Prayer Requests
I will not challenge the efficacy of prayer as a placebo or a self-fulfilling prophecy. For many, either the act of prayer itself offers the psychological comfort to solve your problem, e.g. the countless “miracles” of people’s health conditions being suddenly ameliorated after prayer, or it grants you the determination and clarity that you need to move on in life and take action.
But isn’t it selfish, if not naive, to have prayer requests? What do you even ask for? It seems to me that the only reasonable prayer is the one that asks God to carry out his will. Why ask for anything else specifically when we have such a poor, biased understanding of ourselves and who we truly are, when we fail to understand what we truly want and what we truly need from an objective standpoint, and when we cannot even begin to comprehend our calling and our purpose here on Earth? Why pray for something that you can’t ascertain the actual importance of within your life?
Why pray for good grades so we can get into a “prestigious” college, when to break free from the chains of those societal obligations might be just what we need?
Why pray for our sense of purposelessness and for relief in a drought in our spirituality, when this discomfort might be precisely what we need to realize our vices and inadequacies as a means of making progress as individuals?
Why pray for greater cohesiveness and enthusiasm in our churches, when what we need to do is dismantle the institution of church entirely, recognizing that it’s only a machine for pandering to the masses and conforming to the prevailing social norms?
How can we pretend that God answers to us on a whim? If it doesn’t cause you to be complacent and relieve you of taking direct action in your life, it sustains an absurd delusion about God and the world.
Is it his will when he supposedly answered your prayers and grants you a 4.0 GPA, and when he didn’t answer the prayers of the grieving, bereaved parents of a five-year-old child who abruptly passed away because of health complications?
When he supposedly answered your prayers to give you a lucrative job or business opportunity, and didn’t answer all the billions of people throughout human history that have been ruthlessly murdered or that have hopelessly perished from famine or disease? Why did he not heed to their frantic cries for help—begging on their knees to be delivered from abject suffering—when he so intently listens to you grousing about how difficult life is as the top one percent of anyone who has ever lived?
Do we really think that God is so oblivious to choose prosperity for you and insurmountable hardship for everyone else? Do we really think that God is so arbitrary on who he decides to go out of his way to help?
I am not convinced that being a Christian requires us to delude ourselves through the act of prayer—to pretend that God will give us what we want or what we selfishly think we need merely because we asked. I am not convinced that God is that naive and petty about his own creation. I am not convinced that we need blatantly ignore the daunting reality of this world solely for this ritual to preserve our faith.
We need to wake up.
Stop praying for money, status, reputation, or material possessions.
Stop praying for fulfillment or happiness.
Stop praying for your lack of motivation or purpose.
Stop praying for an end to our suffering.
Stop praying for all the things that our fallen brethren have also desperately pleaded for, but were never remotely close to attaining.
By making it a game about requests—the act of using God as a crutch, as the primary means by which we invoke change within our lives and the grander scope of humanity—we not only selfishly entitle ourselves to receive undeserved privileges, but we also destroy whatever merit God had as a creator. We consign him to be a capricious, temperamental actor in determining the fate of a human life. When the request is granted, we praise him and remember his grace and generosity. When the request is denied, we turn a blind eye, altering the narrative and falling into delusions to maintain this conception of God as a fair, altruistic actor and enforcer of justice.
But we don’t have to play this game. Let us close our eyes and speak to God if we are so inclined, but lest we dispense of our responsibility we have in determining the fate of humanity. Lest we continue to assign this delusional narrative to our circumstances—this notion that there must be a reason for anything that happens to us—when there is no such narrative.
God does not give us what we want. He does not give us what we need, either. Life is neither fair nor absolute. The world takes its own course. We can write all the stories we want and attribute purpose to our suffering and our joy alike, but nothing—not even God himself—will change the inalterable torrent of time and circumstance. Don’t make it seem God has done something when, perhaps, he didn’t do anything at all.
