by Alina Williams
Project Inspirations
What are we studying when we study prayer?
I have wrestled with this question in my work as I read Catholic prayer books from Communist Hungary as sources for thinking about religious community formation, and Marcel Mauss’ unfinished dissertation “On Prayer” has had a significant influence on my thinking. In this work, Mauss writes with a kind of reverence that seems likely to have been later edited out, had he not left it unfinished, and it is this work that most helped me to see the manifold ways in which prayer, for all else it might be, is a deeply social act.
In a particularly memorable passage, Mauss writes, “An invocation such as the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer, is the fruit of the work of centuries. A prayer is not just the effusion of a soul, a cry which expresses a feeling. It is a fragment of a religion… it is a tiny piece of literature, it is the product of the accumulated efforts of men and women over generations.
Prayer, for me, captures (some of) what is at the heart of thinking and teaching religion: tradition and creativity, institution and adaptation, textuality and performativity, individual self-expression and communal recitation, words as symbolic and words as transformative. These many and simultaneous possibilities, though, that make prayer so exciting for me as an object of study, make prayer hard to teach, and one need only say the phrase “prayer in classrooms” to know how fraught a subject this can be.
The experiment, then, invites you to think about the ways that words, when repeated over and over again, might also so many and varied things and to explore how prayer can crystalize questions about the relationship between words, people, and the world.