Prayer as surrender

For me, faith entails walking a frequently uncomfortable line between ultimate hope and a willful blindness to persistent and unanswerable questions.  Sometimes the public policy pronouncements of religious believers reflect that willful blindness (e.g., "God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve . . ."), and sometimes I hear it in the face of tragedy (e.g., "God must have needed another angel . . .")  I just ran across a quote from the writer James Agee that nicely captures my own discomfort.  Agee's father was killed in a car accident when he was young, and Agee's mother retreated into religious devotion.  In an autobiographical novel, Agee describes the scene of the children overhearing their mother's earnest and trusting prayer:

And they felt that although everything was better for their mother than it had been a few minutes before, it was far worse in one way.  For before, she had at least been questioning, however gently.  But now, she was wholly defeated and entranced, and the transition to prayer was the moment of her surrender. 

Yes, prayer is and should be a type of surrender, at least in the sense that it is an acknowledgement of our fundamental dependence, our lack of self-sufficiency.  At a certain point, though, I think that the acknowledgment can function almost as a relinquishment of our humanity, of the tragedy and mystery of the human condition.