we act like God is our wish-granter, we diminish God and set ourselves up for disappointment. The second misstep to avoid is understanding how prayer works in such a way that the logic can be read backwards. For example, the statement that prayer can work miracles, without further nuance, can easily slide into the conclusion that someone who did not receive a miracle didn’t pray enough. That is the logic of charlatans. It is victim-blaming masked in religious language. It lies about God (making God our wish-granting servant) and about people (translating suffering into inadequacy). Both of these problems arise from giving our prayers too much power in shaping events.
Theologian John Calvin was adamantly opposed to overestimating our power in relation to God. Emphasizing the glory and sovereignty of God, Calvin said that our prayers do not change God but they can change us.16 Our pleas will not, so to speak, change God’s mind. Another author, Ole Hallesby, makes a similar point but highlights how our prayer does have an important role to play. God always cares for all persons and is always eager to “employ His [sic] powers in the alleviation of our distress.”17 Our prayer does not change God’s mind, for God always wills to help us. Praying simply gives God “access to our needs.”18 For Hallesby, God knocks at the door to assist us; prayer grants God admittance.
McCord Adams grants still more room to prayer. God’s character and long-term project with humanity is unchanging. God loves us and wills goodness for each and every one of us. Our prayers do not convince God to be on our side; God is already there. At the same time, God aims to be in relationship with us in such a way that we become friends and partners with God. God aims for friendship across the “size-gap” between humanity and divinity.19 McCord Adams draws on biblical stories of Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Job to argue that, “if Bible story leaders are supposed to model being in the world with God, what they model is interaction in which their complaints and protests are heard, in which their preferences help shape the plan, and in which they grow into junior partners in a family business.”20
In this model, our prayers do not manipulate God, but rather are welcomed by God as collaborative input in how God’s unchanging goodness could shape a given situation. I find this persuasive. Whatever God is up to in relation to humanity, human freedom seems to be an important element. Because human freedom makes possible so much suffering—including all the ways we hurt ourselves and one another and the Earth—God must consider it quite valuable to include it in creation. Surely God would then take our freedom seriously in prayer. Put another way, if God respects our freedom enough to allow us to harm one another, wouldn’t God respect our freedom enough to accept friendly suggestions on how to help one another? Of course, we remain junior partners and trust God to disregard our short-sighted and wrong-headed ideas.
But what of the apparent failures of prayer? Enslaved Africans and African-Americans prayed for liberation for generations before emancipation. Every day people pray for an end to abuse that does not come, healing that does not occur, and resources that do not appear. There are some times when the prayed-for outcome does occur, but there is no way to know that prayer was the cause. This kind of evidence does not bring clarity.
And yet, many people find prayer profoundly helpful. Many find prayer life-giving and transforming in the midst of terrible circumstances, even when what they pray for does not come to pass. This could fall within the notion that prayer changes the one who prays but does not change God. Prayer provides perspective and shapes habits of mind and emotion in ways that can be powerful. The efficacy of intercessory prayer would require something more than this, because the aim is for prayer to “work” on someone other than the one who is praying. Proving such efficacy would require an impossible level of isolation and control (to eliminate other influences) and a string of assumptions about what would count as a successful outcome.21
In my own life, there have been times when I simply could not face or handle situations on my own strength and I have felt buoyed and upheld by the prayers of others. A close friend, Jill, lives with her husband and children in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. Jill is a spiritual person with strong moral and ethical commitments who does not identify with or participate in a faith tradition. In the terrible days after the school shooting on December 14, 2012, when the entire town was reeling with horror, I had no idea how to offer comfort to my friend. I told her I was praying for her. Jill’s response surprised me, as she said that so many people were praying for the people of Newtown and the community could feel it. “It’s palpable,” she said. In ways I can neither demonstrate nor explain, the prayers of friends and strangers provided some small aid in the midst of madness.
Many of us tend to think about how things “work” in simplistic ways. Focused as we are on the mid-range—on people and buildings and cars and trees—we think first of physical causality. A person swings a bat, which either does or does not hit the ball. If the bat does come into physical contact—smack!—the ball changes direction. This is the kind of cause and effect that seems most basic. And yet, we know that there is much more going on in our daily lives than the interaction of nearby physical objects.
With a microscope, we can see millions of bacteria, microbes, cells, and atomic nuclei that are part of the ball field. With a telescope, we can see that the ball field itself is part of a solar system and a galaxy and an expanding universe of galaxies. With different kinds of tools, we could perceive that what appears to be the empty space between the players on the field has a lot going on: oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, ambient particles, chemicals, gravity, magnetic fields, radiation, radio waves and more. We only see one small segment of light, only hear one small segment of sound waves, and cannot detect much of our environment without assistance. The world is bigger, smaller, and much more complex than we can imagine. Given this, it isn’t naïve to think that intercessory prayer works even though we cannot pin down exactly how. Rather, it is arrogance to imagine that what we understand is all that is happening!
I think of intercessory prayer in imagistic terms, quite aware that I don’t grasp it fully. God always wills and intends goodness for each and every one of us and for creation as a whole. There is enough freedom around (human freedom but also evolutionary freedom and perhaps plant and animal and other kinds of freedom that I don’t comprehend), and enough history, and enough complexity, that God’s will-for-goodness for us can encounter interference. Intercessory prayer attempts to clear the haze and overcome the interference, to make the way a bit clearer for the love of God that is always directed towards our flourishing.
Praying Together
So far, these reflections do not address the aspect of my prayer experiment that I found most surprising and sustaining, namely, the community that prayed together. The relationship analogies from McCord Adams—of partners and parents—tend towards a one-on-one interpretation. Even questions of the efficacy of intercessory prayer can keep the one who prays and the one prayed for as individuals quite separate from one another. In reality, while we are individuals, we are also profoundly interconnected with one another.
We are growing up with millions of siblings, and our relationship with our parents always unfolds in that context. Even the most introverted or isolated among us still leads a life interwoven with others. We become who we are in relationship with parents, caregivers, teachers, neighbors, and friends. We are shaped by the bully in third grade, the heartthrob in tenth, and the one adult who offered good advice. We live our days amidst classmates and coworkers, with fellow-travelers on the train or the highway or the sidewalk. If I tell someone who I am, my narrative will include a whole cast of characters who shape my identity. Even within my own skin, I am communal. I have my father’s eyes and my mother’s laugh. My sense of humor is a perfect match of my sisters’. I have the genetics of generations, and the DNA of the children
