In other posts I’ve mentioned invisible misunderstandings that C.S. Lewis uncovered by probing and listening — for instance, his discovery that many regular folk are skeptical of not only the stories of Jesus but any stories of 2,000 years ago. They don’t believe that historical events are really known reliably. This kind of misunderstanding would be very hard for an educated person to see — like asking a fish to see the water or a bird to see the air.
Another hard-to-see misunderstanding: Once upon a time I visited the blog of an in-your-face atheist. He had publicly and without shame blogged about divorcing his wife in order that he could live a polyamorist life. Some Christians had posted that they were praying for his wife. He scathingly said he thought this was silly — she didn’t know any of the Christians, and they didn’t know her personally, so why do they expect their prayers to make her feel better?
That is, the atheist talked of prayers as though they were entirely human expressions of concern or empathy or sympathy. A prayer's purpose is to make the person prayed for feel better. At one level, this is a pure flatlander view of prayer: there is nothing supernatural about it, it consists entirely of human good wishes expressed in prayer language. To say “Our prayers are with them” is identical to saying “Our thoughts are with them.” Without active listening such a misunderstanding will remain invisible.
We can benefit from recognizing a flatlander view like this one, because most often they are true in a certain way and they point at practices that, like sodas, have gone flat. In the case at hand it is true that prayers are, whatever else they may be, human good wishes, and unless we are careful our prayers can indeed lose their spiritual fizz and become mere human good wishes packaged as prayers. As a social convention and a habit, saying “I’ll pray for you” or “I’m praying for them” can be merely a way to comfort someone else or feel as though we are doing something about a difficult situation. Intercessory prayer means really asking God to act, and an honest request to God can fail. Flat prayers can't fail, real ones can. And failure is not comfortable.
