What's the point of prayer?

Albert Camus said, "Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world."

I can’t stop thinking about it. I was grappling with it yesterday, as you saw on the blog. From birth we're preprogrammed to expect intimacy. As babies, we cry out and we're immediately comforted by mom or dad. As many times as we shout into the dark, there's mama. She assures us: "I'm right here. I'm here."

We grow up shouting into the dark, carving a path through life's obstacles with a kind of relational echolocation. Under the protection of others, we begin to challenge our unknowns. We step out a little farther each time, always keeping within reach of mom and dad. Testing the unknown. Touching the void. Learning with our fingers.

One day, dad lets go of the bicycle seat and we balance on our own. We start to ride on our own. We learn that we can stand up, and move forward, without him behind us. I remember the first night I stayed over at a friend's house, and I wanted to call home just to make sure my mom and dad were still there. "We're here. Go have fun. We'll be here in the morning." I chickened out that night. They came to pick me up.

We grow. We become braver with every risk we take. Every scrape hardens us, every bruise fortifies us, every big hill beckons us back on the bicycle for one more go. We cry out for mom and dad less and less. We let the rigid structure of familial ties be replaced--slowly, at first--by adolescent friendships and then adult relationships.

And we enjoy the turbulence, the risk. Admit it, you loved all of the drama of high school. After all, you were only drinking deeper, "sucking out all the marrow of life" as Thoreau said. Living dangerously. And the rewards were greater and greater with each new risk we took as we learned and grew. We pass notes, with no idea how they’ll be received. “Do you like me?--Check ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’” In high school, I bought a girl a candy-bar. Yes, I was a late bloomer. “I see you every day coming out of art class. I just wanted to buy you a candy bar and introduce myself.” She shot me down. The whole thing was just delicious; I was putting myself out there.

I think something happens to us in our twenties, in those earliest flirtations with adulthood. As we walk the twenty-somethings’ tightrope, balancing all these new, adult responsibilities, and faced with a new weightiness of purpose, we begin to wonder if all this risk is worth it. The risk is greater. I was out on my own, in a brand new city, having no clue how to live. Looking back, I can see how I got by on luck and cheap-shots, and cheap shots, just a ball of nerves.

Or maybe we think we’re too far out on the line to turn back. As we walk this tightrope of adulthood for the first time, we begin to look down and wonder, How far is this drop? where’s my safety net? who’s going to catch me if I fall? am I out on the wire alone? Our legs get all shaky. We’re really risking it all, now. We’re such a long way, now, from that little boy daring to keep pedaling away from dad. We stop daring ourselves to lean into those turns. We start thinking about how we’re going to slow this thing down. Crash imminent.

I think there's this moment, in our adulthood, where we cry out in the dark one last time and receive no reply at all. The ol’ quarter-life crisis, as it’s called. That’s what Camus meant by an absurdity born of confronting an unreasonable silence. The great irony that, for all our human endeavors, and for all our curiosity, we were placed alone in a silent universe. We cry out; no one answers. You’re on your own, kid.

Welcome to adulthood.

Even we who believe in God must pray in expectation and patiently wait for him to act. We don’t get answers right away. I spent all of my twenties wondering if he even answers us at all, until one of my desperate pleas was heard. I spent nearly a decade sitting in silence, in prayer before a quiet God, feeling like a fool. Feeling like my feeble prayers were too weak to be heard. Feeling like my strong, passionate cries fell on deaf ears. Sometimes I felt so rotten, so wicked, that my prayers had to have been just bouncing off the ceiling and falling back down, instead of ascending up to heaven.

The truth is, there are so few immediate answers in prayer--it’s so rare--that we have nothing tangible to hang our faith on. How many bible verses are about ‘waiting on the Lord?’ We’re seldom assured that our prayers will be granted, but we’re told over and over and over to watch and wait, ‘wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord,’ as the prophet Jeremiah put it. C.S. Lewis said that our confidence to pray must be born out of a personal relationship with our prayers’ recipient, with God. You’ve got to trust that God is listening, and trust his character, that he wants what’s best for you.

This comes not by knowing facts about God, but rather knowing God himself. Knowing Christ’s goodness and trusting his presence. As Lewis said, “Our assurance--if we reach an assurance--that God always hears and sometimes grants our prayers, and that apparent grantings are not merely fortuitous, can only come in the same sort of way.” He's saying that, yes, our cries to God himself often yield no response. We must simply trust that God heard us. And wait.

But oh, the absurdity in that.

So we see that as infants, we learn to cry out for help in the dark, but the great irony of our adult life is that despite our desire for answers, we’re most often met with utter silence. Camus rightly calls this absurdity. It is absurd to desire answers when we’ve been stationed in a universe that is unwilling to reason with us. A quiet world, alone.

