Why Can't We Automate Prayer Away?

The Way of the Pilgrim, the Way of Love, and How We Should Automate It ... Sort of

Once upon a time, early in my satirical writing “career” I wrote a short piece about a fake new Google service called “Google Pray.”

Google Pray Gives You or Your Cause Mass-Marketing to Heaven

As I wrote:

San Francisco: In a bid to win back Christian and Catholic customers, which the tech -giant has been losing en-masse, Google announced a new application to appeal to the more techie and faithful crowd.

“It’s so awkward and hard getting someone else to pray for you, right?” asked Google president Yuri Bernardin in a press conference today. “But now that’ll all change when you have the full power of our servers and the Google Cloud standing behind you.”Using an innovative new idea suggested only today, Google’s Google Pray app will allow you to insert any prayer text, recording, or image or choose from a wide library of existing ones and have the computer pray it for you. Not just once, but with the Google Cloud, parallel processing can have your recorded prayer texted, played back, and bounced back and forth around the world a hundred times to really “send the message” across. Its cloud praying, automated, repetitive, and simple, taking the complex and hassle out of praying.

It works on the basic principle that a prayer is transmitted whenever it is moved. “As incense rises to heaven so also do our servers’ network packets,” Bernardin continued. “Each ‘bounce’ prays the prayer more clearly and distinctly than any person ever could, and with Google Pray, it’s free for individuals.”

You can also set Google Pray to offer prayers for a larger cause and collaborate with other faithful by “liking” their prayer messages and rebroadcasting them from your account.

There’s another business reason for Google to be launching this program now even as it has seemed out of character for the usually reliably liberal company. Finding out what people privately pray for or even whether or not and how frequently they do pray may be worth more than any other data on a person. Recently becoming popular as with the launch of AmazonChurch last week, Facebook is reportedly near unveiling a competing “Facechurch” platform where users can build community over e-church virtual services and gatherings.

Go to pray.google.com to learn more about this new service.

At press time, a premium subscriber version of Google Pray will reportedly include the ability to send a prayer directly to God’s email account, reportedly hosted on a server in His heavenly closet which Hillary Clinton claims was her inspiration for hosting her own e-mailserver.

One more time, it was completely satirical. But since satire is typically an ironic exaggeration about some flaw or absurdity in reality, there’s a point about reality contained in the article and being made fun of. Or, actually, two points, one of which I’ve only realized over the last few months.

When I originally wrote the article the satire was more about the fact that Google had a service for just about everything conceivable and the joke was that they, in an attempt to appeal to conservatives and Christians whom they had mostly done nothing to attract and everything to disparage through their practices, had chosen to launch a prayer service to bring more business back from them.

The joke was not really about the nature of prayer. Prayer was always just something I did without really thinking about why. Prayer, for me, growing up, was like exercise, Dental visits, or taking out the trash, something that just had to happen. It’s not to say I hated it. I managed at times as a child and teenager to like it in the same way one likes being the kind of person who frequently exercises and you particularly like yourself after a challenging bike ride or run.

My line of thought was taken to its logical extreme when at the age of around 9, I devised plans to “become Pope” for the sole purpose of “shortening the Rosary.” Prayer in this sense was purely a reciprocal obligatory function that we owe to God. Even a maxim from catechetical instruction which I received at a relatively young age, that prayer had four ends: Adoration, Contrition, Thanksgiving, and Supplication, was rolled right into this conception. The love of God, if I thought about it at all, was something you proved by fulfilling the commandments of God and by performing obligatory prayers. Extremely conjoined, prayer and the love of God were both just so qualities, things you gained by doing exactly the right things in the right amount and in the right way.

