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:
Prayer, properly speaking, is a petition which we make to God for the things which pertain to our salvation.
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