We’re out here on our own--that’s how it feels. The stars refuse to tell us why we belong. The planets keep silent about their meaning. We ask the universe for answers and the universe gives us more irony, at best.

Not even the darkness of our night sky can serve as a metaphor for the flat emptiness of being we so often feel when we pray, that silence and sightlessness when we shut our eyes. Those foolish pleas. The goofiness of sitting alone in your closet, or kneeling. When we close our eyes, we see a black not speckled with stars. That’s irony on a grand scale. It feels like we are nothing, shouting into a great Nothing.

That’s what Camus meant when he said it’s absurd, how great our human need is and how seemingly disinterested our universe has been in meeting it. We grew up crying to mommy and daddy, but in our adulthood we find we have no one to cry to. No one’s coming to save us. No one’s going to make that rent for you, no one’s paying your car payment, no one’s going to fix your broken relationships, no one’s buying you groceries, or cooking for you, no one’s getting you dressed in the morning, no one will negotiate a better deal for you, no one will guard you from a scam. You’ve got to make your way on your own, now.

And no one’s got a hand on the bicycle seat. You’re out on a wire with no safety net, in your twenties. No one’s telling you where you might fit. No one’s giving you a purpose, work to fall back on. You’ve got to make a life for yourself. You’re calling the shots now. You’ve got to manage your own household. You cry for help but silence is the only answer that you ever receive. Dad’s not coming, I’ve got to change this tire on my own. Mom isn’t here, I have to balance this checkbook myself. I have to learn to adult, as we say.

Aren’t you tempted to despair? Doesn’t this absurdist view of life make you so sad? I don't know if Camus can be considered postmodern but this idea of absurdism is as characteristically bleak as any postmodern view. The problem with postmodernism is that its cynicism, its bleakness, and its detachment--that naval gazing sort of self-referentialism--offers no redemption whatsoever. Irony is great for pointing out problems--the gaps between what’s said and what’s meant--but it never offers solutions.

As David Foster Wallace put it, “Irony is singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks.” Postmodernism teaches us that life has no meaning, there are no great truths, only competing perspectives. Absurdism says, Life's random, none of this is true in any objective sort of way. And neither view seeks to establish a way of being which will find us fulfilled, absolved, or just able to rest.

Rick and Morty has been one of those shows that turns a mirror toward our generation, and I love it for its sharp commentary and philosophical slant. Morty said, “On one of our adventures, Rick and I basically destroyed the whole world. So we bailed on that reality, and came to this one... we buried ourselves... and every morning, I eat breakfast twenty yards away from my own rotting corpse...” bleak, huh? He goes on, it gets worse: “Nobody exists on purpose. Nobody belongs anywhere. Everybody's gonna die. Come watch TV.”

Maybe I’m wrong, but I feel like we’re all feeling that. The absurdity of never knowing anything, but still trying to get some fiber in your diet.

No one exists on purpose. There must be more to this, being human. There has to be something out there, someone out there, to whom we might call and receive an answer. Irony needs something in the way of redemption, lest we despair.

I hope that postmodernism is dying. I think it is. And in its place, I think I see a cool, new set of values emerging. Sincerity is cool again. People are trying to believe things again. Post-postmodernism could be marked by a return to some higher ideal, to endeavoring, to the value of a life lived in hopefulness for the future and curiosity toward the Great Unknown. Post-postmodernism could mean a re-enchantment of our world--new magic.

That's the point of praying, by the way, in case you thought I was never going to answer the question. We pray for us, not for God. We pray to maintain hopefulness in the bleak. We pray for new magic. We’re desperate for new magic.

Sincerity teaches us to keep crying into the dark, keep waiting for rescue, and keep hope alive. Earnestly seek these things, young one. Nothing places us into the future quite like hope, after all. And without hope, don’t we die inside?

Sincerity invites us to pursue community, to live generously, to believe the best in one another, to view others with dignity, to unashamedly enjoy the things we find awesome. “Hope is all that places us in the future,” I think that’s another Camus quote. It’s worth it to have hope. Hope is what places present-you in a future reality. Hope gets ya there.

That's it, man. That’s the whole point of praying. It's to be sincere. It’s to cultivate sincerity. It’s to wish, like a kid again. It’s new magic. It's sincerely hoping and letting that hope shape the future, place us in the future. It’s letting hope serve as a beacon. Prayer is just sending hope out there, probing into the future.

But is that good enough to keep praying? Will that convince anyone who doesn’t pray, to start praying? Doesn't even sincerity for sincerity's sake offer so few answers? Why combat irony with sincerity, prayerfulness, and hopefulness? What kind of assurance can I have of anything when I pray? Søren Kierkegaard knew just how absurd faith and hope are in this upside-down world. Yet, as he writes in Fear and Trembling:

“If people in our times decline to be satisfied with love, as is proclaimed from various sides, where will we finally land? In worldly shrewdness, in mean calculation, in paltriness and baseness, in all that which renders man's divine origin doubtful.

