Maxwell Institute Podcast Re-Released Episode: Why Do We Pray? Featuring Kimberly Matheson

Ashley Pun Eveson: Hello, and welcome to the Maxwell Institute Podcast! I'm Ashley Pun Eveson, the Communications Manager here at the Institute. I help produce and edit the podcast behind the scenes with my talented student employees Austin Ball and Whitney Watt. While our team works hard to get more episodes of the podcast available, we decided to re-release one of our favorite episodes from season one of The Questions We Should Be Asking, titled "Why Do We Pray?" Featuring Kimberly Matheson. We hope you enjoy listening to the podcast.

Rosalynde Welch: Hello, and welcome to the Maxwell Institute Podcast, where we seek out faith illuminating scholarship. I'm Rosalynde Welch, Associate Director at the Institute. This season, we're exploring the questions we should be asking. Thanks for joining us.

What is prayer? In 2020, President Nelson asked us to unite as a church in thanking God through daily prayer. And he promised that prayer brings forth miracles. But what are we doing when we pray? Breathing? Speaking? Kneeling? Today on the podcast, I talk with Kimberly Matheson, a research fellow and my colleague here at the Maxwell Institute. Kim studies and writes about the theology of prayer. And she’s spent years thinking through the fundamentals of our ongoing conversation with God. We talked about why prayer is necessary in a world of therapy and self help. Why prayer can be so hard? What's powerful about getting on our knees in personal prayer? And what's beautiful about prayers in our homes, meeting houses, and temples? Kim helped me take a breath, take a step back, and ask a better, more fundamental question about prayer. What am I doing when I pray, and why? I hope you enjoy the conversation.

Hi Kim! Today, we are talking about prayer. What it is, what we're really doing, at the most basic level when we pray. The topic of prayer has been a major subject of your own study. And I asked you to suggest a piece of scholarship that really got you fired up- body, mind and soul. So what did you share with me, Kim? And why did this essay get you so excited?

Kimberly Matheson: So, I sent you the essay, it’s called The Wounded Word, the Phenomenology of Prayer. It's an essay by a French philosopher, named Jean-Louis Chrétien. And he's kind of an interesting fellow. Fairly recent. But he was raised agnostic and then converted to Catholicism against his family's wishes in his late 20s. And then turned to his philosophical training, to the question of what we're doing in basic religious phenomena, including prayer. And so, I sent you this one, because this essay was both the start of my dissertation work, when I decided I really wanted to think carefully about prayer. And now I'm circling back to it after having written a dissertation on prayer and finding that it continues to hold a lot of really interesting questions for…yeah, exactly, as you say, what it is that we're doing when we pray. And what that means.

Welch: Do you remember the first time you read it?

Matheson: I do. It was… well, we’ll call it a little bit of a slow burn. On this essay, I was in that anxious period between my comprehensive exams and writing a dissertation proposal, when you’d need a topic. And it needs to be a topic good enough to sustain you for the next several years. I was playing with the idea of doing prayer. And I was asking friends and colleagues: “What's available in the philosophical literature about prayer, because I think that's an area that I would like to dig down deeper”, and there wasn't a lot. But somebody suggested this essay to me, and I read it. And my first experience of it was mostly a sense of deep relief, that there is enough in prayer to talk about that you can write a dissertation on it. And I found it useful for generating several questions. I didn't fall deeply in love with the piece, it was mostly just a launching point for my own thought. And then as I've circled back around to it in the years since that first reading, and since I finished my dissertation, I'm surprised at how… how rich it continues to be. And I actually may be more in love with it now than I was in the first reading, because the first reading was just an anxious, desperate attempt to have a dissertation topic. And once all that anxiety is behind me, and I have done some thinking about prayer. This essay is actually all the richer for it, I think.

Welch: You know, I think a lot of listeners might be surprised to know that you can write a dissertation on prayer. How did you decide…how did you come to that topic? Was it a sort of personal draw to the topic? Was it an intellectual draw? How did you settle on prayer?

