ola sigurdsonthe prayer has an influence on its divine addressee is of course awkward,
but what perhaps is obvious from what I have put forward this far is
that prayer is a medium that influences its human sender which has
been observed by theological reflection from Augustine to Søren
Kierkegaard. Through prayer the praying person becomes, so to speak,
more visible to her- or himself in the recognition of how she or he is
dependent on God and by implication also on the rest of creation for
her or his daily livelihood. The positioning enacted by prayer does not
only result in an inner relationship between the human subject and
God that excludes the outer world. On the contrary, prayer ties the
subject together with the rest of humanity and creation. According to
the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, you never pray for
yourself.^18 Even if that could be said to be an exaggeration, at least in
relation to the Christian tradition, Lévinas has a point in that prayer
as such does not estrange people from one another but ties them
together through the intercession for others as well as the prayer to
Our Father to learn to forgive as oneself has been forgiven. Even the
private devotion is usually, in the Christian church, understood as a
part of a tradition of prayer, as a part of the common prayer of the
church. Prayer is a part of the liturgy of the church.^19
Further, prayer has often been portrayed in Christian tradition as a
struggle or even as a conflict. Not because prayer has to struggle to
change God’s will but rather because prayer involves a becoming
visible of one’s own person so that the truth about one’s own self is at
stake. Prayer could thus be a transformative process through which the
praying self in a manner of speaking earns a higher degree of self-
knowledge by being estranged from her- or himself. Prayer is, in other
words, both a decentered and a decentering act. Prayer becomes
decentered also because prayer is never a technique that one learns to
master — as St. Paul declares in Rom. 8.26: “we do not know how to
translation: Jeffrey Bloechl, New York: Fordham University Press, 2002.
- Emmanuel Lévinas, Alterity and Transcendence, trans. Michael B. Smith, Lon-
don: The Athlone Press, 1999, 181. - Cf. Jean-Yves Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Hu-
manity of Man, trans. Mark Raftery-Skehan, New York: Fordham University Press,
2004, §§ 13, 25.