Mending What Is Broken

ACROSS the ancient world, people addressed beings greater than themselves in petition, in grief and in praise. The scholar of ancient religion Alan Lenzi has gathered many such prayers from ancient Mesopotamia, and the habit is far older than any of today's religions.

In this piece I want to suggest that prayer, in many of its forms, serves one purpose: finding oneness in what is fragmented, whether that fragmentation lies between humanity and God, between people, or within the self. I will test that idea through three different lenses: a Christian reading of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible; the language of Psalm 133; and the sceptical account of the nineteenth-century German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, who thought God was a projection of the human mind. Together, they reveal a shared theme of fragmentation, and show prayer as a way of its mending.

Oneness With God

To begin, we pray to recover a closeness with God that has been lost. This is the shape of the story that runs through the Pentateuch. In the beginning, God looks on creation and declares it “very good” (Genesis 1:31), and is pictured “walking in the garden” he made for the first humans: humanity and God, the story suggests, were close enough to bear each other's presence.

But the humans disobey, eating from a tree they had been told to avoid; they become aware of what they have done and hide from God (Genesis 3:1 – 8). Here, in the Christian reading I follow, their wrongdoing passes down to their descendants and breaks the world's original goodness, as a later text in the Apocrypha puts it: “For a grain of evil seed was sown in Adam's heart from the beginning, and how much ungodliness it has produced until now, and will produce until the time of threshing comes!” (2 Esdras 4:30).

Even so, across the Pentateuch God is shown listening to particular people despite the world's brokenness: brief moments of oneness between human and divine will. In Genesis 18, Abraham pleads with God to spare the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, and God agrees: “For the sake of ten I will not destroy it” (Genesis 18:32), though not even ten righteous people can be found there, and thus the cities were destroyed in the end.

When Abraham's descendants, the Israelites, groan under slavery in Egypt, “God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” (Exodus 2:24): God is shown standing in solidarity with them in their suffering. Even when the Israelites lose that closeness altogether, worshipping a golden calf after leaving Egypt, their leader Moses implores God, “O Lord, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand?” God relents, cancelling the disaster he had planned (Exodus 32:11, 14).

Within and despite wrongdoing, the people of the Pentateuch pray, petitioning, praising and groaning; and when their wills align with God's, however briefly, he responds. We pray to be at one with God, if only for a moment.

Oneness With Each Other

The same idea appears in Psalm 133, a short hymn in praise of unity. Its first verse calls it “good and pleasant” when brothers live together in unity, language that echoes the goodness of the Genesis creation myth, as if harmony between people were itself a small restoration of what was lost.

The next two verses compare this unity to “the precious oil on the head” and to “the dew of Hermon, which falls on the mountains of Zion”, images which evoke both sacrifice and heaven. As the notes in The New Oxford Annotated Bible, edited by Herbert May and Bruce Metzger, explain, the oil running down “upon the beard of Aaron” recalls Aaron, Moses' brother and the first of Israel's priests; and other psalms make explicit that prayer is itself a kind of offering: “Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving” (Psalm 50:14).

Hermon, the highest mountain in the region, is linked here to Zion, another name for Jerusalem. The scholar George Lawless, writing on St Augustine's commentary on this psalm, explains that Zion stood for the Church: a community at one with each other, living quietly, peacefully and humbly, and offering prayers in place of complaints.

Unity between people, in other words, is bound up with sacrifice and with Zion, and both point back to prayer. From this, we see that prayer draws one another into unity, foreshadowing the place where, in the psalm's last line, “the Lord ordained his blessing, life forevermore” (Psalm 133:3). Christians read this as a glimpse of the heaven described at the end of the New Testament, where God “will wipe every tear” and “mourning and crying and pain will be no more” (Revelation 21:4).

In unity we pray, to mend the world's wounds.

Oneness With Ourselves

But what if God is not there at all, and is only a creation of the human mind? Even then, I want to suggest, prayer has a purpose: to become at one with ourselves. In The Essence of Christianity (1841), Feuerbach argued that theology is really a disguised study of human beings: God is not a separate being but, in his words, “the manifested inward nature” of humanity.

In this view, God is what results when people split off the best parts of themselves and project them outward as something they can depend on. “Prayer,” Feuerbach wrote, “is the self-division of man into two beings, a dialogue of man with himself, with his heart.” Prayer, then, is a kind of self-address. Our feelings, on this account, are treated as all-powerful, because we address them to a figure we have ourselves made almighty.

Feuerbach's argument can be pushed further. If God is the product of a human tendency to divide the self, then God becomes what scholars call a fetish. The word here is used in its academic sense, not its everyday one: in anthropology, a fetish is an object of worship believed to hold powers it does not really have; in psychoanalysis, a fetish is a symbol that stands in for, and disguises, something a person actually knows or desires, as the film theorist Laura Mulvey and, more recently, the philosopher Timo Airaksinen have discussed.

If God is nothing but a fetish, he still stands in for what Feuerbach considers truly real, namely nature, the world and humanity, while still satisfying our need for something to depend on.

Feuerbach concluded that we should redirect our reverence away from God and towards nature and humanity instead. However, if God is a fetish in this sense, it does not follow that he can simply be discarded. Airaksinen argues that the usual modern response to a fetish should not be suppression but toleration: understanding it for what it is, and leaving it be. Attempts to stamp out a fetish tend to be futile at best and harmful at worst, and can simply raise up new ones in its place.

In a Feuerbachian view, we may have to tolerate the idea of God and learn to live with it. And if God, in the believer's account, comes before even tohu vavohu (the “formless and void” of Genesis 1:2), the most natural way of working with this particular idea may be the one people have used for millennia: prayer. If, for a moment, the person praying feels at one with God, then in Feuerbach's own terms they are at one with themselves.

Prayer marks, if only briefly, the division healed.

We pray, then, not to make our feelings all-powerful, but to hold a kind of dialogue with our divided selves: to understand, tolerate and accept that division. Just as a fetish can be worked through by understanding it, the self may be made more whole by the same understanding, sought through prayer. So even under a wholly secular account of God as a projection of the self, prayer keeps its value: it brings the pieces back into conversation.

What Prayer Does

In both the religious and the secular account, prayer joins together what has been broken: a relationship with God, a divided community or a divided self. Believers' petitions are often attempts to right what they see as injustice. Contemplating the state of the world in prayer can be a way of making sense of suffering and of bringing a scattered mind back to stillness. Praying for the dead, in many traditions, bridges the gap between the living and those they have lost. Prayer may or may not alter the course of events, but it can give the person praying the strength to face brokenness directly.

Research on prayer and wellbeing points in a similar direction, though it measures the person praying rather than settling any question about God. The anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann has argued that prayer can allow a good inner feeling to be experienced as though it came from outside oneself, which may help explain its comforting effect.

A student study by C. D. Groover at Liberty University reported that Christians could reduce anxiety while praying through greater self-awareness rather than avoidance. And a study of veterans of the Bosnian war by the researchers Pajević, Sinanović and Hasanović found that those who regularly performed Islamic prayer showed lower tendencies towards impulsiveness and aggression than those who did not. These are modest findings from different traditions, and they cannot show what causes what; but together they suggest that prayer can steady the person who prays, whatever one believes about who, if anyone, is listening.

We pray, in the end, because prayer is a way into repairing what is broken in our world, whether that is a crack in the ceiling, a debt unpaid or a loved one dying too soon. In the very act of praying, the person who prays is strengthened to face that brokenness, and moves a little closer to oneness: with a higher being, with other people, or with themselves.