Prayer

Prayer is usually sorted by what it does, petition, praise, thanksgiving, confession, intercession, but the more revealing division is by form, because form is what a tradition actually teaches and enforces.

Fixed prayer is set text at set times. Muslims pray five times daily at hours determined by the sun, facing Mecca, in a sequence of standing, bowing, prostrating and sitting that is identical in Jakarta and in Lagos. Observant Jews pray three times a day from a fixed liturgy, and the obligation attaches to the hour rather than to the mood. Christian monastic communities divide the day into offices and rise in the night for one of them. The point of fixity is precisely that it does not depend on wanting to.

Free prayer is composed while it is spoken. It dominates Protestant and especially evangelical practice, where praying aloud extempore in a group is a normal acquired skill and reading a written prayer can be heard as insincere. The two forms have been in real tension rather than polite coexistence: the English quarrels over set liturgy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were about exactly this, and people were imprisoned over it.

Silent prayer dispenses with words. Quaker meeting waits without any programme at all. Orthodox hesychasm repeats one sentence until it sinks below deliberate thought. Catholic contemplative prayer aims at wordless attention and has a technical literature on how to tell that from mere absence of mind.

The body is not incidental to any of it. Muslims prostrate; Orthodox Christians make full prostrations in Lent; Jews bend at named points of the standing prayer and rise on the toes at others; Hindus touch the feet of an image or a teacher; Tibetan pilgrims measure a route in body-lengths. Where a tradition specifies what to do with your knees, it is making a claim about what prayer is.

Every tradition that prays has had to meet the obvious objection, and the answers are not the same answer in different words.

The petitionary problem is sharpest where God is held to be both all-knowing and unchanging: if God already knows the need and has already settled the outcome, asking can neither inform nor persuade. Classical Christian and Muslim theology generally answers that prayer is a cause God has ordained rather than a lever applied to God, and that its principal effect is on the one praying. That is a coherent answer, and it satisfies almost nobody in distress, which is why the practice has always outrun its own theology.

Traditions without a personal God pray anyway, and this is where comparison earns its keep. Theravada Buddhist chanting is not addressed to a being who can grant requests; it is understood to settle and purify the mind of the chanter and to generate merit. Recitation before a Buddha image is not petition in the Abrahamic sense, and calling it that is among the commonest errors in general accounts. Jain practice is stricter still: the liberated souls invoked in the central Jain formula cannot intervene and are not asked to, and the recitation is an act of orientation rather than of request. To read either as a weaker form of asking God for things is to misdescribe it.

Efficacy studies exist and are worth stating plainly. Trials of intercessory prayer for medical outcomes, including a large multi-site study of cardiac patients published in 2006, have not found benefit. Believers reasonably object that the design assumes exactly the mechanical account of prayer their own theologians reject, and that a God who responded to randomisation would be a different sort of God. Nothing in the results settles whether prayer is worth doing, and most people who pray have never treated it primarily as a means of obtaining outcomes.

The most consequential thing about prayer is not what it asks for but that it recurs. A religion that fixes prayer times has taken possession of its adherents' days, and that is a larger claim on a life than any doctrine.

Islam is the clearest case. The five prayers are tied to solar positions, so the schedule shifts through the year and differs by latitude, and in high northern summers jurists have had to rule on what to do where night barely falls. The call to prayer sets the acoustic character of a Muslim city. Employers, airlines, hospitals and armies accommodate it, and where they decline to, it becomes a matter for the courts.

Judaism fixes three services and attaches short blessings to a great many ordinary acts, so that the day is punctuated by formulas rather than only by services. Christian monasticism built an entire architecture of time: the offices, the bell, the rising in the dark. It shaped European timekeeping itself, and the mechanical clock was developed in part to wake monks reliably.

There is a comparative point here that resists the usual framing. Fixed prayer is often described as a burden that sincerity lightens, but practitioners across these traditions describe the opposite relation: the schedule is what carries them when sincerity is absent, and the days it is hardest to pray are held to be the days it matters most. It works in the way a rule of exercise works. This is why the traditions that keep it are entirely unembarrassed about the mechanical quality of the obligation, and why converts often report the schedule, rather than the belief, as the thing that changed their life.