Matheson: Yeah, great question. I think it is surprising that you can write a dissertation on prayer. There are not many programs in which you could, especially in the way that I chose to do it. So I…my training is in theology. I have a PhD in theology from a Catholic University. And I chose that particular path of training, that discipline, precisely because you can write on topics like prayer. You can take the tools of the academy and philosophy and whatever lens you want to bring, but you can bring it to bear on your devotional life. So, I knew that was going to be attractive to me, and it made writing a dissertation of the sort possible. That's what I wanted from the beginning. Why I settled on prayer was again, in some ways born out of the kind of anxious necessity of writing a dissertation before you know what that process looks like. The academy is structured such that you need to write a dissertation and know what you're going to write on before you've written it. You don't know what a dissertation writing process is going to be. So the best I could figure was, this should be a topic that really matters to me. It should be something that interests me. And something that I think I could chew on for, say, three to five years without getting sick of it. And the thing that checked all those boxes, for me, was prayer. Prayer felt like the place in my own devotional life where, like the rubber hits the road. Prayer is where all the things that, that I learned in church and in scripture study and through paying my tithing, it feels like those are enacted in a deeper way for me, when I'm praying. It's just like a really distilled focused version of what I'm doing in my…in my religious life. And so I knew that it was interesting and meaningful, and it seemed like a rich enough topic to sustain a dissertation project at least. And it turns out, yes, I think it will actually sustain an entire life of prayer. Of prayer, study, thought, all of it.

Welch: So, I have to ask Kim, did you pray about whether you should write a dissertation on prayer?

Matheson: What a lovely question! I did not. That feels like such an abject failure in the moment. I mean, maybe I did. I pray about all sorts of things. So, I want to hold open the possibility that past me prayed. I don't just distinctly remember it. Ah, that's a great question. I should at least pray about whether or not it will stay my research focus for the next several years.

Welch: I know what you're praying about tonight, Kim!

Matheson: Yeah, that's right.

Welch: So what you just said is actually, exactly sort of the main argument or claim of this article, which is that there's a way in which prayer, kind of concentrates and distills everything about a life of faith into that moment, that action. You know, this article is called a phenomenology of prayer. And phenomenology is one of those big words that I think really sounds intimidating when you hear somebody else use it. But in reality, what I've learned is that it's a very simple idea. Extremely simple, in fact. It's just the study of real time experience, as it happens, right? What we perceive and how we perceive it. So Chrétien here is just asking very basic questions about prayer. Things like what is our body doing when we pray? What is our breath doing? What is our voice doing? How does language work in prayer? So he's getting down to sort of the very granular, nitty-gritty level of what is happening when we pray. So what do you think he means by that? That prayer is the essence of religious experience? What leads him to that claim? And do you agree with him?

Matheson: Yeah, I'll, I'll maybe answer in reverse order. I do think I agree. And you heard that in kind of my narration of how I came to this topic. That's where he starts the essay. He says prayer is the religious phenomenon par excellence. It is like the beating heart of what we're doing in religion. And I take it that what he means is that prayer is something like the language of religion, it just encapsulates so much of what religious devotion means. So when I pray, I'm oriented to God. That's a pretty fundamental part of religion. When I pray, I am thinking about and praying for others. It embodies service and an attention to my fellow man. I'm also sacrificing things, I'm sacrificing my time and my attention, and my desire to be somewhere else. Prayer does in miniature what all of Christianity is trying to do, and it concentrates it on these daily five to ten minute stretches, where you are on your knees, are praying over your meals. You are actually doing religion, but distilled. I think that's actually a deep part of prayer's power.

Welch: So it's interesting that in that description of what prayer is, I don't think I heard you say, it is asking for things. Right? So can we ask for things when we pray?

