A note about Prayer

To continue blogging on this panentheism theme, I want to say something about prayer. Many panentheists hold, for various reasons, that God does not answer our petitions. In other words, if I pray to God to help my team win the big game, or my sick dog to get better, God is not the kind of entity that will intervene to answer that prayer.

Let us not concern ourselves here with why some panentheists deny the efficacy of petitionary prayer. Let us just grant for the moment their contention that such prayers cannot be answered.

I often teach panentheism in my intro to philosophy courses, and bring up this denial of petitionary prayer. Inevitably concerns are expressed about this fact. It seems that our modern culture has reduced prayer to the petitionary variety - prayer = asking God for things.

But there are other kinds of prayer that a panentheist would not only accept, but celebrate. There are prayers of adoration, in which the glory of the divine is celebrated, prayers of thanksgiving, in which we express gratitude for the world and our blessings, and contemplative prayer in which we recognize our unity with the divine.

In short, one can have a very rich prayer life without petitionary prayer. In fact, petitionary prayer should probably be thought of as prayer at its most shallow.