But it’s this sort of “just because” attitude about prayer, I’ve only recently come to realize, that was the funniest, and unintendedly so, point of the satire article. If we don’t know why we pray, and it’s just something that has to happen, why don’t we automate it away like every other semi-distasteful, difficult, or monotonous task in the world? Repetitive and intercessory prayer, in particular, seemed the most monotonous and pointless in the view I implicitly held. If you could automate it away to spend more doing some other kind of prayer that my 12-year-old self held to be “harder to do” and more meritorious, why not do so? Or, at the very least, why not focus on “better” prayer: spontaneous off-the-cuff prayers, silent prayer of the heart? Why do you have to speak at all? Doesn’t God know the intention of our hearts before we ask? Doesn’t prayer take away time from doing actual charitable works, from reading the Bible, etc?

The article was funny, at least to me and its readers, because these questions demonstrated I subconsciously realized that my ideas of prayer and the love of God were wrong, even if I didn’t realize it. Obviously, now, the idea that a Pope could gerrymander “required” or “recommended” prayers down to an extremely low amount and that we would love God as much as before we would with a “regular” amount seems ridiculous. So also does it seem odd to treat the relationship between prayer and the love of God as a linear function. Less odd than the other possibility, but are you really loving God more according to the quantity of prayer alone? Does a rattled-off and sped-through Rosary count for more than a short, intentional, and creative personal prayer to God? How would you even decide what counts more?

So how ought we to properly approach prayer and loving God, especially in light of confusing maxims from Scripture? For while in Matthew Christ commands: “do not babble like the pagans, who think that they will be heard because of their many words,” St. Paul’s injunctions, in a seemingly contradictory way in 1st Thessalonians to “pray without ceasing.” How can we square the relationship between the practical thing we find ourselves doing without much thought, prayer, and the central nature of the Christian life in the love of God? Why do we pray?

Now there are two answers to this question, and nearly every one of the spiritual life: the ideal reason, why we really should do something, and the realistic reason, why we often do so, even if it is not itself the best possible of reasons.

Why do we often pray? Often just because others around us are praying. Mimesis towards our social peers is an explanation for why we start doing just about everything in fact. It can turn into a specifically perverse version but isn’t necessarily so, even though it also isn’t usually the best of reasons on its own. Fear, obligation, and Pharisaicalism do arise as motivators out of this sort of cause, and are good starts to prayer and devotion, something I will address at more length later, but are not sufficient ends in themselves in the long run. Here, however, I want to focus on the ideal motivations for and practice of prayer, as the ideal, in its finality, is where all “why” questions must culminate.

The Ideal Objective of Prayer

To understand this all better, I posit that prayer to be prayer, has to have both an internal and an external component. Interior conformity or directness of the will, the passions, and the other human powers toward God, is one element, whilst an exterior act, either fully exteriorly directed as in spoken prayer, or exterior in the sense of something formed and conceptualized in the mind even if not spoken, like mouthed or clearly conceptualized, but solely mentally pondered phrases.

Prayer usually requires that these two principles be taken together. Prayer is thus not the satirical absurdity of the mere playing of sound waves representing certain words into the air or even just speaking certain things. But prayer is also not merely an interior conformity or directedness of the will, the passions, and the other human powers toward God. That by itself is merely the first actuality of love of God, habitually loving God. Prayer is, in Aristotle and Aquinas’s model of human action, second actuality, the bringing of the habit of the love of God into act.

Now the proportion whereby love of God is to prayer as habit is to act is not exclusive There are other ways of loving God. In St. Francis de Sales’s model of the love of God, the love of God has two levels of actualization, one of which is prayer and intellectual contemplation or mystical theology, the love of complacency, while a further actualization of love of God is the love of benevolence, actively working to align oneself and one’s powers further with the love of God, loving what God wills through one’s love of God.

Prayer is thus, at least ideally, performed for the love of God. Alright, perhaps, that was obvious. But what does this mean? Let’s ask the, in its simplicity, potentially stupid-sounding follow-up: Why ought we to love God?

