If religion were not about such serious things, it would be the funniest product of human invention. Such a mish-mash of contradictions, inconsistencies, earnest nothings, pious posturing, arrogant ignorance, obsessing about trivia and complacency about enormities, embracing demonstrable falsehood and disregarding obvious truths, religion runs the gamut of the grandeur and misery of humanness.
But, as Thomas Edison famously declared, “Mankind is incurably religious." To facilitate sharing our inherent religiousness, humans invented theology. By the simplest definition, theology means talking about God.
Now here’s a word you can casually throw out at your next cocktail party or prayer meeting to intensify your friends’ awareness of your erudition:
Theodicy.
Theodicy is the part of theology that is about how God does His (Her/Its) thing in the cosmos. The prevalent form of Christian theology believes the Creator is actively involved in the ongoingness of all creation. It includes believing that God interacts with the creatures made in His image, particularly humans. One of the ways God interacts with humans is by communication, the human side of which is called prayer.
In the religious sense, prayer is simply talking with God, mentally or verbally, individually and privately, or together as a group. In our talking, we acknowledge God’s supreme majesty, express adoration and gratitude, confess the wrong we have done and the right we have left undone, and request from God whatever we think we need, temporal or spiritual, to survive, thrive and either satisfy our personal cravings or accomplish the purpose for which we believe we were created.
Some of the silliest, shallowest, saddest, and most superstitious heresies of religion have taken root like weeds in the garden of prayer. One is the tacit notion that public praying is most properly performed by people with “reverend” attached to their names, thus conferring a status which includes preferred access to the ear of the Almighty. As a general principle, I decline invitations to invocate at civic-club luncheons, formal banquets, graduations, ribbon cuttings, rodeos, political rallies, male or female beauty contests, duels with deadly weapons and cockfights.
Paying careful attention to some of the prayers intoned in religious gatherings could lead one to think that the purpose of prayer is to provide God with information he would not otherwise have, or persuade him to do something he would not otherwise do. Even Episcopalians, who should know better, include a prayer for rain in our beloved Book of Common Prayer.
In a region devastated by drought, the National Weather Service forecasts the possibility of rain. Clouds appear and a few drops begin to fall. The faithful, gathered in desperate sincerity, beg God to turn on the spigot and release a deluge. A few miles away under the same rain clouds, a few frightened faithful gather where a small child is trapped in a culvert that even moderate rains fill to overflowing. It may stay full of water for hours. In equally desperate sincerity they beg the cosmic water engineer not to let the rain come down.
That scenario is not meant to ridicule prayer, it is contrived to make a point. Absurdity can sometimes clarify truth; understanding what a thing is sometimes requires understanding what it is not.
Prayer is not a speech made to God with our eyes closed or a self-deluded device for manipulating deity. Urging someone seeking God’s guidance or deliverance or success to “pray harder” presumes that the efficacy of prayer resides in the one doing the praying. Is God somewhere saying, “C’mon, beg me one more time”?
There is no objective reason to think there is an essential cause-and-effect connection between the praying and the event, activity or other phenomenon to which it is linked by subjective observers.
The fragments of scripture dealing with prayer offer no coherent, comprehensive teaching about what prayer is or should be, other than an intimate spiritual transaction between us creatures and the One in whose image we are made, whatever that means.
To pray is to experience God. Not all the philosophies ever formulated, not all the learned teachers who ever illuminated truth, nor all the books ever written, nor all the languages ever spoken, can tell us what that means.
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