The Limits and the Effectivity of Prayer

When we reflect on what we mean by prayer, and what expectations we have for it, we can determine both the limits and the uses of prayer in navigating our way through life, and obtaining results aligned with our aspirations. In the USA it is common for people to send “thoughts and prayers” for those subject to mass school shootings, for instance, when they have little or no interest whatsoever in actually addressing the underlying causes and doing anything at all to mitigate the problem. In this case, the prayers are empty, and are simply meant to brush aside any real examination of the causes and remedies. This is obviously not an actual instance of prayer, and the lack of effectivity in preventing further mass school shootings cannot be chalked up as a failure of prayer, but as more a matter of the failure to convert the prayer into an effective energizing of action to support the prayer.

So what is prayer? And what meaningful role can it, and does it, play in our lives? Those who believe in rigid determinism do not accept that prayer has any real or significant role because everything is already fixed and established and prayer is not going to change things. Those who believe in the operation of random chance or a machinery of Nature also do not believe in the efficacy of prayer, as without some higher being capable of hearing the prayer and intervening in that machinery, the act of prayer is simply an empty gesture to a non-living machine.

Some people perceive the universe to be the result of an Impersonal Existence. Others perceive there is a Being, a divine Person manifesting through the creation. Prayer can be accepted by either of these groups. For those who see the Impersonal side of the creation, prayer can be understood as an act of focusing and tuning to the vibratory pattern that aligns them with the manifesting force of the universe. For those who see the personal side of the creation, prayer can be understood as aligning the individual being with the universal Being and thereby taking on the aspect of that personal being as it carries out its intention in the universe.

We come then to the question of prayers as wish-fulfillment. We pray to God for money, relationships, success in career, for passing tests, for some other personal desire, or to cure an illness or ward off bad results or situations. While there can be some underlying truth in such an action, inasmuch as there is a tuning of the being to a vibratory force that may help in a situation, it is clearly not likely that there is a god who resides at the other end of a prayer switchboard and who grants requests through personal intervention at the request of an individual. It is in this regard, when looking at whether prayer brings about an active intervention in a specific life or event, that skeptics of prayer tend to point out that rarely can one see any type of result that would justify even a possible intervention result.

The more an individual aligns himself with the deepest and highest parts of his being, and thereby with the divine intention in the manifested universe, the more chance there is that prayer will act as a method of alignment and see its fulfillment. To the extent that an individual prays for some kind of personal benefit separated from that universal direction, disappointment is the most likely result. It is not God’s role, so to speak, to provide one with a winning lottery number! To the extent that prayer expects God to “do everything” and does not bring about any form of action or focus by the praying individual, there is little likelihood of any noticeable benefit. All the “thoughts and prayers’ for school shootings have not yet solved the problem, nor prevented any such event from recurring on a consistent basis, because no concrete action has followed up as a result of those prayers!

Sri Aurobindo writes: “The efficacy of prayer is often doubted and prayer itself supposed to be a thing irrational and necessarily superfluous and ineffective. It is true that the universal will executes always its aim and cannot be deflected by egoistic propitiation and entreaty, it is true that the Transcendent who expresses himself in the universal order that, being omniscient, his larger knowledge must foresee the thing to be done and it does not need direction or stimulation by human thought and that the individual’s desires are not and cannot be in any world-order the true determining factor. But neither is that order or the execution of the universal will altogether effected by mechanical Law, but by powers and forces of which for human life at least, human will, aspiration and faith are not among the least important. Prayer is only a particular form given to that will, aspiration and faith. its forms are very often crude and not only childlike, which is in itself no defect, but childish; but still it has a real power and significance. Its power and sense is to put the will, aspiration and faith of man into touch with the divine Will as that of a conscious Being with whom we can enter into conscious and living relations. For our will and aspiration can act either by our own strength and endeavour, which can no doubt be made a thing great and effective whether for lower or higher purposes, — and there are plenty of disciplines which put it forward as the one force to be used, — or it can act in dependence upon and with subordination to the divine or the universal Will. And this latter way, again, may either look upon that Will as responsive indeed to our aspiration, but almost mechanically, by a sort of law of energy, or at any rate quite impersonally, or else it may look upon it as responding consciously to the divine aspiration and faith of the human soul and consciously bringing to it the help, the guidance, the protection and fruition demanded….”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Powers Within, Chapter IX Aspiration and Prayer pp. 83-84