Matheson: Yes, I think yes! Definitely, I think we can. In fact, I think we're told to when Jesus models prayer, and says, here's how to do it. One of the central petitions of the Lord's Prayer is “give us this day, our daily bread”. But there is a lot of literature, both from apostles, and from philosophers and from theologians-since the beginning of Christianity- who want us to be careful about, about making petition the whole point of prayer. It seems fairly clear that something larger is going on in prayer, and that the purpose of prayer as I mean, as our own Bible Dictionary says, is much more about working on our hearts and our souls than it is getting things from God like some giant vending machine in the sky. What I think is happening in petition, though, is still pretty important. And so I talk about this some in my own work. I think it's a pretty thin understanding of a petitionary prayer. Prayer, where you're asking something, to assume that all you're trying to do is get some kind of blessing from God. I think there's actually a much richer experience happening. So for instance, one example we might think of is…let's pick kind of a serious one. Let's say I have a child who is quite ill, like dangerously hospital level ill. Obviously in a very deep sense, I want that child to get better and I'm going to pray to Heavenly Father to please, if it is in keeping with thy will, please heal my child. But I don't think that that's all I'm doing when I asked that prayer, because I've been in situations like that, where I've asked Heavenly Father for something very meaningful to me, but it wasn't just trying to get the blessing. I was also trying to prepare my soul for maybe things go a little sideways here, or this doesn't turn out the way that I want. So, if I'm praying next to a hospital bed, I'm praying that my child get better. But I'm also praying for the possibility that I will be made adequate to the possibility that my child doesn't get better. And as I look around the hospital room, I'm praying for the people down the hall, and I'm praying for the doctors. And I'm remembering my aunt who has cancer and praying for her. There's a way that prayer is actually about, I think, learning to see a wider array of possibilities in a given situation such that yes, one possibility is that my kid gets better. One possibility is that I get the raise at work, or things go the way I want. But when I pray, I'm also hopefully aware that, in fact, things might not go my way. And that petition, my particular request, is actually just an occasion to start a larger conversation to prepare my soul for the different possibilities. And I think actually, this is a deep part of what is modeled when the Lord prays in Gethsemane, right? Thy will not mine be done. But you have to put your will in conversation with the other possibilities, so that you can prepare yourself for the wider array of what God might be doing in your life.

Welch: I love that. And it really does chime with my own experience, when I have been in those moments of greatest distress, the urge to petition God for relief is overwhelming. You almost can't stop yourself from pleading with God for your child. And yet, as you say, it's, it's more than that as well. And it's putting yourself in front of God, I think, that changes that moment and changes that kind of language. And it makes me wonder, you know, in theory, we could sit down with our journal, or we could sit down with our scriptures, or we could sit across from our bishop, and we could work on getting our will in alignment with God that way. And those are probably all useful things to do. But is there something about prayer, when our language is addressed to God that is especially powerful in that work of aligning our will with His?

Matheson: Yeah, I think so. And I think actually, this seems to be- if more than anything else- this seems to be Chrétien’s question too, in this essay. What…what difference does it make? He actually asked this question. So what, what's different about prayer from say, talking to yourself in a room or writing an essay, or journaling? And we might add in the 21st century, why not just go to therapy? What's different between prayer and going to therapy?

Welch: Exactly.

Matheson: There's another person there who has an outside perspective and can give me some objective advice about my life. Why am I not just going to therapy? Why am I praying? And the answer that this essay suggests, I think, really smartly, is to point to the nature of God. God outstrips us way more than any therapist or even a bishop ever will. God is-compared to our finite capacities- God is virtually infinite. God has an eternal perspective. We are finite, we are sinful creatures, God is perfect, God has so much understanding. And we…we’re quite limited in that respect. And so that distance between our perspective and a heavenly perspective is what this essay trades on especially, and then draws out a number of downstream effects. So I guess the first answer would just be the difference between a finite, mortal, limited human being and an infinite, eternal, eternally perspectived being. That distance is what we get in prayer that we don't get anywhere else.

Welch: And I really liked that he pushed us back quite hard against cynical views of prayer, right, that would see prayer as childish or kind of deluded, right? We're just talking to ourselves in our own head. And in fact, that seems to be his point- is that in the very act of addressing God, we are showing up to God. Right? And that allows us to show up to ourselves in a new way, right? It kind of…it opens up what might have been a closed mindset that we had, by putting us in that direct relationship to God. It gets us out of our heads, rather than keeping it just talking to ourselves in our own heads. So suddenly, we're open. And when we're open, we realize that we're incomplete. It's like a snowglobe, that's gotten a hole punched in it. The water drains out, you realize that you need to be replenished, you need to be filled by God again and again, in the way that he grants us daily bread and daily breath and sustains us from day to day. So, prayer fills us by reminding us of God's greatness and our own incompleteness without him.

Matheson: Yeah.

Welch: And it seems like that's a kind of work that can't really be done in a journal or with a therapist. As important as that work can be as well. It doesn't do what prayer can do.

