Prayer as explained by C.S. Lewis

I can take no credit for the contents of this post.  I won't even try to expand or expound or explain further, because this totally blows my mind.  It comes from an essay called "The Efficacy of Prayer" by C.S. Lewis that attempts to answer the question "Does prayer work?"  I'm tempted to just type the entire essay, so if these (long) excerpts interest you - go read it here, it's only 4 pages long, and you'll be halfway there once you finish reading this post!  Anyway, the entire essay, and these excerpts, really help me think about the mystery of prayer, and about the times when I've asked myself, "What's the point of praying about ____?  Does prayer even work?"


We make requests of our fellow creatures as well as of God: we ask for the salt, we ask for a raise in pay, we ask a friend to feed the cat while we are on our holidays, we ask a woman to marry us.  Sometimes we get what we ask for and sometimes not.  But when we do, it is not nearly so easy as one might suppose to prove with scientific certainty a causal connection between the asking and the getting ... As for the lady who consents to marry you - are you sure she had not decided to do so already?  Your proposal, you know, might have been the result, not the cause, of her decision.  A certain important conversation might never have taken place unless she had intended that it should.  Thus in some measure the same doubt that hangs about the causal efficacy of our prayers to God hangs also about our prayers to man.  Whatever we get we might have been going to get anyway.  But only, as I say, in some measure.  Our friend, boss, and wife may tell us that they acted because we asked ... We do not try the control experiment of refusing the raise or breaking off the engagement and then making our request again under fresh conditions.  Our assurance is quite different in kind from scientific knowledge.  It is born out of our personal relation to the other parties; not from knowing things about them but from knowing them.


...The very question "Does prayer work?" puts us in the wrong frame of mind from the outset.  "Work": as if it were magic, or a machine - something that functions automatically.  Prayer is either a sheer illusion or a personal contact between embryonic, incomplete persons (ourselves) and the utterly concrete Person. Prayer in the sense of petition, asking for things, is a small part of it; confession and penitence are its threshold, adoration its sanctuary, the presence and vision and enjoyment of God its bread and wine.

...It would be even worse to think of those who get what they pray for as a sort of court favorites, people who have influence with the throne.  The refused prayer of Christ in Gethsemane is answer enough to that.  And I dare not leave out the hard saying which I once heard from an experienced Christian: "I have seen many striking answers to prayer and more than one that I thought miraculous.  But they usually come at the beginning: before conversion, or soon after it.  As the Christian life proceeds, they tend to be rarer.  The refusals, too, are not only more frequent; they become more unmistakable, more emphatic."

...little people like you and me, if our prayers are sometimes granted, beyond all hope and probability, had better not draw hasty conclusions to our own advantage.  If we were stronger, we might be less tenderly treated.  If we were braver, we might be sent, with far less help, to defend far more desperate posts in the great battle.