There are Baltimore Catechism-type answers you could give, God is perfect goodness, etc., but, past a certain point, that’s not a question with an intellectual answer. If you are in love and you believe in the goodness of the one you love, do you question why? In human relationships, you don’t. That’s the point of human love. So also, ought it to be with the love of God.

And only with this, admittedly unintellectual, but only because it stretches beyond the human intellect and reason, I believe, does prayer make sense. Only when prayer is but a free expression of one’s love of God is it most truly prayer. Prayer is an external representation of an interior disposition, and both serve together to unite all our powers under an orientation of the will toward God.

Now one might still think that spontaneous and creative prayer is better. Why pray the Rosary? Why, in the tradition of the East, engage in the similar practice of the repetitive Jesus Prayer? Why merely use someone else’s external form to represent your own love of God? Isn’t that distracting you from representing in words and intention your particular way of loving God?

The Way of the Pilgrim

Only reading the 19th-century Russian Orthodox spiritual classic The Way of the Pilgrim helped solve this conundrum. This anonymously written book follows a Russian peasant who attempts to reach holiness by following St. Paul’s injunction to pray without ceasing. Under spiritual direction, his method throughout the book is primarily praying the Jesus Prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, Have Mercy on Me a Sinner” (or some similar variation).

But he’s not just praying it daily. He starts at three-thousand times a day and ultimately increasing to even more frequently from there as the peasant’s starets, or spiritual director commands him:

“So this is what the holy Fathers prescribe in such cases,” said the starets. “Therefore, you must accept this teaching now with complete trust and repeat the Jesus Prayer as often as possible. Take this chotki and use it while you repeat the prayer, at least three thousand times a day to begin with. Whether you are standing, sitting, walking, or lying down, continue to repeat: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me!’ Do not be loud or rush the prayer, but without fail repeat it three thousand times each day, neither increasing nor decreasing this number on your own. Through this exercise God will help you to attain to the unceasing prayer of the heart.”¹

The anonymous peasant follows the advice as he journeys throughout Russia through the book, praying the prayer three-thousand, then six-thousand, then twelve-thousand times a day. At this upper limit, however, he finds himself praying literally without ceasing.

He is of course performing a very rote prayer, seemingly taking the obligation-based view of the purpose of prayer to its logical extreme. But while his daily practice began with such outward trappings, the peasant soon finds that the prayer has changed him. He no longer prays out of obligation. He desires to pray even more than he is obliged. The prayer has become his constant focus, his habit, and its meaning the center of his attention and experience:

Early one morning somehow the prayer awakened me. I began to recite my morning prayers, but my tongue was reluctant to say them, while all my desire seemed to be striving, as if with a mind of its own, toward reciting the Jesus Prayer. As soon as I began to repeat it, I was filled with such lightness and joy that it felt as if my tongue and mouth spoke the words of their own accord, without any effort on my part! I spent the entire day enveloped in such joy and somehow detached from everything else—almost as if I were on another planet. By early evening I had easily completed the twelve thousand repetitions of the prayer. I had a strong desire to continue praying, but I dared not exceed the rule given to me by the starets. In the days that followed, I continued to call on the name of Jesus Christ with such ease and feeling so drawn to it.²

What has been effected within him is not just an attachment to the prayer, but an increase in the love of God by virtue of the prayer. The peasant now feels a “continual yearning of the human spirit toward God” ceaselessly. His prayer is not just an expression of his love of God, but effects love’s increase.

Such a mode of prayer, by its repetition drills all the interior powers, the imagination, the intellect, the will, all of one’s consciousness into a singular unity. All is directed towards pondering, meditating, and loving, specifically in this case, toward the Divinity of Jesus Christ, His redeeming power, and our sinfulness and need for Him. The interior disposition expresses itself in an outward form, the doing of which further confirms and strengthens the interior disposition into a habit, as well as in intensity within each moment.

