The selfish desire of hopeful prayer

While waiting for a bus, Henna Cundill contemplates how prayer transforms the uncomfortable into imaginative hope.

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

A woman leans against the glass of a bus shelter while waiting, she clasps a bag.

“Try praying” suggests the bus as it pulls up. Ironic, really, given how much of my life I’ve spent in this draughty shelter, earnestly praying that a late bus would just turn up. Well, here is a bus, but it is not the one I’m waiting for. However, its slogan has lodged in my mind. Perhaps I should pray anyway, just to pass the time? What would I pray for right now, beyond the bus I want? Are any of my other prayer requests something that God is likely to countenance? I’m all too well aware that there are some things on my personal wish-list that the Almighty is definitely not going to grant.

In 2022 a Church of England survey found that nearly half the population (48 per cent) claims to pray, and the numbers are apparently even higher among the 18-24 age bracket. In the breakdown of the statistics, it can be seen that the poll respondents prayed for all the ‘right’ things – for peace, forgiveness, guidance, and for those in need. So far, so pious. Would any of us really admit to a pollster that we pray for the other, slightly more selfish things – a convenient parking space, good weather on a holiday? Such prayers are suitably benign, but probably also pointless. God, surely, has better things to do. We still pray them though. Well, I do anyway. Maybe you are better than me, but I’ll go ahead and admit to all those little, probably pointless prayers – prayers revealing that inwardly I’m quite selfish, and a bit of a narcissist, a girl who just wants an easy life and an on-time bus.

Perhaps the uncomfortable truth here is that a lot of prayer is born out of a desire for ease and comfort. Prayers for peace, forgiveness, guidance, and even prayers for others in need can be no less a response to a sense of discomfort or discontent than the prayers to get me out of this draughty bus shelter. But such desires are entirely natural. After all, as humans we are programmed to maintain homeostasis. Within that, most functions can happen internally – so when the individual body is too hot, it sweats; when the body is too cold, it shivers (like me in this shelter right now). It’s all about control.

But sometimes the discomforts are emotional, and we are dependent on external factors to maintain or regain our homeostatic sense of peace – factors that are out of our (or any person’s) control. To pray is to make a cognitive response to that realisation, to seek some input from a higher power. There is nothing I can do to make the bus come on time, and in the absence of peace, forgiveness, guidance, or when contemplating the multifarious sicknesses and struggles of my fellow human beings – well, I realise that maybe damn near everything is out of my control. God, can you do something about this? It’s making me uncomfortable.

Oddly enough, even the most well-known of Christian prayers, the so-called “Lord’s Prayer” (Our Father, who art in Heaven… etc. etc.) makes no bones about acknowledging this. Part way through, like hungry children who loiter in the kitchen whilst mother is cooking dinner, unashamed the pray-ers cry out: “Give us this day our daily bread.” It is a daily moment of divinely sanctioned gimme, gimme, gimme. My selfish inner narcissist loves that bit.

I’m not generally praying for bread; I have bread. But to me the bread is a metaphor for all my inner needs and appetites. I think one of the early Christian writers, Augustine of Hippo, grasped this uncomfortable truth also. Reflecting on the brutal honesty of the prayers which are found in the Bible’s Book of Psalms, he wrote: “Your desire is your prayer, your prayer is your desire.” Augustine was not advocating that such desires should be uncritically indulged, but that pray-ers should be honest enough to verbalise their desires, to acknowledge them before God, and in that way allow sunshine to become the best disinfectant.

There is, perhaps, no bleaker statement than the words, “I haven’t got a prayer.” Where there is prayer, there is imagination, and imagination is a sign of hope.

How interesting that the Lord’s Prayer acknowledges this basic human need – this need to say, “God, life is uncomfortable, and I don’t like this feeling.” I wonder about the other 52 per cent of the poll respondents, the ones who said that they didn’t pray. What on earth do they do with their appetites, with their difficulties, or with their sense of malaise? Because I think Augustine was right: prayer is all about desire, and desire is about hope for satiety – be it physical, emotional, or cognitive. Prayer is anticipating that our desires can or might be met by someone or something, out there somewhere, and allowing ourselves to imagine how that might come to be. There is, perhaps, no bleaker statement than the words, “I haven’t got a prayer.” Where there is prayer, there is imagination, and imagination is a sign of hope.

It takes a bit of courage, sometimes, to admit to what we imagine, what we secretly hope for. It might be a world of peace and prosperity for all, but it might also be for the demise of an enemy or for a successful and stress-free life. Psychologists Ann and Barry Ulanov observe that in this way, all prayer is confession, even the prayers where we are asking for stuff. By coming face-to-face with God, we also have to come face-to-face with ourselves, including our selfishness and narcissistic longing.

