One of the minor characters of Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild is the old man to whom Krakauer gave the name 'Ron Franz.' He was 80 years old when his and Christopher McCandless's paths crossed. McCandless made indelible impressions on the people he met, but he affected Franz more than anyone else, so much so that the old man with no surviving next of kin wanted to adopt the 24 year old as his grandson. The story of their encounter is recounted in the chapter entitled 'Anza-Borrego' and is also well told in the movie version of Krakauer's book. Franz came to pin his hopes on the remarkable young man and longed for his return from Alaska. When he heard from a hitchhiker that McCandless had died, he and his faith were shattered:
"When Alex left for Alaska," Franz remembers, "I prayed. I asked God to keep his finger on the shoulder of that one; I told him that boy was special. But he let Alex die. So on December 26, when I learned what happened, I renounced the Lord. I withdrew my church membership and became an atheist. I decided I couldn't believe in a God who would let something that terrible happen to a boy like Alex." (p. 60)
This sort of reaction is of course not uncommon, and the same goes for its opposite number: people will often proclaim, with more or less seriousness, the existence of God when some good thing happens to them. "I won the lottery! God exists after all!" I am struck by the childishness of such faith and the puerility of such a notion of God. Did Franz really think God would upset the causal nexus to save McCandless from his mistakes? And if Franz was able to believe in God for all those years despite his awareness of the terrible evils of the 20th century, how could his faith be overturned by a single boy's starving to death? It is as if Franz could believe in God when He took away what other people wanted, but not when God took away what he wanted. The egocentricity stares one in the face, and the suspicion arises that faith in God is nothing more than a childish anthropomorphic projection (Feuerbach) or a case of wish-fulfillment (Freud). People whose faith is of this sort think of God as a being who can persuaded via petitionary prayer to deliver material goods and intervene in human struggles. Theirs is a materialistic conception of God, a superstitious notion of God as a Power behind the scenes who exists to supply material wants and who can be cajoled into supplying them by enactment of the appropriate rites and rituals.
My concern is not with Franz's psychology, but with what a mature notion of faith would look like, and whether such a mature notion is even possible. Or is it rather the case that faith in God is inherently and necessarily childish as atheists tend to think? If God is not conceived as a supplier of mundane benefits, as a miraculous intervener in the causal fabric for one's own mundane benefit, to 'smite one's enemies,' save one's friends, etc., is there a way to articulate a sophisticated concept of God that is not sophisticated unto utter vacuity?
Here are some rough suggestions.
1. Although one cannot rule out the possibility of miraculous divine interventions, mature prayer, when petitionary, cannot consist of requests, let alone demands, for material benefits. Petitionary prayer for material benefits — "Give us this day our daily bread" — is the lowest grade of prayer. One asks for mundane benefits whether for oneself, or, as in the case of intercessionary prayer, for another. In its crassest forms it borders on idolatry and superstition. A skier who prays for snow, for example, makes of God a supplier of mundane benefits, and this amounts to idolatry, the worshipping of a false god. God is not a magical appendage to the material world. Talk of a Hail Mary pass, for example, should disgust a seriously religious person.
As for superstition, consider the case of a believer who places a plastic Jesus icon on the dashboard of her car. It seems clear than anyone who believes that a piece of plastic has the power to ward off automotive danger is superstitious. A hunk of mere matter cannot have such magical properties. Superstition in this first sense seems to involve a failure to understand the causal structure of the world or the laws of probability. A flight attendant who attributes her years of flying without mishap to her wearing of a rabbit's foot or St. Christopher's medal is clearly superstitious in this first sense. Such objects have no causal bearing on an airplane's safety.
But no sophisticated believer attributes powers to the icon itself. The sophisticated believer distinguishes between the icon and the spiritual reality or person it represents.
Well, what about the belief that the person represented will ward off danger and protect the believer from physical mishap? That belief too is arguably, though not obviously, superstitious. Why should the Second Person of the Trinity care about one's automotive adventures? Does one really expect, let alone deserve, divine intervention for the sake of one's petty concerns?
But what if the icon serves to remind the believer of her faith commitment rather than to propitiate or influence a godlike person for egoistic ends? Here we approach a form of religious belief that is not superstitious. The believer is not attributing magical powers to a hunk of plastic or a piece of metal. Nor is she invoking a spiritual reality in an attempt to satisfy petty material needs. Her belief transcends the sphere of egoic concerns.
2. The next grade up is petitionary prayer for spiritual benefits. At this level one is not asking for one's daily bread, but for acceptance, equanimity, patience, courage, and the like in the face of the fact that one lacks bread or has cancer. "Thy Will be done." One asks for forgiveness and for the ability to forgive others. One prays for a lively sense of one's own manifold shortcomings, for self-knowledge and freedom from self-deception. One prays, not to be cured of the cancer, but to bear it with courage. One prays for the ability to see one's tribulations under the aspect of eternity or with the sort of detachment with which one contemplates the sufferings of others.
3. Higher still, I should think, is prayer that is wholly non-petitionary. At this level one asks neither for material nor for spiritual benefits. One form of this is prayer is sheer gratitude for what one has. Prayer as thanskgiving. Beyond this there is prayer as pure aspiration, as a straining of the soul upwards. A pure spiritual seeking, ascending, soaring. One seeks to elevate oneself above one's perceived infirmity and wretchedness. One seeks to rise above the paltriness, crudity, baseness of one's usual thoughts and emotions. Not a petitioning, but a self-elevating and a leaving of oneself behind.
4. Prayer as aspiration may then lead on to forms of meditation proper and perhaps infused contemplation. At the stage of meditation the soul enters mental silence and rests there having abandoned all petitioning and aspiring. One is no longer working but resting in mental silence. Within this silence one perhaps receives mystical grace which comes from without the mind.
5. I don't know quite what to do with Weilian prayer. See Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, Routledge 1995, p. 19: "A method of purification: to pray to God, not only in secret as far as men are concerned, but with the thought that God does not exist." Is this the purest form of prayer, prayer bereft of every petition, bereft even of the hope of attaining anything at all, or is this form of prayer but an expression of Weil's extremism?