Prayer - Lesson 4

Professor James Houston

Prayer

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Misunderstandings about Prayer

Lesson Transcript

We’ve spoken a lot already about the misunderstandings and the abuse of prayer life, but Jacques Ellul, that in another course we've been discussing on the impact of technology on our culture, has a book called Prayer and Modern Man and he writes very discerningly on his own observations about misunderstanding of prayer. And he says first of all that one common misunderstanding is that prayer is mere custom - it's something that we're used to do. And he reminds us of Leo Tolstoy, who tells the story of two brothers who met for a weekend doing some hunting together after a long absence from each other. At the end of the evening the younger brother, as was his habit since his childhood, knelt to say his evening prayers. And when the younger man, Tolstoy narrates, had finished and was settling down for the night, he looked at him and said ah, so you still do that. They said no more to one another, but from that day the younger brother ceased to say his prayers or go to church. No longer did he pray, no longer receive communion or go to the church for the next 30 years.

And this is not because he knew his brother's convictions and joined himself with them, nor because he decided anything in his own soul, but simply because the words spoken by his brother were like the push of the finger on what seemed a solid wall of habit, but it was ready to fall from its own weight. In other words, the collapse of customary habit that’s unreflective and unexamined, that has no deep belief system to support its practice pushed it all over with his pinky. It's a terrifying awareness of what can happen to us. Or again, says Ellul, we think of saying our prayers and saying our prayers, like saying the Lord's Prayer, or saying the Book of Common Prayer, is again, as we've seen, a kind of attitude that can be so superficial.

We all know as children the story of Christopher Robin saying his prayer. And Christopher Robin saying his prayer was simply that he stuttered badly as a teenager and was teased cruelly by his playmates in the schoolyard, but when he was in the choir, he sang like the angels. And, of course, he loved the choir because of that. But when his voice broke then all thought of faith evaporated with it. And one of the great tragedies that many of us have is that we associate the custom of prayer with an emotional crux - something that we need to support us. But it's vain prayer. And our Lord Himself, of course, speaks of the vain repetition of the Pharisees, who are doing this publicly as part of their professional life or their sense of identity, but it's totally false.

Then thirdly, says Ellul, we can think of prayer as magic. In other words, that prayer is just simply that we pray because we don’t have, again, another close relationship with the Lord. In the play by Bertolt Brecht Mother Courage and Her Children, the story is told of a group of peasants who wait terrified as enemy soldiers are attacking the neighbouring town by night, so they start praying. And the dumb girl, Kattrin, has meanwhile shown initiative to climb on the farmyard roof and she saves the community by the noise that she's making with her drum as if there's an advancing platoon that is coming to their defence. And so what Brecht is teaching is like many moderns; there is the criticism that we can make of the magic of petitionary prayer. He says it was unnecessary: you just have to use your own wits. And so in our devotional life, we can sometimes stumble because we realise really we don’t need to pray; we need to do something about it ourselves. So again, as we've said, prayer can be a [forfeitude 00:05:47] of truly moral behaviour.

Well, there are many other ways in which we can see this, that prayer is not simply a technique. Prayer can only be a profound relationship.