Were it not better to stand fast in the faith, and better that he that standeth take heed lest he fall; for the movement of faith must ever be made by virtue of the absurd, but, note well, in such wise that one does not lose the things of this world but wholly and entirely regains them.”

Kierkegaard’s conclusion comes after exploring the absurdity of Abraham’s faith in God, the ‘enormous paradox’ that without hope, Abraham’s actions toward Isaac on Mount Moriah would be tantamount to murder. Of course, we know God was testing Abraham and would not allow Isaac to be killed in the end. He will provide the offering. But that’s Abraham’s hope, right?

You know the story well: Abraham and Sarah are unable to conceive. God promises that Abraham will be the father of many nations, but Abraham must wait for the promise to be fulfilled. Abraham skirts God’s promise by sleeping with another woman. Many years later, Abraham and Sarah are given a boy named Isaac.

Then God asks Abraham to kill Isaac, his long anticipated boy. His ‘only begotten son,’ that’s where we get that phrase from. Abraham faithfully takes Isaac to be slaughtered but God stops the sacrifice. God was trying Abraham’s faith. Abraham becomes a key figure in God’s plan to redeem the world, to save us from our sin. His faith pays off. “From me, you did not spare even your own son,” God says, which becomes a redemptive picture--a kind of hope in what’s to come.

Kierkegaard writes of this story, “For if faith is eliminated, having been reduced to a mere nothing, then only the brutal fact remains that Abraham wanted to murder Isaac--which is easy for everybody to imitate who has not the faith--the faith, that is, which renders it most difficult for him.”

Kierkegaard is pointing out the absurdity of the whole thing, the irony, not only that the field of ethics would declare Abraham’s actions murderous while theology sees them as self-sacrificial, but that any other man, with or without faith, would be seen as a murderer by all who read the story. That even Abraham himself must have been thinking, “Am I really about to do this?”

Kierkegaard writes:

“If faith cannot make it a sacred thing to wish to sacrifice one's son, then let the same judgment be visited on Abraham as on any other man.

And if we perchance lack the courage to drive our thoughts to the logical conclusion and to say that Abraham was a murderer, then it were better to acquire that courage, rather than to waste one's time on undeserved encomiums.

The fact is, the ethical expression for what Abraham did is that he wanted to murder Isaac; the religious, that he wanted to sacrifice him. But precisely in this contradiction is contained the fear which may well rob one of one's sleep.”

Catch that? It doesn’t always feel right to do what is right in God’s sight. It often feels ridiculous. So, from our limited perspective, it’s absurd to have faith, and yet we praise Abraham for his faith. We teach our kids to have faith, but not to murder their own children. We punish murder, we reward faith. Faith was credited to Abraham as righteousness and became his saving grace.

Any other man would be jailed for killing his son and yet Abraham is lauded for attempted murder, and, following Abraham’s own example, we strive to live lives of faith. Without faith our world is cold. With faith, we’re often found doing the ridiculous, and doing cold things, like Abraham risking his only begotten son. The irony, the absurdity, the contradiction.

C.S. Lewis said we pray with confidence not because we know about God, but because we know God. It’s our relationship with God that gives us hope to keep taking those risks, keep doing the silly thing, keep calling out, crying out, raising our torches in the dark and plodding forward clumsily. Taking the big risk, the Isaac-sized sacrifices. Abraham was only able to take that step and live in the contradiction because he knew God’s nature. He knew that God would provide a way.

It’s God’s promises that make it worthwhile to have faith. Just a couple of chapters after that verse in Hebrews where it says that Abraham had faith and it was credited to him as righteousness, God promises us, “I will never leave you, nor forsake you.”

Oswald Chambers said it better than I ever could. He writes:

“‘I will never leave you...’--not for any reason; not my sin, selfishness, stubbornness, nor waywardness. Have I really let God say to me that He will never leave me? If I have not truly heard this assurance of God, then let me listen again.

‘I will never...forsake you.’ Sometimes it is not the difficulty of life but the drudgery of it that makes me think God will forsake me. When there is no major difficulty to overcome, no vision from God, nothing wonderful or beautiful--just the everyday activities of life--do I hear God’s assurance even in these?”

When we cry out and are met with silence, and when--for all our cries--the universe offers so few answers, when the result of our prayers is delayed, our assurance is that we know God. We know his goodness. We can trust his promises. For all of the absurdity of everything all around us, the promise makes hope worth it. Makes prayer worth it.

Our assurance is that God has promised us a great many things, including, “I will never leave you, nor forsake you.” It’s that promise that makes faith make sense in this upside-down, paradoxical, contradictory world. I know it took me a long time to get to that point, but man, I want to trust all this. I want to believe all this. I’m desperate for new magic. Reading Camus and Lewis and Kierkegaard all the same time might have been a mistake...