This is the season of Advent: the time of prayer. Of course we should all pray all the time and not just in this season. I am not a prayerful person but I do pray daily and cannot imagine not doing so. Even King Claudius, whom Charles Lamb said was the least likable character in all Shakespeare, prayed, and had sufficient self-knowledge to know that his prayers were ineffectual:
My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
All must pray to somebody or something. As Homer says (Odyssey 3: 48), ‘Everyone needs the gods.’ Darwinian fundamentalists pray to Holy Charles; Richard Dawkins, I suppose, to the primaeval polyp. The word comes from precari, to beg or entreat. Luis of Grenada (1504–88), the great Dominican authority on prayer, wrote:
The last point is the key. As Jeremy Taylor says, prayer is ‘the ascent of the mind to God’. Sursum corda.Prayer, properly speaking, is a petition which we make to God for the things which pertain to our salvation. But it is also taken in another, broader sense to mean any raising of the heart to God.
I was taught by the nuns that prayer consisted of four essentials: praise of God, thanksgiving for His benefits, confession of sins, and petitions. Most of us concentrate on the last. But what are we allowed to pray for? Origen, following the Stoics, laid down that only spiritual benefits should be sought in prayer. Pelagius, following the Platonists, contradicted him: ‘You cannot pray for virtue.’ Surely St Augustine got it right: ‘It is proper to pray for anything which may be lawfully desired.’ The key here is ‘lawfully’. I pray for the souls of the departed, 15 in particular, and the welfare of the living, my current list containing 32 names.
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