Thoughts on prayer

One evening while I was sitting with Ma Schmidt—I had almost a week to go before coming home, and it was maybe eight or nine days before she died—I suddenly had an idea. She had been moaning "Help me" over and over, even as she was totally unable to answer the question, "Help you do what?"

And suddenly I wondered, Is that how God (or the gods) experience human prayer? Everybody knows that the great majority of prayers seem to go unanswered. Could it be that the problem is on our end, not God's? To flesh this out a bit: Maybe it's the case that there is a limited range of things that God can do for us, but "Make It All Better" isn't one of them. Or, well, it might be one of them if we could specify exactly what we mean. But maybe (for whatever reason) we can't ask God to figure it out for us. Maybe He's willing to help if only we can spell out what we want, but remaking the Universe from scratch so that I personally am never unhappy, … well that just isn't on the menu. (And after all, what I want out of the Universe is probably different from what you want.) So the end result, so far as we can perceive, is that our prayers go unanswered. And we blame it on God. Ma Schmidt probably blamed it on us that her pleas for help fell (to all appearances) on deaf ears.

You can take this image a step further.

Another time during the same evening, I gave her a cup with water in it. She drank a sip or two, and then put her hands back in her lap while still holding the cup. After a few minutes, she plaintively begged for "Water!" But of course she was already holding water. So I pointed to it, and told her, "You have the water. Lift it to your lips and drink!" She stared back at me uncomprehendingly, and implored piteously, "Water!"

And again I wonder: Is this what God experiences with us? We ask piteously and humbly, "Please give me the power to solve my problems!" And for all I know, He might be thinking, "But you already have that power. It's in your hands right now, as we speak. Lift it to your lips and drink!"

But of course we stare back uncomprehendingly, and then wonder why the prayer was never answered.

Or maybe I'm wrong, and it's nothing like that at all. But I couldn't help thinking of it.