Matheson: Yeah. And I, I liked that you contrasted this with a kind of reductionist understanding of prayer as childish, as naive, as kind of a comfy thing we do, to kind of soothe our emotions. That there's a kind of immaturity in certain popular critical conceptions of prayer. And this essay totally dispenses with those. The model of prayer in this essay is one of great labor, and great risk, and great import . And in fact, it's kind of…the title is maybe a little bit curious. We mentioned the title is The Wounded Word. And wound has all kinds of negative connotations for us. That might strike listeners a little odd to talk about prayer as a wounding. But what the essay means by that is that, precisely as you say, prayer is incredibly, it's a risky, laborious venture, because you are opening yourselves up to God. And we know, you are virtually promised that when you show up and offer God room in your life, it's not going to be comfortable. He's going to challenge your ideas, puncture your pretentions, maybe give you assignments that you did not want. And I think as anyone who has actually tried to pray over the course of a life knows, it is incredibly difficult! It is very hard to get yourself on your knees over and over. And to figure out how to make this feel useful. And you might find yourself in a certain groove for a few weeks. But then you get bored of those ideas, or the circumstance changes. And now you've got to figure out what to say before you go to bed every night. I can't tell you the number of nighttime prayers where really they're not prayers, they're just me feeling resentful that I have to pray before I go to bed. And having to figure out how to set those resentments aside and actually get into a mode of openness. That's deeply laborious. It's a deeply vulnerable task when we do it, right. And so I think Chrétien talks about wounding with prayer, I don't think he means like the wounding in battle or something. I think he means something more like the wounds of maybe surgery, where there's going to be pain involved, it's going to be hard, it's going to feel invasive. But this is actually very much for the long term health of our souls.

Welch: Let's get into that work, then. Let's talk at a really basic level about the work of prayer. Is there something special about praying out loud on your knees?

Matheson: Oh! This is a good, this is a good question. For me, Chrétien clearly thinks yes for him, and it's kind of one of the most shocking things about this essay. He insists that prayer is fundamentally spoken and vocal. He thinks that he's doing… that silent prayer is essentially just a species of spoken prayer, that meditation is no different from praying verbally out loud, in the ways that Latter-day Saints are most accustomed with. I am not so sure that they are exactly the same thing. But I do think there is something special that happens when we pray out loud. That doesn't happen, in say, a sitting meditative practice. And the way that the essay puts it is that language- it gathers you, it collects you, and I think maybe anyone…I mean, you and I write for a living. So we know this in a really deep way. Writing is an intensely difficult process. Because it is not as if the ideas are already fully formed in your head, and you just have to type them down on paper. Giving voice, putting things into words, is itself the labor, it gives a shape to your thoughts and your ideas that isn't there in your own head. This is why turning back to therapy, or talking to our parents, this is why we do that. Because it provides a setting where we can sit with someone and go through the process of putting our experiences and our thoughts into words. And we find at the end of the session, or the end of the phone call, that we have a better sense for what our life is and what our feelings are. And we've given them order and shape. And so prayer, I think, is asking us to do something like that work, but to do it with God, for all the reasons we said. Because his perspective is important there. But I find that as I pray over elements of my day that I need help with, or responses that I've had, or questions that I have, or relationships that need healing or improvement, the work of putting my thoughts and feelings into words- that itself is the is the labor that shapes my soul in a deep way.

Welch: He makes another point about vocal prayer that, that really struck me. And it's about the way in which the physical act of speaking recruits our breath in certain ways. Right before you start to speak, you have to intake your breath and inhale. And so he makes this really beautiful point, which is that, there's a way in which every spoken prayer is already granted in some way. Because God has given us the breath to pray. Before we, before we even address God we take in that breath. We know that God put breath in Adam in the Garden of Eden, he puts that breath in each one of us all day, every day. When we notice it, and especially when we don't notice it. And so before we ask God for anything before we even address him, we take in that breath, and God gives it to us. He gives us prayer, even before he gives us perhaps, or perhaps not, any of the items we may petition him for in that prayer. That was this beautiful lightning strike for me as I, as I thought about the actual physical work of prayer and drawing in that breath, being on our knees, right? With that connection to the earth that God created for us and put us on. Right? That, those physical actions that we can take for granted, actually, are really part and parcel of what prayer is and what the experience of prayer is, and how it connects us to God in that way. So I think I'll remember that every time that I, that I open my mouth to pray now.