As the peasant’s spiritual director continues there are further benefits to the spiritual life from such a habit of repetitive prayer:

“The constancy of prayer will surely turn into habit and will become a natural thing to do. In time, it will create a suitable and appropriate disposition of mind and heart. Imagine if man would steadfastly fulfill this one commandment of God about praying—in this one action, he would fulfill all the commandments. For if he prayed uninterruptedly, at all times and during all manner of activity and work, calling on the divine Name of Jesus Christ in the innermost secret place of his heart—even if this is done initially without spiritual warmth and zeal; even if it is done by sheer will power—this of itself would leave no time for sensual, sinful pleasures. Each sinful thought of his would meet with resistance before it could take root; no sinful act would seem worthwhile, as it does to an idle mind. Longwindedness and idle talk would diminish or completely vanish, and the power of grace contained within the Name of God, when constantly invoked, would instantly wipe out each transgression.”³

The way of love bestowed by the habit of the Jesus Prayer is but a fleshing out of the similar admonition of the 14th-century Byzantine theologian Nicholas Cabasilas, who in his The Life in Christ similarly argues that habitual meditation upon and desire for union with God, Christ, and the Saints is how we can begin to enter, even now, into the joy of the Eternal Life to come. Thought of and desire for the things of God can be performed at any time, even during more worldly occupations. This habit perfects our will for the sake of ever desiring God more and more as we fill our imagination and intellect with the best possible of objects, while also simultaneously defending ourselves from occasions of sin by literally crowding them out by better things. The problem anyone faces from just trying to “think” about something, are the obvious distractions that will almost immediately arise. Try to follow Cabasilas’ recommendation to ponder and hold before your imagination the mysteries of Christ’s life, for example, and you’ll probably only last a few seconds. Either whatever other task you are doing will distract you, fill up your imagination, and require your active attention, or you’ll run out of “things” to ponder and distract yourself from a feeling of emptiness or boredom. The human mind, at least in our current temporal mode of existence, does not easily rest on a single concept, object of attention, and object of desire. We flit around, discursively jumping back and forth between parts or principles of an object or idea, and can’t easily force our attentive power into stasis. Simple repetitive prayer, however, solves this problem as with the path presented by the peasant protagonist narrator of The Way of the Pilgrim. In praying the Jesus Prayer, he—and we—can begin to force our thoughts, and through them our attention, and through that our will, into a spiral of ever-increasing focus.

Breaking down one rendition of this prayer into four parts, we begin by bringing the Lordship and Kingship of Christ Jesus, over us and all things, before our mind. Not resting here, but speaking next “Son of the Living God” we thus confirm and confess this Lordship to be a result of Christ’s divinity. Following this by a request for mercy both confirms that Christ as the Son of God has the power and office to forgive but also presses us toward humility in our need for this mercy, by the mere saying of the words, confirmed also by the final repetition of our lowliness and sinfulness before the entire prayer is repeated by turning our mental gaze and love again back upwards and outwards to Christ.

Sister Natalia (a friend of some of my friends) also offers here a far better and deeper explanation of the Jesus Prayer in particular than I could hope to write:

The Way of Love

Paradoxically, by constantly moving our attention, rather than trying to maintain a stationary focus on our own, repetitive prayer helps maintain our attention. The more repeated, the more habitual, once habitual, self-sustaining, until, paradoxically again, the use of repetition of external words makes the words themselves almost melt away from attention, the internal aspect of prayer, the true prayer of the heart, the imagination and attention being filled with contemplation of Christ, and our Redemption through Him, while the desire for Him dominates our will.

In stark contrast to verbose and creative prayers, which entail lots of active effort to come up with said verbosity and creativity, this sort of prayer, when it is ultimately made habitual, is in that ultimate state, automatic.

In the external sense that is. The external actions, the spoken, mumbled, or mouthed words become so when repetitive prayer is taken seriously and made habitual. However, the internal disposition of the imagination, intellect, and heart is active, creative, and ever more deeply penetrating.

