Olivia Strittmatter - The Phenomenology of Prayer

 Blog Post 4 - The Phenomenology of Prayer


This post is going to be on a concept from chapter 4 of The Phenomenology of Prayer.

The major concept that I want to discuss is how prayer is used as an attempt to provide a sacred space where the sacred can appear to the person.

First of all, prayers are not just kneeling with your hands pressed together with your eyes closed. A prayer can be anything where a person is communicating with the sacred. This can be applied to wilderness hiking, such as on trails like the AT. When hiking long distances one can go into flow, which we discussed in class so I won’t talk about it here, but this can be seen as a form of prayer, because the person is opening themselves up to experiencing the sacred without actively trying to. 

Flow can bring forth the sacrality of a space and allow the participant to take a role in experiencing it. This type of prayer turns the wilderness into a sacred space where the sacred is able to appear and communicate with the person. This is not a form of petitionary prayer typically, because the observer is not specifically asking for anything, or hoping to gain anything from this experience. Typically when one realizes that they’ve been in a state of flow, it is already past, and they then have time to think about their experiences.

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