Matheson: Yeah, that same passage you're referencing was also what struck me in this, this last rereading my most recent rereading. And I think that's probably what I will take away from the essay this last time, is to think about prayer as more of a conversation. Which maybe seems like a silly thing to say, because of course, prayer feels like a conversation, we're talking with God. But usually, I've thought of that in terms of the kind of, it's a five minute conversation. I say, Dear Heavenly Father, at the end of the prayer, I say amen. And the conversation is what happens between the space of those two phrases. But this essay suggests that actually, prayer is part of a much, much longer conversation with God. The reason you pray in the first place is because he gave you breath, as you say, or, he sent you primary teachers and parents who taught you to pray, or missionaries who taught you to pray. Prayer is actually a response. We are not the one starting this conversation. I wonder how our prayer lives might change if we thought of a conversation on a much broader scale. What if each prayer is just a sentence that you are adding to your conversation with God or even just a word? What if you think of the conversation that you are having with God this year, or this decade? Prayer is like a, it's like a heartbeat, it's like, it's like the…he calls it the, something like the equivalent of the respiration. Prayer is part of our spiritual respiratory system, and you…what if each prayer is just an exhalation in this longer conversation that you're having with God. I think, I wonder sometimes if our prayers fail, because we put them on too small a scale. We think we get down on our knees and start a conversation, and the whole conversation happens there. But my life, my devotional life, has been a much longer conversation with God, and I like the idea of prayer as just one breath in the larger spiritual respiration.

Welch: And that breathing never stops, right. When…when we note it or when we don't. Our body continues to breathe in. And this is, you know, what King Benjamin so movingly expresses to me, is that even when we don't know that we're still being sustained by God in those moments. And perhaps there's a way in which that prayer is ongoing, even in those moments when we're distracted by other things. When we know that we are living in relation to God, there's a way in which that conversation is continuing. He makes another point about this idea of praying always. Right, we're instructed to pray always, which seems like a daunting commandment, when there are so many pressures and concerns and distractions of the world that necessarily take our mind away from the discipline of prayer. So, he has a beautiful idea about the way in which our individual private prayers are a part of a larger communal prayer that comes up from the body of Christ. So talk to me a little bit about, first of all, is there a difference between personal, private prayers and the kind of more ritualized family and church prayers that we undertake in my home? You know, multiple times every day? Are they the same thing? Are they different? And what's his idea about the participation of, of those two forms of prayer?

