intelligible version of an instrumental conception of prayer. Are we really to imagine the source of life and love, goodness and being, letting un-prayed-for plague victims die whilst Sam’s mum’s humanly treatable cataracts dissolve thanks to her congregation’s best petitionary efforts? (Tim Minchin (2025), “Thank You God”). And can anyone really, without lapsing into deism, make clear the distinction between that ordinary unfolding of life which is itself the divine will in action and something else called “divine intervention”? That God’s ways are inscrutable; that His will is immutable; that His goodness is not to be modelled on our own: such truths are unimpeachable because grammatical, i.e., they elaborate for us the meaning of “God’s ways”, “God’s will”, and “God’s goodness”. Similarly, it might be said, the wrongheadedness of the idea of “putting God to the test” is not so much ethically as opposed to, but ethically because, conceptually corrupt: it is not so much that its attempt is simply wicked, but that it is wicked to push such a debased conception of God, one modelling Him on His creatures, riding roughshod over the distinctly religious nature of the concept of “divine will”, and neglecting that concept’s derivation of its force from our human struggles to truly acknowledge our own wills’ limitations without lapsing into omnipotent fantasy.

The question remains as to whether we can recover a conception of petition which neither lapses into irreligious instrumentality nor is “sanitised” or rendered safe by the shearing off of its distinctly petitionary character. Consider Christ’s prayer teaching: “Ask, and it will be given to you… For everyone who asks, receives”? (Matthew 7:7). For sure, the Christian is quick to reassure us, prayer is not to be thought of as pressing the buttons of a celestial vending machine. We no more pray actual prayer when we pray insincerely, or when our grasping wills are still in on the act, than Victor Lustig, the conman who twice took money for it, actually sold the Eiffel Tower. This, however, tells us only what prayer is not, and leaves open the question of what the sense is in which what is prayed for is given. Regarding spiritual goods (patience, humility, loving kindness, courage, inner calm, etc.) we may see the right-hearted prayerful asking for them—with its constitutive relinquishing of ego and trust instead in God’s own will—as itself affording the inner transformation. As Phillips (1965, p. 125) puts it: “To ask God for something in [such] examples is already to have begun receiving.” So too can we understand how it is in praying for God’s guidance that the one who prays comes into closer alignment with the divine will. Prayer here, it could be said, involves progressively entering into a deeper, more internal, relationship with one’s Maker as the soul becomes less “incurvatus in se”. But what of those quite proper prayers—for a sick partner to be well; for a relative on a dangerous journey to reach his destination—where prayer and its fulfilment are related only internally through their common description and not causally by their occurrences? One sometimes hears “‘No’ is also an answer, you know”—but whilst this cute phrase may sometimes find religious application, it speaks past rather than to “Ask, and it will be given”. So what, then, is the point of such petitions?

It is at this juncture, I suggest, that magical thinking and faith must go their separate ways. The magical thinker takes Christ’s above-quoted prayer teaching to cover the expression in prayer of any sincere longing. She who comes to a truer faith, by contrast, sees it as covering only spiritual goods. But this does not mean that we ought not pray for what, if it occurred, would anyway be only coincidentally related to the praying. An example: a friend tells me that her time of most fervent prayer followed two miscarriages. She prayed desperately, she said, through her tears, for another conception, and to be able to carry to term. I asked “Did you think God was more likely to make this happen if you prayed?” The thought dismayed her. “No. Prayer for me was about honesty in the relationship [with God]. … And I kept telling God so He’s with me in my naked need, so I’m less alone with it.” Speaking the truth about her real longing, acknowledging her own helplessness, and recovering some trust in God’s plan for her were how she understood her prayer’s function. “Why not just talk to a friend?” I asked. “Because when I’m praying, I can let myself be flooded by it all, and I don’t need to spare the friend’s feelings or have to deal with their well-meaning attempts to spare me from my own.”

We see here already the beginning of an answer to the question of the point of prayer, but also an answer to van Herck’s question to Phillips as cited above: If Phillips’ model of prayer is along the right lines, why doesn’t the petitioner simply (1) name his desires and (2) pray “Thy will be done”? The answer is that such a prayer would not be in the soul’s own voice. The soul pleads; the mind names. What is missing from the set of (1) and (2), that is, is not a superstitious intent to change God’s will, but the sincere surging of an afflicted soul. In true prayer, the one prays genuinely gives an expressive confessional voice to—rather than simply collates—her helpless desires. A comparison with psychotherapy may help. All going well, psychotherapy will (inter alia) help the patient truly get in touch, and not just talk about, his feelings. Making the unconscious conscious does not involve believing that what your therapist accurately says about your deepest feelings is true. Instead, it means being able to express (speak from) these feelings at the same time as self-ascribe (speak about) them (Finkelstein 2019). Grief, anger, disappointment, yearning: such feelings can remain both inarticulate and throttled unless given expressive space to breathe. And it is human nature that our feelings can remain inwardly inarticulate (in the sense of unstructured, unassimilated in our self-understanding) unless they are articulated (in the sense of voiced) to another. In psychotherapy, this is to another person; in Christian prayer, so the story goes, it is to the personal ground of being itself. Naturally, enough such prayer may often be clumsy, coloured by superstitious and unholy longings to influence God’s will. As Saint Paul (Romans 8:26) tells Christ’s followers: “We do not know how to pray.” Even so, giving your actual feelings actual voice is paramount, and so, even if the results are clumsy, we are to “pray as you can, not as you can’t” (Chapman 1935)6.

