Faith & Spirit Quote by Geoffrey Chaucer

Prayer, in Chaucer’s hands, isn’t a clean hotline to heaven; it’s a mirror held up to human fog. “We know little of the things for which we pray” lands with the quiet bite of a poet who spent his career watching people narrate their desires as virtue. The line cuts against the confident piety of late medieval culture, where prayer structured daily life and salvation could feel like a ledger of petitions, penance, and ritual. Chaucer’s move is to question not God’s capacity to grant, but the petitioner’s capacity to understand what they’re asking for.

The intent is corrective, almost pastoral: humility is not optional when you’re pleading for outcomes you can’t actually map. Subtext: most prayer doubles as self-justification. We ask for love, success, safety, vindication, and call it faith, but the real object is often control - relief from uncertainty, a guarantee that our story ends the way we prefer. Chaucer implies that our wishes are compromised by limited knowledge, shallow self-awareness, and a tendency to confuse immediate comfort with long-term good.

Context matters. Medieval Christianity emphasized divine providence and the danger of misdirected desire; Chaucer translates that theology into psychological realism. It’s not anti-prayer so much as anti-presumption. The line works because it reframes prayer from transaction to exposure: the act reveals how little we grasp about consequences, about ourselves, about what “good” even means. In a culture of formal devotion, it’s a sly insistence that sincerity is not the same as insight.