On my eighth birthday, my parents got me a manual on “How to Become a Princess.” It was a thrilling book, riddled with little notes, interactive cut outs and all the instructions a girl could ever need. I learned about all the respectable activities princesses engaged in — riding horses, hosting social events and walking around the garden. I learned that if you feel a yawn making its way up your throat while you’re at the ball to press your tongue to the roof of your mouth, think about the beach and it will crawl right back down. There are so many gowns to choose from, there’s a time and place for each one, and the same goes for forks and spoons and curtsies and laughs. I stared at the pages in awe for minutes at a time, enamored by the suggested reality.
At the end of the book was a small envelope with a prayer, which the book said was just for me, that if I recited it exactly three times every night before bed for two weeks, a transformation would take place, and the next morning I would wake up as a princess.
This is the first time I tried to pray. My head to the pillow, ready to dream. I said it once, I said it twice. Then three came, and all the air would contract. In the darkness of the room I felt seen like never before, caught red-handed and flush-faced, breath stuck in my throat as my nostrils flared. It burned and I couldn’t take it — the heavy silence, my wish hanging in the air. I wanted the prayer to become a reality more than anything else. I wanted the prayer so badly I would say it a fourth time.
Why, when confronted with my own desire, did I deny it? I’ve spent years curious about whether this was a particular strain of neuroses from my youth, or whether it made sense within a greater conception and function of prayer. What inspires people to pray, and are we revealing something about ourselves when we do so and in what we ask for? What is it that we are looking for — a change in material conditions, a solution to internal turmoil, for justice to be served and a great balancing of scales to transpire? Is there a difference in how we approach prayer and the actual potential of the act?
It was difficult to explore these questions given prayer is not a particularly popular topic amongst the philosopher clique. Earlier this month though, while I was doing a JSTOR deep dive, gathering readings for my thesis, I stumbled upon an essay called “Santayana On Laughter and Prayer” by Daniel T. Pekarske. It quickly found its way into my downloads and was printed out within the day.
George Santayana was a Spanish-American philosopher who wrote about prayer quite frequently throughout his career. His corpus has been understood as confronting the question of how people, defined by our consciousness — more specifically the consciousness that endows us with an active awareness of our finitude and a permanent premonition of our death — can find satisfaction and happiness. The spiritual journey to Santayana is one of reconciliation with this finitude and, moreso, with the eternity that is life. Within this context, he treated prayer quite compassionately and believed that it had positive value, saying “Prayer is at once the most childlike element in religion and the most spiritual: for it begins with a cry for help or a feature of surrender and it ends with complete self-forgetfulness and absorption in the divine life.”
It’s a description of prayer that might make us laugh at what seems to be its idealism. How many people pray with the dissolution of themselves in mind, with the hope of forgoing the desire that inspired them to act initially? Aren’t most prayers ones of preference or aspiration, with the exception of those habitual graces of the dinner table and special occasions? For many, prayer remains trapped in self-indulgence, focused on a transformation of the substance of reality that is willed by the Greater Power, and, in prayer, we can find reward and retribution, benefit and improvement in the quality of our lives. And it seems that the greatest appeal is how completely uninvolved we are in bringing about that change, absolved, as it is, of responsibility over ourselves.
Santayana believes that these forms of prayer are futile and lacking in truth, and this is because his philosophy is grounded in a materialist metaphysics perspective. He is unwavering in the belief “that only matter acts. Spirit, though undeniably real … owes its existence entirely to the functioning of the body, of which it is the conscious though partial transcript — the guileless witness.” Matter is one of four realms of Being to him, the only one that “consists of substance, change, and duration … takes up space and morphs through time … the principle of existence.” Spirit, which can also be understood as consciousness, is incapable of influencing material reality and does not exist in the world of matter. This is also conceptualized as the body having two acts — the psyche or the animal soul and the spirit, which acts in and with awareness. These two have different wills and it is their “distressing and irremediable conflict … that engenders prayer, and that, at its best, prayer acts to ameliorate.”
When the spirit is confronted with its own limitations, with its inability to influence or enable tangible change, prayer transpires. Although it starts from a typically material longing, prayer gets the spirit to accept its constraints through contemplation, settle for satisfaction with the inevitable and allow it to perform in alignment with eternal ideals.
And I know this to be true, because prayer is confrontation and, as a child, the confession booth I never attended. It was an intimate and revealing act that I didn’t want to follow through on. I didn’t want God’s eyes on me — me in all my imperfection. I was asking for something, and I was telling someone about myself. I was admitting to perceived lack, to desperate want, to honest need. I was admitting to what I perceived as at a distance, out of reach and beyond my sight. And, even then, I knew that it wasn’t becoming a princess — this was the stuff that dreams are made of. It was about having meaning and direction. In asking to be a princess, I was asking for an explicit purpose.
Why wouldn’t we want to aspire to clarity, to reconciliation with ourselves? It’s daunting, but there’s an incessant need in everyone to disperse the fog, although it inevitably comes back. Make your intentions clear, even if it’s difficult to acknowledge. Still and now, as I attempt to improve my relationship with prayer, I can’t get my voice above a whisper. But I’m making a sound, and I follow it through. Hearing myself is a start.
Kyriaki Yozzo is a senior majoring in philosophy, politics and law.
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