So, have I got the courage to verbalise my personal wish-list? To take this idle moment and allow my imagination to present God with all my deepest, darkest desires? Well, it sounds like it might be good for me, whether God is listening or not. Prayer, it seems, is an opportunity for some gritty self-reflection and deep personal growth. So why not? Here goes:

“Dear Heavenly Father…

…Oh, never mind, my bus is here.

Amen.”

Article

Creed

Redemption

16 January 2024

4 min read

Discover the kindness of a Blue Monday snowfall

Waking to a new world, Henna Cundill considers the transformation of more than just the view.

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

Two small chidlren push a curtain aside to stare out the window at snow.

“Blue Monday” in Aberdeenshire (the third Monday in January) turned out to be a “white Monday” in the end. The snow began on Sunday evening, and it continued on and off throughout the night. It was accompanied by an atmospheric howling wind, which woke me up from time to time. At each waking I peeped through the window to see the world gradually disappear under a thick white blanket.

Monday morning was a liminal place – all of us dressed for work and school but drifting about the house as if it were still the weekend. We live next to a busy road, but there were few cars and what traffic noise there was had become strangely muted. None of us could settle to anything, we simply alternated peering out of the windows with checking online for news about school. Then came the announcement that school would open at 10am (there’s little that really stops for snow in Aberdeenshire) so on went the wellies and the woollies and off we went down the front path, both excited and a little awed to sully the unbroken blanket of white with those first few footprints.

Snow suspends the rule that we have to be standoffish and dour, even in Scotland.

But as we walked, we noticed that our footprints weren’t at all the first. Tiny scratch marks testified that the sparrows, the robin, and the blackbirds had long been out and about, busy with their day’s travail. A slinky line of pawprints revealed the neighbour’s cat had paid us a visit too. All around our house, countless tiny stories of industry and encounter had already been told – (some sliding pawmarks and a few stray feathers suggested a gripping plot twist.) Later that morning, it began to snow again, and all these stories gradually disappeared. By the time my boys came tramping home from school, they were once more tasked with picking out a brand-new path across a fresh unbroken expanse of white.

After dinner I went for my own habitual walk. We’d had yet more flurries, so I had to make new footsteps all over again. By then the wind had dropped, the sky was crystal clear, and the snow had gone from powdery to satisfyingly crunchy underfoot. It felt like an awe-filled privilege to leave my trail of footprints. I walked one of my usual routes, but the white covering had softened both the landscape and the soundscape, making everything seem new and unfamiliar. As I trailed back through the housing estate, I noticed snowmen that had popped up in some front gardens, and neighbours who were chatting as they helped each other to shovel driveways and grit paths. Snow suspends the rule that we have to be standoffish and dour, even in Scotland.

What if I could always watch yesterday’s path being gently erased, and always have another chance to make new?

All in all, it was difficult to feel blue on a white Monday. The snow made it feel as if nothing was permanent, let alone usual. There was no drudgery, no same-old, same-old. I wondered if I could become like one of those tiny birds, skipping lightly through each day’s work? Even whilst canny to the fact that a certain sneaky cat was prowling about. By the time I got home, there were new prints from him also.

In the Bible, snow appears as a metaphor for forgiveness, for making a fresh start. We read in the book of Isaiah: “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.” There is much in this idea that runs counter to how our modern society responds to misdeeds – especially in this age of instant messaging and social media, when photographic evidence of our blunders can travel the world instantly and be preserved for posterity. There is also much that runs counter to how I respond to myself when I mess things up. It is not usually the howling wind that keeps me up with ‘the dreads’ on a Sunday night, but my mind’s hobby of regurgitating memories of the previous week’s mistakes, misspeaks, and misunderstandings. In the pre-dawn hours of a Monday morning, I am usually awake and well occupied with the prospect that, in the week to come, I will almost certainly make many of those same mistakes again. I walk those same old paths, re-tread those familiar footsteps – the inevitability of my own imperfection is ever before me.

But what if I peered out of the window at the daybreak of every Monday morning and found that there was snow? That I was held in a liminal moment – less sure of what the coming week would hold. What if I could always watch yesterday’s path being gently erased, and always have another chance to make new? Ideas such as this are at the heart of the Christian hope. In the Bible, the Psalmist writes that God does not treat us as our sins deserve, nor repay us according to our mistakes. Instead, God takes them away so infinitely that they are: “as far as the East is from the West.” They are gone, from red as scarlet to as white as snow.

I suppose snow every Monday would be inconvenient. But snow on Blue Monday felt like a kindness – a gentle rendering of the familiar into the unfamiliar, allowing me to see things anew, to reflect, to reconsider, to redirect my steps in certain ways. As I write, there is more snow falling. Later I shall have to go out with the shovel and the grit, but I won’t do it yet. If I leave it for now, then when my boys return from school in a few minutes time, they too can tread one more time with awe across a fresh, unbroken expanse of white.