And this is the part, that really matters, our contemplation of and love for God becoming ever more ceaseless in its interior reality. We must arrive at it by means of external actions to begin, confirm the desire, and keep steady attention, but the real point is the loving relationship.

One must begin with an external chore, and maintain the spoken externalities, but as the spiritual director tells the peasant at a certain point the interior end, pondering God and uniting one’s will with His must become so desired as to be effectively effortless⁴:

“The continuous interior prayer of Jesus is a constant uninterrupted calling upon the divine name of Jesus with the lips, in the spirit, in the heart, while forming a mental picture of His constant presence, and imploring His grace, during every occupation, at all times, in all places, even during sleep.”⁵

I have never approached the frequency of repetition of the Jesus Prayer or similar invocations suggested in The Way of the Pilgrim. However, even far lower levels of repetition in terms of raw quantity, praying it, whenever it comes to mind, as many times as I can until I predictably get distracted, has still, I have found, been a self-perpetuating practice. Once I start, it just keeps going. My attention is not perfect, but I have begun, through the prayer, to have a deep focus on God in my imagination not possible through mere efforts at silent prayer or even silent adoration before the Blessed Sacrament.

And what’s more, as long as I enter into the prayer without a Pharisaical disposition, a desire to repeat the prayer a certain number of times, for uhh, saying the prayer a certain number of times… Just saying it that way helps demonstrate the pointlessness of such a disposition. But well, whenever I don’t have that disposition, I have to say that I begin to enjoy it once I start, in a certain way. Perhaps enjoy is the wrong word. “Enjoy” is rather low-brow to describe the feeling. Perhaps entering into love, and letting yourself love God is a better way. Too often I think we falsely think that loving God ought to be hard to do and feel difficult the whole time. And there is a paradox here. I can’t begin to untangle the paradox of love and sorrow in St. Therese of Lisieux’s spirituality. But rather the love of God, in its fullness, will be something we want for its own sake. It’s the only thing or activity that deserves the appellation “for its own sake” in the last analysis. We can’t get anywhere near the fullness of the beatific vision of course now. But as The Way of the Pilgrim and Nicholas Cabasilas’s The Life in Christ argue, living the life in Christ, the life of grace begins now, is achieved by such ceaseless interior prayer and will be accompanied by joy, that is delight in its object, the Beloved. We just have to get over this hurdle of our own making and let ourselves enjoy loving God.

It’s not a stance or experience admissible of deep dissective rational probing. But again, if you are in love and you believe in the goodness of the one you love, do you question why? Do you question why you enjoy it? In human relationships, you don’t. That’s the point of human love. So also, ought it to be with the love of God.

So let it be with the way we can ceaselessly love God. So let it be thus with prayer.

Let yourself enjoy it by praying constantly, whether it be the Jesus Prayer in the East, or the Rosary (which admits of all of these same effects but too often is done with a rushed Pharisaical mindset where we don’t let ourselves enjoy it).

And so, the endpoint of prayer really does ought to be a certain sort of automation. Not really the kind I was joking about years ago in the satirical article, and not really a full automation. It’s not automation in the same way that love with another human person never should be. From the perspective of the deepest recesses of the heart it is the furthest thing from automation. But it is and ought to look automatic in its external aspect.⁶ We ought to be so habitually turned toward prayer because we like doing it that we just always do it. Because we want to. Because once you find the Love, why wouldn’t you always think of Him and be turned towards Him?

1. The Way of the Pilgrim, https://malankaralibrary.com/ImageUpload/a491228b2afa653b54cdf0e0fe128d80.pdf, pg. 21.

2. The Way of the Pilgrim, pg. 23.

3. The Way of the Pilgrim, pg. 167.

4. Effective Ecclesiologism (e/ECC): https://x.com/jamespoulos/status/1729219630684942535

5. The Way of the Pilgrim, pg. 18.

6. The Love of God, ought, to use modern tech parlance, e/ACC.