Why Do People Pray?

            Why do people pray? I suppose that if you ask that question you will get a wide variety of answers that somehow sound very similar. Books on prayer explain the four forms of prayer: the prayer of petition, the prayer of intercession, the prayer of thanksgiving and the prayer of praise.[i] We will consider each of these forms of prayer separately in later articles, but giving the list doesn’t exactly answer our question of why people pray. It gives various forms that prayer takes, but it doesn’t explain what causes prayer to begin with.

         In considering this question, we need to realize that all our decisions and actions are responses to various realities and situations. We never actually initiate anything. We didn’t initiate our own existence. From the moment of conception, we exist in a time that continually changes but that we cannot change.

As we become independent of other people, we find that, up to a certain point, we can change the space we occupy. We can alter our presence in that space, and we can alter accidental details pertaining to that space, such as buildings and other persons and even the superficial conformation of the space, but we can’t transfer the Rockies to Jupiter or eliminate the Pacific Ocean. There are limits to what we can change. There are realities that lie outside of our ultimate control, like the laws of thermodynamics.

            Even our thoughts and ideas have their source in our experiential knowledge. We cannot form a concept of something outside of that experience. For example, how do you picture an analemma? What is an eighth color in the physical light spectrum? We can put those thoughts and ideas together in a new way, but we cannot conceive of a reality beyond them.

            Yet we continually seek to do so. We want more than we can experience. The physical world and its concepts are vast beyond any human mind to contain, yet they are too small. We want infinity.

            “God has put eternity into man’s heart.”[ii] That desire for the infinite is built into our humanity. We continually reach out for what is beyond our mind to conceive and our hands to grasp.

            Moreover, we seek a living infinity, an infinite reality that responds to our seeking. An inert infinite reality may occupy our minds for a time, like a vast playground with rides and toys will occupy a child, but the time will come when the child wants more than the playground; she wants playmates.

            We, too, seek more than an inert, infinite something. It is the search for that “more than”, in my opinion, that causes us to pray.

[i] Catechism of the Catholic Church #2629 and ff

[ii] Eccles. 3, 11