Why Pray?

In a conversation last night we were discussing the nature of prayer.  My specific question was this: When you pray, what is the expected outcome?

One response placed the effect of prayer into two categories.  The first is that a prayer is a petition for God to intervene.  The second is for prayer to effect a change in the individual in order to understand things either better or more clearly.

I differed from both of these views in that I look at it in relation to God's position as an eternally present being.  This means that God does not actually change God's mind, at least in a way that makes sense to human understanding.  A change of mind comes at the end of a process of deciding between alternatives in which one expected outcome outweighs another expected outcome.  For God, as an eternally present being, all outcomes are present and there are simply no unknowns.  In fact, there are no real alternatives since all possibilities coexist eternally.

I couched prayer in terms of God's eternally present plan in which God's will works out in our midst.  Now it is clear from Scripture that we are to pray to ask of God what we desire, to ask God to intervene, to confess our sins to God, to pray for those who are ill, etc.  However, my question, in light of God's eternally present plan and will, was what the actual effect of prayer is.  Thus, if I make that prayer am I expecting a specific intervention from God that corresponds to an expected outcome?  That is to say, if I do not pray, said outcome will not occur?  The problem with this is that it makes God's eternally present will contingent upon human petition.  That does not seem to make a whole lot of sense.

My answer is that prayer is a means to work out our faith in a way that the working of God's eternally present will in our midst is revealed thus making what is incoherent coherent, and what is unintelligible, intelligible.  It is not to ask that God intervene in a specific miraculous way on our behalf as if not praying will not effect change.  It is to ask God to reveal what God has already planned in the midst of otherwise incoherent events to render them intelligible.  Prayer is thus a means of grace that we enact through faith.

The problem with this view, as it was put to me, is that it seems fatalistic.  If God's will is already determines, then why pray at all?  It seemed to be a cynical view of prayer that when we pray God does not actually intervene as if we are making a request to someone who says, "Sure I'll do that" or "Sorry, but I must deny your request at this time".

So why pray if God's will is an eternally present and does not "change"?  Why do I pray if all I am doing is asking for God to reveal God's plan?  And if God's plan is predetermined, then it seems that we have no freedom in the matter.  It all seems overly deterministic and hangs its hat on predestination.  In one sense this is true.  But because I cannot tell you for certain what will happen next, I still have to make choices and therefore, I still have freedom.  Even if God's will is predestined, since we cannot be sure what that looks like, we still have to choose and ask God to reveal that will to us.  We simply cannot ask this unless we have free wills to ask.  In this way I am certainly in the compatibilist camp with respect to the nature of God's will and the human will.  Even if our choices are predestined by God, we are still acting in freedom to make those choices since even if God determined our choices, we are simply not aware of that in practice.

So why pray?  The answer is that I pray because I cannot foresee the future, I cannot easily discern God's will for me by looking at the past that I know, and I cannot discern God's will readily for even my neighbor, much less the rest of the cosmos.  I pray because I hope that my desires for the world match God's own.  I pray to make my own will coincide with the will of God.  I pray that my incoherent experiences that make no sense to me will cohere and make sense.  I pray to observe the two commandments that Jesus reveals to be the most important: To love God with all the heart, with all the soul, and with all the mind, and to love one's neighbor as oneself.  I pray to let God be God and to let the chaos of our world be relative to that Word that gives order to it all – even when I cannot perceive any order at all.  I pray in order to change and be more receptive to the things of God that are outside of my reach in order to grasp them, even for a moment.

So do I pray for others and make petitions?  Yes.  But I do so not with the expectation that my prayer will result in the desired effect and without which the desired effect will not occur.  I petition God so that my own desires will be compatible with the very eternally present will and plan of God.  Prayer is, in a word, faith seeking understanding.

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