Matheson: That’s a good question! I don't know that I knew what he would say about the participation between the two. But a couple of thoughts come to me. I also was really taken with this idea that…it comes from St. Augustine, that the command to pray always rests easy, it doesn't rest on you as an individual. The body of Christ is praying, and your prayers contribute to that. And when you fall silent, don't worry, someone over in a different country is definitely praying at the time that you're sleeping, and so it's fine. And I think as Latter-day Saints, we have even more resources to think about that because there's prayer constantly coming up from temples the world over. So I think that's a beautiful idea. Just on a personal level, I think the difference between- I guess I can see two differences between communal prayer like a family prayer or a sacrament, prayer in church, and private, individual prayer- the first is that in my experience, private individual prayer is so much harder, because private prayer demands me to be really vulnerable. This is my one-on-one time with God, and I am on the carpet in that time, in a way that if I'm praying in my family, or praying over a meal, there are certain scripts that I can rely on. And it feels a little bit easier. There I'm fulfilling a social obligation. And even, if even if I'm not quite sure what to say, there are scripts that I can rely on. But actually, I think the existence of those scripts in a communal setting also has a lot of power that we can then bring back into individual prayer. So, if I can share a story really fast, about…I want to say a decade ago, I started-just because I was in graduate school studying religion- I became very interested in…I wanted to have more exposure to how other Christian traditions worshipped. I started attending other services like for, for Holy Week or a Good Friday, I would go to an Episcopal church or a Methodist church or, you know, I was, I would attend morning prayers at a little chapel on the campus of where my masters was. I mean, I would try to do these things. And it was the first time that I was really exposed to either a liturgy, or the kind of communal recitation of the Lord's prayer that, that the liturgy often entails. So about a decade ago, I was still early in this practice. And I was attending an Ash Wednesday service at a Methodist Church, in Boston, where I did my masters. And the Ash Wednesday liturgy is, so it's one of my favorites, because there's a portion where the officiant will kind of read together as a congregation these words and they're printed for you in the program. The officiant will read a line and then you will respond as a congregation. And it's this whole five, maybe, probably a five minute litany, of all the ways that we have failed to keep the commandments. You as a congregation recite that “we have not forgiven others, the way that you have forgiven us, we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We have not been terribly kind, we have not remembered you in every waking moment”, We are kind of as a congregation praying this to God. And I remember feeling a really…we talked a minute ago about the way that language kind of shapes you. And I remember feeling myself shaped by these words. Five minutes before I stepped into that church, I hadn't been thinking about the way that in fact, yes, I have failed to love my neighbor. And I have not been terribly kind. And I'm, you know, I have all these weaknesses. But as we prayed it together as a congregation, I felt myself taking on the emotional affect of my own weakness. I was contemplating with others the ways that, yeah, Jesus has all of these things that he tells us to do in the New Testament. And I'm pretty bad at all of them. And so there I think, is one function of communal prayer. I think we've all had experiences listening to a really powerful prayer at the end of a sacrament meeting, or in General Conference, where the person praying, puts their finger on a really powerful spiritual theme from the talks. Or says something that kind of strikes a chord in you and you resonate and say, Oh, yes, that is true. I feel that too. You wouldn't have thought you were feeling it before they said it. But once they say it, you can see it. And that's become a helpful part in my own devotional practice now, because when then, I individually, when I'm praying, when I hit the very frequent moment where I've run through my list of complaints, and I've finished asking for the things that I want. And you know, we're 10 seconds in. Now, what do I say? I don't, I don't, when I've stalled in my prayers, and I run out of things to say, I will often think back to one of those powerful prayers, or I'll think back to something that Jesus said, “Give us this day, our daily bread, forgive us our trespasses”, I'll kind of look around in my mental library of prayers that I remember for things that others have said, to see if that might fit something in my life that I could give shape to here. And that's actually like a really chastening experience. It kind of disciplines my own emotions in an important way. So maybe I've just complained loudly about my children or my calling. And then I'll remember a prayer. And sure enough, Jesus says, “Thy will not mine be done”. And when I compare what I just said, with what Jesus said, those many-you know, hundreds of years ago- I feel my affects get chastened a little bit. And I remember, okay, now I need to try and pray in this other direction. And they'll kind of set me that way. So there's kind of a lot of ideas in there. But I do think that, in my experience, individual prayer is harder. Because you stall out so quickly, because you're so exposed, you see your weakness so clearly. But there's a really powerful effect to communal prayers for the way that they can shape us and then be resources that we then bring into our individual prayers too.

Welch: I love that, Kim, and it's really helping me to think about those moments of communal prayer that we do so often at church and in family prayer, and it can be easy to tune them out. I likewise had a very powerful experience a couple of years ago, sitting in a stake conference. And I had just sent a child off to college, and I was feeling just bereft. An incredible sense of loss. It had been a rough time with this child before he left, and it was just filled with grief and anguish. Kind of out of proportion to the situation that morning. And I as I was sitting there, just kind of silently weeping in stake conference, the words of Psalm 23 came to me. And they just came as this beautiful gift into my mind. I was drawn to them first of all, because the psalms are so good at expressing that pleading, anguished petition. Right, so there was something about the voice of the Psalm that drew me to it and attracted me to it. But then just as you say, as the words kept on circling through my mind, it kind of gathered, and calmed, and directed my own feelings in the direction of of the trust, right, and the gratitude, and the love that is so beautifully encapsulated in this idea of the Lord as our…as our good shepherd who leads us in the green paths and by the still waters. And so it makes me think: I should be listening with the same kind of eager attentiveness to all of the communal prayers in which I participate, so that hopefully, at some level, I can identify with and feel that kind of solidarity of spirit with the speaker, to the same degree that I, that I do with the Psalmist. Right, and then it can have my own unruly feelings, kind of disciplined and, and chastened, and, and enriched, and enlarged by that identification with the person who, who is speaking, speaking the prayer to God in that moment. I'd have to come to those prayers with a lot more energy of mind and openness of heart than I do, but, but maybe that's what we should be aiming for, right? In every moment of prayer. Sometimes we will fail. But I think sometimes those moments can come for us.

