Article March 18, 2019 Issue

Prayer that begins with God, not self

Christine Driessen

Perhaps, like me, you’ve noticed a trend in society—a strong focus on self (as in common terms and catchphrases such as “selfies,” “love yourself,” “treat yourself,” “I am the center of my universe”). This focus on self seems intended to help people feel better about themselves, but in reality I’ve found it lets people down. Ultimately, if taken to its extreme, it fosters self-centeredness, loneliness, and a lack of connection to others or something outside oneself, bringing a sense of longing, insecurity, doubt, and even hopelessness to people’s lives.

This tendency to focus on self can creep into prayers, so that prayers always begin with “I.” For example, as a Christian Science practitioner, I have heard people who call and ask me to pray for them tell me things like, “I am struggling”; “I have been suffering for years”; “I keep praying”; “I know I am spiritual, good, and loved, but I am still struggling.”

My heart goes out to these dear ones, but—did you notice? There is no God in this picture! These are prayers that begin with self and with a material picture of suffering, which then attempt to patch up that suffering with spiritual language, rather than simply beginning with God, Spirit, and reasoning out from that purely spiritual basis. A material approach to spirituality is echoed in what I once heard a keynote speaker tell an audience at a mental health conference: “Since we are material, pain, disease, accident, aging, deterioration, war, divorce, and death are all natural to us and inevitable; and that is our spiritual journey—to learn to live with that—so we have drugs to keep us going a little longer.”

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