“Does prayer have any meaning for someone who is no longer sure about what, if anything, is on the receiving end? If God or the divine isn’t a ‘being’ out there ‘listening,’ what are we doing when we pray?” It’s with these questions that libris.ro opens its review of philosophy professor Vance Morgan’s “prayer” book. Its conclusion? “[T]his book is about opening oneself to the ‘possibility of God’.”
In a 2018 posting, Morgan himself identifies “a few things that prayer might be (maybe).” These include attentiveness; “highly focused thinking”; silence (“The deepest truths are often those that cannot be said”). But, when all is said and done, “Prayer is about us, not about God”: it’s “not an activity—it’s a state of being. […] The secret of lived Christian faith is that it is…a way of life energized by love.”
Australian John Salmon concludes his critique thusly: “Morgan’s reflections, I think, would nourish the religiously deeply observant, as well as the atheist. […] He has stimulated me to resume, at least occasionally, the practice of prayer, and even if I direct it to the Lord above—whom I don’t believe in—I know in my heart I’m touching the divine within.”
Prayer for People Who Don’t Believe in God
By Vance Morgan
Wood Lake Publishing Inc, 2019