Matheson: Yeah, I mean, that's such a beautiful articulation. I mean, I think that's… I think that's why we pray, I think that is what prayer is for at bottom. And it puts a lot of extra pressure on us when we are in a communal setting to pray rightly. My son lately, has started praying in family prayers, lines that I recognize from things that I pray, and it's kind of shocked me, because of course, this is how kids learn to pray. They, they copy what other people do. But it's been an interesting moment of reflection for me, because it's like my prayers have a second life. Certain phrases that I, you know, voiced into the world are now being prayed again, through my son. But that means that something in there resonated with him, that he felt called to in his soul, he felt some sort of power in that language. But I think about this. I try to think about this, when I pray in a…to close a meeting or at the end of sacrament meeting, or end of a Sunday school lesson, there's a responsibility that we have in those moments, to try and encapsulate the kind of communal feeling that will call us to be better disciples.

Welch: So prayer kind of really makes visible the truth about our minds and our hearts, which can sometimes be hidden by the fact that we are separate bodies, right? We live in these discrete bodies, but really, our minds and our spirits and our hearts are open to each other. And you see that so directly when you hear your own language coming out of your son's mouth, right?

Matheson: Yeah, yeah.

Welch: And when and when in communal prayer situations, we hear these phrases that are familiar, we see made visible, made audible, I should say, made audible, just how much we share and just how much our minds and our spirits communicate with each other at every level.

Kim, I'm really thinking about what you said earlier about the way that God works in our lives at different timescales, right? Sometimes from moment to moment, but maybe even more often, from year to year from decade to decade, and how prayer, every instance of prayer is just one kind of beat in that longer conversation. I'm wondering whether thinking about these larger scale, larger timescales, are there any questions that have been long-term questions that have linked your spiritual life and your professional life? We're focusing on questions this season, thinking about asking good questions and questions that carry over from one realm of our life to another. Are there any, any questions that have really guided you and propelled you in your spiritual and intellectual explorations?

Matheson: Definitely. I think I will name three. The first pretty obvious to this conversation I, I just want to know what…what I'm doing when I pray. Right. I've now thought about this for many years, I've read a lot of stuff from a lot of people. This is a cliche, but I feel like I'm just scratching the surface, right? I've essentially written a book-length piece of scholarship on the question of what we're doing when we pray. And this will continue to just itch at me for years, because I feel like there's something really powerful happening there on my knees when I pray. And I want to know more about that. So that's, there's one lifelong question. The other two are a bit broader, but they also motivate me. I mean, they're, they're why I'm in this profession, and they will be my questions going forward. One is what it means to worship the God who appeared to Joseph Smith in the grove. Because the God who showed up there is not the God that traditional Christianity had painted for itself, for so many centuries. We know that God has a body, God, this is a God who still speaks to prophets, and still sends books of scripture into the world in a modern age, that those are not possibilities that the broader Christian tradition had seen its way to. And so a lot of my work is in kind of materialist philosophies that look at what would it mean for…if all we have as Joseph Smith teaches in the Doctrine and Covenants, if everything is material, what does that do for the way we think? Because that's not how the world has by and large thought for a long time. And so that's one question. The other one that is long standing for me is, what it means to read scripture. How do we do it? How is it different from reading other kinds of books? What are the practices by which we make, we make the truths of scripture known in our lives and to the world more broadly. So those three are very theological questions, you can see why I was destined only for a theology PhD, and nothing else.

Welch: You're living your best life, Kim Matheson!

Matheson: Yes, I am!

Welch: So each of those questions, I think, sort of takes a step back maybe from where we might dive right in, unreflectively. So rather than asking, you know, why isn't God answering my prayer? Or when will God answer my prayer? As urgent as those questions are, it sounds like you're asking, hang on a second. First, let's figure out what am I doing when I pray, right? Instead of, well, what do the scriptures say about such and such? Hang on a second, let's step back. What is scripture? What is this writing? What is, what brings it to life? Is that a fair characterization, that sometimes when we're getting stuck on our questions, maybe we take a step back and go back to basics and just ask more fundamentally, what is this thing?

