Day 332 - Prayer addiction

 

What I hadn’t quite expected in this year of not praying was the sheer compulsion that seems to come from within me to pray.

I wanted to do a little research and find out if prayer addiction was an actual thing and could find very little.

There was some material online about ‘religious addiction’ – about people engaging in rituals and mood-altering disciplines in order to get a spiritual high. Most believers will feel guilty if they miss their prayer routine. But sometimes it can get out of hand. Sometimes ‘not praying’ can seem to be a performance-based thing.

It seems to me that religious-addiction can probably be helped by having hobbies and interests outside that of faith activities. But it all does have a habit of seeping into these unrelated activities too.

Of course, it is a relatively benign addiction. That’s why there is no information about it. It is only if you attempt to stop that you can get withdrawal symptoms. There is a culture in which it is positively encouraged to have a lengthy ‘quiet time’ every morning. If and when that is missed, the believer will often feel guilty. Or perhaps that it has not been a long enough amount of prayer.

The sin of ‘prayerlessness’ is very much a no-no in Christian culture. It is not entirely helped by our intrepid leader, who explicitly told people not the boast about the amount of time they pray (before ensuring that the book which told of how he went alone to pray so often would become a bestseller).

Long, public prayers are particularly frowned upon. Except we are not very good at not trumpeting our prayers. It has become a cultural thing now, but if the gospels are to be believed, it is the opposite of what used to be expected.

My prayers to God during this prayer strike have been brief and to the point. I haven’t secretly been praying all the time. I really am resisting the compulsion to pray. But there have been some brief ‘talks’. I’m not sure they have done much good. It is probably wisest to bawl my eyes out in prayer but that hasn’t happened. Besides, what then? Back onto the treadmill of prayer. First five minutes a day, then ten? Then half an hour, then an hour? I do think that prayer is a good deed and like all good deeds it should be voluntary. Not demanded or ordered or insisted upon.

It is, of course, none of my business what others do in private. (Unless it is maybe a murder or something.)

Anyway, there are other, far worse addictions which have even less of a capacity to fill the God-shaped hole. That, I imagine, is why no-one ever talks about it.