Hammarskjöld’s on Prayer

An entry from Dag Hammarskjöld’s diary reads:

“Your cravings as a human animal do not become a prayer just because it is God whom you ask to attend to them.” — Hammarskjöld, Markings. pp.11 (“1941–1942: The Middle Years”)

In the sense that prayer is petitionary, we pray for certain desires to be satisfied: the desire for union with God, the desire to live a life that conforms to God’s character, the desire to love and reconcile with others, and so on. We can call these ‘higher-order’ desires, insofar as they have God as its object, either directly or indirectly, and inasmuch as they are intrinsic to us, not as mere animals, but as rational animals, made in the image and likeness of God.

If prayer is prayer inasmuch as those things for which we thirst have God as their object, then a corrupted form of prayer is any prayer that ultimately terminates with us, with God serving only as the instrument by which our desires are fulfilled, rather than the end to which our desires point, and it is these types of self-enclosed desires — or ‘lower-order’ desires — that belong, for the author, under the category of “cravings.¹” The point, I take it, is not that there is something wrong with petitionary prayer, but rather that there is something amiss with any kind of petitionary prayer that does not have God as its object, or that seeks to align God to our will rather than the converse².

True prayer always subjugates the temporal into the eternal.

[1]: My sense is that “cravings” is too strong a word, no doubt a consequence of translating from the original Swedish.

[2]: All of this may, in large part, explain why some people lose faith when their prayers are not answered.