A Psychoanalysis of Praying Alone
Did You Ever Really Love God? Or Did You Just Enjoy the Friends You Made Along the Way?
For the last couple of years, I’ve had the privilege to have had a great group of friends with whom to pray and attend Mass and adoration. Together, we prayed Prime and Compline daily, Vespers and Terce some of the time, and frequently just seemed to wind up drawing each other for one reason or another into the Chapel to pray.
It couldn’t have been a bad thing alltogether, but as I recently moved away to a larger city halfway across the country, to a place where I knew and still know very few people, I’ve come to realize even more how the positive mimetic effects we friends had on each other were double-edged swords.
Praying alone, as I do now most of the time, is a far more difficult proposition to the selfish will. For one silly reason that I knew used to motivate me to walk to group prayer, there is no one you know to talk to afterwards if you’re alone. For another, you won’t be missed if you’re not there, so there’s no downside, at least to the demon of laziness tempting you, to skipping out on a prayer routine.
But, if it feels more difficult to pray alone, if it is far less enticing now to get up off the couch and walk to the chapel, my past sincerity of prayer when I prayed with others is called into question. Was I praying because I wanted to pray, because I wanted to increase in my love of God? Or was it merely to get the social reward of fellowship afterward as well as the social reward of status, of appearing to be holy within and for the group? Am I now, stripped of these earthly benefits, seeing the true selfish nature of my heart?
Certainly, I have to confess failing here to at least some degree. But I am left confused. How do I know where my heart is in regard with prayer? Is it wrong to pray with others if, by doing so, you are distracted by lower desires, social pressures, and other reasons?
Conversely just because prayer by oneself is harder does not also mean that it is necessarily more meritorious or done with greater love and zeal. The fact that we always attend Mass with others and that, generally, the eremitical or anchorite life is not the primary form of religious vocation, seems to suggest that one should not always pray alone. It is possible, if one merely prays alone, to also not really be praying, but instead deluding and only talking with oneself.
Yet, I remain confused.
For Jesus, within Matthew’s Gospel alone, makes two seemingly contradictory injunctions, to pray alone, and to pray with others. Which is it?
“For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” — Matthew 18:20 RSV
“But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.” — Matthew 6:6 RSV
Resolution, perhaps, comes from a lesser-noticed aspect of Christ’s parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector at prayer:
Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, “God, I thank thee that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week, I give tithes of all that I get.” But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, “God, be merciful to me a sinner! I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other; for every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted. — Luke 18:10-14
When looking at this parable, we normally—and rightfully—pay attention most of all to the pride of the Pharisee, as his desire for social esteem was the cause of his prayer. It was not a love for God or even fear of God that motivated him, only his pride and desire for higher standing within a community. Amidst his fellow Pharisees, we could consider this a case of Girardian mimetic desire in operation for him. He desires what he sees those around him desiring. He scapegoats the "other men,” especially the tax collector next to him, for what is ill in the world. He exalts himself, taking his desires and identity in the other self-righteous men amongst whom is his community.
Such self-righteousness leads in Rene Girard’s mimetic theory to the ultimate act of mimetic rivalry ending in scapegoating, the Jews, led by the Pharisees putting ultimate opprobrium for all sin upon Jesus Christ and bringing out his death.
We also see the humility of the tax collector and are encouraged to act as he acts when we pray.
But what we don’t notice usually from a Girardian (or any) lens is why the tax collector himself prays? In the end, of course, we again now and Christ says that the tax collector has the love of God in a humble prayer of submission crying for mercy. But, dispositively, what leads him to pray? What made him go to the temple? What made him desire to do so? Given his background as a tax collector, probably not his direct peers and fellow tax collectors, but more likely the example set by the Pharisees—specifically the prayer of the Pharisee standing next to him and who was not praying for the right reasons. The tax collector, in some moment of self-reflection and humility, imitated the Pharisee. Seeing the Pharisee’s high status in the community as predicated upon his good deeds, like praying in the temple, the tax collector, feeling remorse and seeking status, imitated. Of course, only to a point, as the tax collector had humility instead of pride, but we can say that his desire was drawn up by mimetic example set by the Pharisee, even as, simultaneously, the Pharisee was brought down by his mimetic desire. Even a poorly intentioned person or act can, in this hidden subtext of the Parable, be an occasion for good being brought about in others.
To me, this applies to all of our prayers and, in fact, to all of our actions. We always have a mix of intentions, some far better than others. We never start out in perfect holiness and ecstatic charity but must approach it from a beginning made in lower reasons.
For me, years ago, it was because members of the local community who were held in high respect frequented the chapel and prayed the Divine Office. I wanted their respect. I wanted to be like them and be liked as they were liked. And so, I began praying with them.
I believe—I hope—my motivations have been purified and risen since then, but the desire for social status, I have to admit, was the beginning. Praying alone, however, makes you aware of where your heart, stripped of these lower reasons, rests at any one point. Stripped bare, and only when stripped bare, do you see yourself as you are—naked in all your faults before the Almighty.
We need such moments constantly, so Christ enjoined us to pray alone in order that we might be separated from mimetic temptations to pride and status.
And yet we must not only pray alone. We need a model and encouragement from the rest of the community, from the rest of the Church, Christ’s Body. We must pray physically with the Church. And so Christ enjoined us also to pray with others.
Companionship and friendship, while “lower” than Divine intimacy and although often a temptation to pride and against charity, are not evils in and of themselves. We need companionship from others to guard against self delusion, laziness, and ennui. We are called of course also to love others and to bring them to deeper holiness along with ourselves.
Even as within the Church from the early Desert Fathers to the Carthusian and Camaldolese hermits still around today, complete silence and mystical solitude alone with God are valued, and remain goods for all to pursue to at least some degree, one’s prayer should not be all alone.
Perhaps a personal practical reconciliation between group and solitary prayer is found within St. Paul’s command to the Thessalonians to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:16-24).
The Mass and the Divine Office are meant for and to foster a community in charity, and ought to be prayed in community. For the Mass serves not just as Communion and reconciliation of each of us with Christ but of each of us with one another, especially with those others present together at the same Mass. Similarly, the Divine Office serves in a related, lesser role for a community together to consecrate the hours of their day back to God. But other prayers, like the Rosary, the Jesus Prayer, etc., are better designed for solitude, for individual prayer, silent or otherwise. You don’t go to Mass without ceasing. Even the monks of Cluny couldn’t make the Divine Office last a literal twenty-four hours a day. But you can, as the Russian spiritual classic The Way of the Pilgrim argues, pray these other, more repetitive prayers, (almost) without ceasing.
The Mass and the Divine Office form the communal, core part of one’s prayer, the obligatory and communal part. In them, there is a risk for self-seeking desire for status after status ceasing only in pride. But if one assaults oneself with the task—the challenge—of praying without ceasing, alone, quietly, and without regard for the praise of others, the prayer of the repentant tax collector, for example, “Lord Jesus Christ Son of God have mercy on me a sinner,” you can better understand where your soul is at when you pray.1
If you “enjoy” this, it’s more likely that you do love God when you go to pray with others. If you find praying alone without ceasing miserable, perhaps you really don’t love God as much as you thought you did.
Even yet, you are not forsaken or abandoned, as the positive side of mimesis, the desire for status within the group that is praying, may bring you around to liking the prayer and loving God.
And always, no matter where you are, mimesis, as long as it doesn’t get out of hand, can be an encouragement to growth, or at the very least to not slipping out of a prayer routine on a rough day.
So seek out a group to pray with as best as you can. But don’t stop praying alone.
And as The Way of the Pilgrim suggests, pray until you enjoy doing it!