monastic prayer

 

I've often wondered what the point is of all those monks and nuns spending so much of their day in prayer. I mean, 'good for them', I think, 'but how exactly does that help anyone else?' It would - it seems to me - be an oddly superstitious kind of belief if you thought that praying for the relief of famine or the cessation of violence could have any direct effect on it. Or if you thought you could indirectly affect such matters by tugging on an intervention-making God's heart-strings. That way a smug madness lies - at least as I see it. As if God needed waking from his slumbers by your petitions before relieving the world of its pain.

So what, then, is the point? The first thing I want to recall is that not all activity need have a point outside of itself. It needn't be done for instrumental reasons. The praying could itself be the point, then. ... But, well, what is that point?

Well: an analogy. You're telling a difficult story. Your listener baulks at much of it. But it's nevertheless redeemable. It is the ending which makes it come good. Your last words, on your deathbed, might do much to redeem your life too. Or perhaps you and your spouse are having an argument. It's painful, but after a while you put down your proud defences, and reach a new level of mutual understanding. The argument has cleared the air; the sincere sorrow at hurting one another along the way enables you to value what along the way has been a rather painful matter. Perhaps prayer, then, can be seen as the redeeming word on the sins of humanity that it gathers up along its way.

Or how about this? It's simply good to pray when that prayer is honest praise of God. It's good that such prayer is in the world. We who fail to pray thus - all of us - should be glad that some of us are doing rather more of it.

And what of petitionary prayer? Well, this too is redemptive in its way. A moment of mindful acknowledgement arises amidst the dismal swathes of our egocentricity. Oh, that things could be other than the painful muddle they are! ... There's a kind of night-time dream which fills the mind with good things. It's tempting to see it as mere self-palliating fact-avoiding wish-fulfilment. But how about, instead, seeing it as a grace-ful moment which reminds the far-too-self-enclosed, mood-perpetuating mind that there's more to life than how it construes things? ... Petitionary prayer might do this too, no, if one's words caught the soul's drift in the right way? So that the change of mind, the expectation of a redeemed life, the acknowledgement of all the pain and muddle and yet the true remembrance of peace and wellness... so that this remembrance could itself redeem the lot of us all.

But how can it redeem someone who knows nothing of it? Well, think of how we don't do well to bad-mouth the dead. This wrongs them, we believe, despite their being dead. So too we might take care of them - perhaps by sharing a fond memory of them with a friend, perhaps by carrying forward a noble ambition of theirs or otherwise by following their example, perhaps by tending their grave. Well, can the souls of the living not be tended to in the same way?