A few years ago, for the first time I can remember, there was a backlash against prayer. It was in the wake of the Paris nightclub attack, and specifically to the hashtag: #prayforparis (which was shared over 70 million times) . One of the writers for Charlie Hebdo, a Paris based publication (the victim of a previous attack), told people that Paris did not need your prayers. This of course was commented on by every editorial page, debating: is the act of prayer beneficial?
For many, prayer is nothing more than a smokescreen that prevents important work from getting done. It is a false hope and a useless act. As Christians, we don’t believe this, but can we prove it? Do we have evidence that prayer works? This was a question that CS Lewis took on in an essay called The Efficacy of Prayer.
He starts the essay by telling a few personal stories about answered prayer, but quickly explains how each of his experiences could be doubted by someone who wants to find no link of causality between prayer and result. He concludes:
The question then arises, “What sort of evidence would prove the efficacy of prayer?” The thing we pray for may happen, but how can you ever know it was not going to happen anyway? Even if the thing were indisputably miraculous it would not follow that the miracle had occurred because of your prayers. The answer surely is that a compulsive empirical Proof such as we have in the sciences can never be attained.
Lewis goes on to tease this out a bit, showing us how, even if one was to set up an experiment in the form of the scientific method, there would always be a flaw in the process. There were too many variables in every situation. But what if this sort of inquiry were actually missing the point entirely? What if asking ‘does prayer work’ actually makes us miss how its working? Lewis explains:
Prayer in the sense of petition, asking for things, is a small part of it; confession and penitence are its threshold, adoration its sanctuary, the presence and vision and enjoyment of God its bread and wine. In it God shows Himself to us. That He answers prayers is a corollary— not necessarily the most important one— from that revelation. What He does is learned from what He is.
If prayer is a means for God to reveal Himself to us, then allowing us to be part of the process by which He works is His way of inviting us into His story. Prayer is how God allows us to be a part of making the world operate. Lewis quotes the philosopher Blaise Pascal in this:
God instituted prayer in order to lend to His creatures the dignity of causality.
In other words, God does not have to allow any of our actions to play a role in His creation; it should not be any more a surprise to us that prayer is allowed to function as a part of His overall purpose. Prayer is how God allows us to be part of His sweeping narrative, and allows us to see His creation in this way. Lewis ends with this description:
Prayer is not a machine. It is not magic. It is not advice offered to God. Our act, when we pray, must not, any more than all our other acts, be separated from the continuous act of God Himself, in which alone all finite causes operate.
Like all other actions, prayer is a physical act of ours that God uses in divine ways. While the cause and effect are a bit more mysteriously connected than some of our other efforts, they are no less powerful. This separation forces us to recognize God’s hand that much more present and necessary.