Prayer as the Expression of Personal Religion

In Silence. Why We Pray
by Donald Spoto

(Page 4 of 6)

Of Time and Memory -
Some Historic Aspects of the Interior Life

Considered independently of specific cultural forms, traditions, doctrines and rituals, religion in general may be described as the inner awareness of an ultimate Reality beyond the self and beyond the human. Once acknowledged, this perception, however dim and provisional, invites a personal response to and association with that Reality - a living and active relationship we may identify as prayer. As distinct from aesthetic or poetic feelings, which establish a link to the divine through art, prayer is essentially a relationship we have with God in this world.

When it is expressed communally or liturgically, prayer is authentic for the one who prays only when there is or has been a prior awareness of the divine presence in secret and in silence - in other words, a sense of the numinous evoked by an apprehension of what is subjectively holy or sacred.

Ideally, of course, such feelings should also be evoked by public acts of worship; that they so seldom do is one of the failures of contemporary religion, which often seems content with conveying a comfortable feeling of good fellowship or a pleasantly undemanding folksiness. A profound sense of the holy does not, of course, require grand panoply: the Quaker tradition of congregational silence can bring many participants to the threshold of profound reverence. Such a practice takes seriously the words of the biblical injunction, "Be still, and know that I am God."

Prayer has a quite personal and empirical character; as a habit of being and of becoming oneself in this life, it goes be- yond intellectual analysis. Hence William James, the American philosopher and pioneer psychologist of religion, claimed that without prayer there can be no religious life. Found everywhere in human history, prayer expresses, with or without images or words, the experience of a mystery and of a presence beyond this world and above the human; as such, it is concerned not with thinking about God but with relating to Him.*

Prayer in Time and Memory

In his Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh University between 1902 and 1904, William James perhaps startled his academic audience by calmly stating, "Many reasons have been given why we should not pray, whilst others are given why we should. But in all this, very little is said of the reason why we do pray. The reason why we pray is simply that we cannot help praying."

Prayer also occurred, as James rightly presupposed, in archaic, prehistoric cultures: this is clear from modern studies of primeval clans and tribes that survived with their traditions relatively intact and uninfluenced by the encroachments of developed society.

Even a brief consideration of ancient history reveals that wherever there was a sense of wonder or awe in the face of the unknown, there was prayer; where there was gratitude for a successful hunt or a good harvest, there was prayer; where there was fear for life or safety, there was prayer. One might even say that prayer was natural for those living closer to nature. In the case of Native American tribes and of the peoples of the Far East, for example, this did not mean that prayer was always directed to a specific being or invisible spirit: often the address was made vaguely, to the spirit of a tree or a river, conceived as a foreign but vital "being" who shared the universe with the perceiver.

Centuries and perhaps millennia before there was anything like the separate department of life known as religion, there was what might be called a religious sensibility - a sense of the Beyond, that seems to have been as instinctive as breathing, sleeping and eating. Conscious of their connection to that Beyond and evidently aware that a relationship could be established with it, people expressed their needs, wishes and reverence. They did not require knowledge in order to understand.

The word "religion," as a matter of fact, never occurs in the Hebrew Scriptures, nor is it to be found in the gospels; there are a mere five references to it elsewhere in the New Testament. The idea that matters of faith have come to comprise but one discrete aspect of life among others - competing, as it were, for our time and attention - is unfortunate, for such a notion implies that faith centers only around ritual observances or subjects that are obviously "religious" (all of which are of human development and expression in any case). To think this way, as C. S. Lewis trenchantly observed, is to substitute navigation for arrival or courtship for marriage. What is infinite, after all, can have no standing as a department: either everything in life exists in its light, or faith itself is an illusion.

* * *

The precise origins of prayer itself we may never know. But the consensus of anthropological and ethnological studies should be noted: we can find at every point of human experience some idea of transcendence and an attempt to relate to it. An intuition about life beyond the grave is a significant corollary of this: "It is certain," wrote W. F. Albright, one of the great scholars of the ancient world, "that the belief in an after-life has a very long prehistory, going back in some form as far as the Neanderthal men of the Mousterian age. Just what physiological and psychological sources it had, we can hardly demonstrate."

Albright's studies in the origin of language support his insistence that what we now call primitive man (flourishing at about 5000 b.c.) was capable of abstraction: "The earliest known stages of the Egyptian, Sumerian and Semitic languages show that general qualities such as 'goodness, truth, purity' could be abstracted from the related adjectives and identified as abstractions by some linguistic device." By the 4th millennium b.c., humans had certainly developed a sense of a divine being - and they associated this being with creation and with characteristics their cultures held to be good. It is at least tenable, therefore (and probably quite correct), to say that the sense of the divine is an innate human perception - not an invented projection, but rather the acknowledgment of a primal certainty.

© 2005 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Donald Spoto, author of The Hidden Jesus, taught theology, Christian mysticism, and biblical literature at the university level for twenty years. His other eighteen books include internationally bestselling biographies of Alfred Hitchcock, Laurence Olivier, Tennessee Williams, and Ingrid Bergman.