An atheist's prayer

| Bidisha | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

One need not believe in God to experience the benefits of praying for moral guidance
If anyone's out there, guide me, please, for I need help.

If there were any heavenly entities – and let me say now, I think there is no God – they must, during the past few thousands of years, have heard a multitude of similar plaints from beleaguered mortals, cast up to the skies in times of pain, doubt, crisis and tragedy. There must, too, have been other moments when a message to the gods was offered, not at a zenith of angst, but with a spirit of whimsical surprise, gratitude, felicity and celebration. On yet other occasions, the communication will have flown calmly from periods of rest and contemplation, even recuperation from suffering.

These expressions of pain, rapture or affirmation, sent from the centre of an individual's soul to a recipient whom they can feel but cannot see (or, more poignantly, cannot feel but desperately need and desire), are all types of prayer. Each is different – from a savage cry for help when all realistic means have been confounded to a sneaky plea for a last-minute parking space or an avaricious cosmic order for wealth untold – but they are all scoffed at equally by the stolidly unspiritual.

There is little mystery surrounding this contempt. As Adam Rutherford's witty series investigating the Alpha course phenomenon has shown, a young initiate is often taught forcibly to pray with a combination of very basic practical advice and rugged generalised encouragement, like a new young farmer being given his first lessons on a tractor. Whether or not enacting this process results in any deep fulfilment is overlooked, as long as the outward protocols and rituals are met. The rest is left, aggravatingly, to that ultimate mystery: the individual's personal relationship with God.

Intellectual rigour is thin on the ground when it comes to bending God's ear. Interestingly, both the religious and the non-religious, the believers, the sneerers and the indifferent alike see prayer as a form of wish-making, an ode to God, a search for reciprocity that is essentially romantic in nature. Whether authentic or not, prayer is represented as a spiritual dialogue.

I believe quite the opposite: that prayer is a type of moral philosophy, an active process in which the individual interacts, not with God, who does not exist, but with what Plato would have called the good or the just. At its most untroubled, that interaction is barely contentious: to walk in the world and feel connected to its people, to feel at peace, to feel that one has prudent detachment and good judgment, is a prayer so happy and uncontroversial that it barely registers with its unsuffering source. But a prayer it is, because it involves a moment of self-awareness and world-awareness, the both together.

We are more used to thinking of prayer in moments of quandary – and yet even here, surely the process can be a morally philosophical one, not just (as I grant it may be in certain life-and-death situations) a last-minute plea for succour. Everyone has experienced a time when they have been torn between right and wrong on the one hand and their own desires, yearnings, pleasures and joys on the other. Everyone has experienced the desire to go for a walk, to contemplate, to clear their head, to think things through and listen to their inner guide. What is that, really, but a kind of prayer? And what is that but a moral process? It is a way of encountering one's own sins, one's proclivities, one's selfishness and two-facedness. It is an intellectual and deeply personal process that requires moral braveness and does not always yield the answers we may selfishly want.

One does not always return from prayer rewarded and refreshed; one might be disturbed to have encountered one's own hypocrisies – and those who believe in God may regard that inner disturbance as a sign of His disapproval. Though it may pain us, prayer at its most effective can show us the difference between what gives us momentary pleasure and what is ultimately right.