Prayer as a Religious Narrative: The Spiritual Self and the Image of God

This article examines William James’s study on prayer in The Varieties of Religious Experience by framing prayer as a form of religious narrative that demonstrates the religious person’s construction and development of the spiritual self. The author begins by reviewing William James’s theory of the self and discussing its significance for multiple constituents of the self. By assessing James’s distinction between the terms I and Me, the author discusses how James’s notion of multiple selves provides a helpful framework for understanding the narrative nature of the self. In the following section, he investigates how James discusses prayer as “the very core of the living religion” by looking at the prayers of George Müller and Karl Hilty in The Varieties. The author argues that the Jamesian understanding of prayer reveals a particular process of how one makes sense of oneself and one’s image of God.