An essential end of Christian prayer, it is said, is the quelling of anxiety (Barth 1960b). The instruction to not be anxious or afraid is given over 100 times in the Bible (e.g., Philippians 4:6–7 “Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus7.”) In part, what is important here is learning to place oneself in God’s hands. Rather than believing that one’s life will only be ok if one’s own current hopes are realised, and being left anxious about whether this realisation will happen, one instead adopts a different ethic, one that promotes accommodation to and a hopeful attitude regarding that in life which is not within one’s control. But, in part, I suggest, the quelling of anxiety comes from the sheer articulation of one’s fears and needs. By giving them true voice, by “confessing” them as the religious say, or, to speak instead now with the psychologists, “mentalising” them, they are rendered assimilable, thinkable, and tolerable (Fonagy et al. 2004)8. And essential to this, in either its therapeutic or religious versions, is that one trusts that one will be accepted as one even if the feelings in question are experienced as shameful. Fantasies of independence or self-help, which provide illusory succour at the expense of entrenching a deeper world-alienation, can now be put down; the soul becoming now less incurvatus in se. In the process, anxious doubts are not solved but rather dissolved as the soul stops trying to meet its own needs and instead reposes in the arms of its Maker9.

It is time to take stock. The Wittgensteinian approach we have taken to the question of “What is Christian prayer?” proceeded by situating the activity within its sense-making context. The context in question is our soul life—i.e., our life of hope, despair, conscience, and love. This was itself understood in relation to our fallenness—i.e., in relation to our prideful disposition to indulge comforting fantasies of self-sufficiency which fail to acknowledge our dependency and so also cut us off from gratitude for that on which we depend. Prayer has been described as the undoing of these dynamics, the enaction of a deeper relationship with God, and an undoing which involves anxiolytic changes in the heart of the one who prays rather than changes to the will of He to whom prayers are offered. To end now, I will consider one last meaning of prayer, a meaning which may be described as its preservation of human sensibility in the face of what is most intolerable in life.

Take, then, the prayer of Eternal Rest, or Requiem: “Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May they rest in peace.” Why, during the funeral or burial, are such words reached for? A proper theological answer references the hopes for the soul of the departed of those who pray. But, and without disputing such intra-religious answers, the illumination here sought is one that instead finds its way to prayer’s intelligibility through relating it to our human predicament. … And so, imagine: there you stand, alone beside your friend’s muddy grave. You would like to speak with him again but of course you cannot. (Nothing now counts as: speaking with him as opposed to imagining doing so; death will do that to a relationship.) Your cares and concerns for him, those constituting the living body of your friendship, have not simply ceased; your instinctual care still manifests in wanting to know how he is doing. You still want to tell him you love him. You want to tell him that now even more than you did before. Of course you do. But his part in history, the living process of his life: they has ended. His abode is now not temporal but eternal: now he is without his own opportunity to grow, make amends, love more truly, or deepen the life of his soul. And yes, you know we are not, as we might put it, merely externally related to our friends: in love, in our wanting the best for one another, in our making our own their joys and sorrows, we are one another. And so, your petition for his soul’s repose may in this way be auto-enacting: the meaning of his life, his selfhood, is itself coloured in and through your loving memory of him. But, true as all this may be, we may set it this aside as a motivation for prayer as once again containing too little of the soul’s own voice. Why, then, do you pray for his eternal rest?10

Or take the case of another friend who is dying; perhaps he has a couple of months left to live. You find yourself often thinking on him, feeling desperate about his plight. But there is nowhere for these thoughts to go, nothing for you to do beside telling him you love him when you see him. But at all these other times? What can tie together the flailing strands of your painful cogitation? The suggestion with which I now close is that prayer is, inter alia, the act into which your words flow when they have nowhere else to go; it is what you do when there is nothing you can do; it is how the heart speaks its concerns when trying to meet them is fruitless; it is where your longing goes when it cannot discharge itself in meaningful action. Prayer is now the form that love takes. And, praying now, those flailing strands settle in the sombre seriousness of your heart’s petition.