The Prayers of People Who Don't Pray

Put a person who does not believe in God in a hospital waiting room, with someone they love on the other side of a set of doors, and listen. Not for long, and not to intrude — just enough. Very often, under their breath, from a person who would tell you with complete sincerity that there is no one to hear it, you will catch the oldest words there are. Please. Please. Please, please, please. Or a whispered bargain, half-formed, addressed to nobody: if she’s okay, I’ll — I’ll do anything, just let her be okay. Or simply, torn out of them at the moment the doors open and a face appears, oh God — from a mouth that does not believe in one.

I am not interested, here, in scoring the obvious point, the smug little gotcha that the atheist prays after all, so perhaps he believes really, so perhaps you should too. That is a cheap thing to do with a person’s most defenceless moment and it misunderstands what is actually happening. Because the non-believer whispering please in the waiting room is not, in that moment, secretly believing. He knows there is no one there. He would tell you so afterward and he would be telling the truth. He is doing something else, something older than belief and entirely separate from it, and I think it is one of the most human things a person ever does, and worth looking at with tenderness rather than triumph.

What the prayer is made of, once you take God out

Because if you strip a prayer of its theology — take away the God it is addressed to, the doctrine, the whole apparatus of belief — what is left is not nothing. What is left is the pure act underneath, and the pure act is this: a person who loves something, and cannot control what happens to it, and cannot bear to do nothing, reaching out, with words, toward the situation itself, in the direction of a mercy they cannot compel. That is the whole of it. That is what a prayer is, at the bottom, under all the religion: the sound a human being makes when they care enormously about an outcome and have run entirely out of power over it. And that sound does not require you to believe anyone is listening. It only requires you to love someone, and to be helpless, and those two things arrive in every life, believer and atheist alike, and when they arrive together, in the waiting room, at the bedside, the sound comes out, please, please, because it is the sound love makes when it has nothing left but words.

The please is not addressed to God, in the non-believer. It is not really addressed to anyone. It is addressed to the world, to the situation, to the raw fact of the danger — it is a person turning toward the thing they cannot control and speaking to it, begging it, as if it could be moved, not because they think it can but because the alternative, silence, sitting there mute while the person you love is in danger, is unbearable, and the human animal will not tolerate the unbearable without reaching for something, and the something, stripped of every belief, turns out to be a whispered please to nobody. It is not a lapse in the atheist’s reason. It is a rise in the atheist’s love, breaking through the reason, doing what love has always done when it is helpless, which is to speak toward the danger in the old words, and mean them, and know they change nothing, and say them anyway.

The company of the helpless

And here is what I find moving about it, arrived at from both sides, because I think this is a place where the believer and the non-believer are doing, underneath everything, the same thing, and might for once recognize each other rather than argue.

The believer in the waiting room prays, and means it as a prayer, to a God she trusts is listening. The atheist in the waiting room whispers please, and means it as nothing, to no one. And on the surface these are opposite acts, the great dividing line between them, the whole argument. But listen to the actual sound, in the actual moment, and it is the same sound — the same helpless love, the same turning toward an uncontrollable danger with the only thing a person has left, which is words and the wanting behind them. The theology divides them completely and the human act unites them completely, and in the waiting room, at three in the morning, with the ones they love behind the doors, the believer and the atheist are not, whatever they think, in different rooms. They are in the same room, making the same sound, out of the same love, at the same wall of helplessness, and the fact that one of them believes someone is listening and the other does not is real, and matters, and is also, in that specific moment, almost beside the point, because the please is not really about who is listening. It is about how much you love the person behind the doors, and there is no arguing about that, and no difference in it, between the ones who pray and the ones who only, helplessly, in the old words, out of love, to no one, do.

So I have stopped hearing the atheist’s whispered please as a contradiction, and started hearing it as what it is, which is the human heart, doing under pressure the thing it has always done, with or without a God to do it toward. It is not evidence of secret belief and it is not a failure of reason. It is love, at the end of its power, reaching out in the oldest words there are, toward a mercy it cannot command, from a person who knows no one is listening and cannot, for the life of them, for the life of the one they love, stop saying please.