The urge to pray, to send out on the great blog in the sky a theological SOS and/or thank-you note, is so strong a human impulse that even people who don’t believe that anyone hears their prayers, people who have no religious dogma that tells them to whom they ought to pray, pray anyway. I am one of them.
For many people, prayer may be nothing but an atavism from a time when more people believed that someone really did hear their prayers. That kind of prayer may be just a language tick: “Please god let it not rain on the day of the picnic” or “The flight should land in New York by midnight, deo volente” (which I used to think meant, “If God is flying,” since so many of my Latin-knowing friends said it only about air travel).
Some non-Muslims as well as Muslims add “Insh’ Allah” after any cocksure statement that makes them fear the evil-eye, such as, “I think I can make the cross-country drive in two days. . . . Insh’ Allah.” The line between piety and superstition is always hard to draw.
But to whom do the godless pray? My father, the founding publisher of Pulpit Digest (a weekly collection of sermons), used to joke that atheists had a special Dial-a-Prayer number (dial it and no one answers) or that they prayed “to whom it may concern.” Agnostics, too, may pray, like Swinburne in the Garden of Proserpine, to “whatever gods may be.”
But words have power, and the formulas of prayer are often comforting in themselves, even if they are sent out in mental envelopes marked “address unknown.” For many people, the habit of prayer simply comes down to acknowledging that we are not in control of our lives, and hoping against hope that somebody else is. And to the extent that that realization is often calming and empowering, all prayers are answered.
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