From JOURNALS AND PAPERS (1846)
On prayer.
“The spontaneous, immediate person believes and imagines that, when he prays, the main thing—the thing he has to work at especially—is that God hears (hører) what he is praying about. And yet, in truth's eternal sense, it is just the opposite: the true prayer-relationship does not exist when God hears what is being prayed about but when the one praying continues to pray until he is the one who hears, who hears what God wills.”
In December 1954, the American composer Samuel Barber (1910-81) premiered a cantata called Prayers of Kierkegaard. Divided into four parts, Barber’s work is based on a miscellany of prayers written by the Danish thinker:
The first prayer of the cantata invokes the immutability of God—a fitting theme, particularly given the journal entry cited above. As Kierkegaard makes clear, the goal of prayer is not to bring about change in God, as if the divine were subject to human caprice and desire. Rather, it is to align the human being, who is caught up in the ceaseless flux of earthly life, with the unchanging will of God. This sort of prayerful hearing (høring) is obedient (hørig).