Matheson: Yeah, definitely. I'm glad you drew that out. That's true! That is a theme of all those questions. And for me, I suspect, actually, that this is something that my academic training has given me. For me, this is the function of the academy. Sometimes we- in kind of our popular imagination, we assume that the academy is where you go to get the answers. And in my experience, it's not. It's where you go to sharpen the questions. And if there are ever points in like, my devotional life where I have gotten stuck, typically, it's because I'm being too fast, because there are too many assumptions baked into my questions. And what I need actually are better questions, more capacious questions. I need the tools that will allow me to notice what assumptions I've been making and what kinds of ideas I may have imported into my worldview that I don't know, I haven't interrogated those, or am I actually committed to those? Should those be there? Actually, scholarship is what has helped me to do that, maybe more than anything else. And it's been…yeah, in all the ways you're gesturing towards, really profoundly helpful in my life.

Welch: Kim, as we're getting close to the end of our time here today, both of us know that prayer is hard. It can be hard, it can be discouraging, sometimes. And I'm thinking of listeners who, whose prayer life is maybe stalled at the moment, right, who aren't in that conversation with God right now. Maybe they feel estranged from God, or maybe they're dealing with a grief that makes that type of conversation difficult. Do you have encouragement? Do you have advice? Or do you have wisdom? For listeners who are stuck in their prayer life?

Matheson: Maybe! I hope so. Let's see. Here's what I would say at this stage of…of kind of my, my thinking about these questions. I think, in general, we need to expand our sense of the scale on which conversations with God operates. And maybe we need to also turn down the expectation for what counts as prayer on our end. Here's what I mean by that. On the question of scale, I'll point back to what I said a moment ago about, think about this year or this decade, as the scale of your conversation with God. This prayer is a breath, it is a word, it is a sentence in that larger conversation. I think, if we know anything about God, it's that He operates on very long, very long timescales, much longer than we do. That can be profoundly uncomfortable when you're trying to have conversations with Him. But also, that is what…that is what our best hope is, right? That's when we point to God having an eternal perspective, that's what we mean. You get the benefits of being in conversation with someone who works on a different timescale. But you also get some of the difficulties of that. We're impatient, we don't like it. So think of this as a much larger conversation. Second, I would suggest that we spend a lot of time either frustrated the prayer is not doing what we think it should, or anxious about whether or not we're doing this right, and it feels the way it's supposed to. And I would say as much as possible, cut out those worries, just kind of set them aside. If you are showing up, if you are on your knees and you are genuinely open to heaven, you are showing up as authentically and vulnerably as you can, with your distractions set aside, your anxieties about whether or not you're doing this rightly, ignoring those. Setting down your resentments that you have to be here on your knees in the first place. If you are showing up vulnerably and open, you are praying. You have…you have won half the battle there. I think my last suggestion for people is to think about prayer as the work of putting yourself in touch with the possibilities of what God might have in store for you. So often we think of prayer as just like the place where we ask for what we want, or we emote about our days. And I think I think a lot of prayer is meant to be plugging us into the kinds of surprises that God might send. The way that there's actually a lot more potential baked into our world than we are prone to see. So, for instance, when you're praying about…when you're praying about a particular person, you're praying about a kid who is just driving you crazy, or whose decisions you just can't approve of and you're not sure. Part of what you're doing in that prayer is not just asking God to fix the situation, you're asking God to help you see your child more capaciously. To see their potentials, to see, to see them as a child of God, to see the way that he might be working with them, not just you working with them. You are, you are injecting more potential and a broader perspective about that child. I think prayer is where we do this with every object and every person that we pray over. And so if you're stalled out in prayer, call on the resources of other prayers you overheard, right. Think back to communal prayers that have moved you. Think about the prayers that Jesus has offered, and call them in as a way of seeing new potentials. And also, just explore possibilities with God. Ask Heavenly Father to help you see what you're not seeing in this moment. So I think, I think those are my three. A longer timescale, just show up-you've won half the battle, just show up, and then make this a place to explore possibilities with God.

Welch: Kim Matheson, this has been so wonderful. Thank you for joining us today on the Maxwell Institute podcast.

Matheson: Oh, it's been a pleasure! Thank you for having me.

Welch: Thanks for listening to the Maxwell Institute podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe and give us a rating or review on the platform where you listened. For updates about the Maxwell Institute, follow us on our social media platforms @BYUMaxwell and sign up for our newsletter at mi.byu.edu. Join us next time, and take care!