Prayer

Chapter 1: Supper Prayer

The widow would 'tuck down her head and grumble a little over the victuals..."

Chapter 3: Petitionary vs Emptying of Self [The two providences]

Miss Watson teaches him about prayer.
First, she takes him in the closet after he returns all mussed up from his adventure in Chapter 2 with Tom and the gang.
"She told me to pray every day, and whatever I asked for I would get it."
Once he got a fish line but no hooks.
He takes prayer as a literal list of requests for himself.
He asks Miss Watson and she calls him a fool.

Then, in a subtle aside, Huck set down in the woods (earlier) and had 'a long think about it'.
This second prayer reflects a kind of contemplative prayer, where Huck is asking for some guidance on what prayer really is, and why it doesn't 'work'. Again he cites examples of what is 'not working'- money lost, recovery of stolen goods. "Why can't Miss Watson fat up?".

After a time, he says to himself(always an indicator of the possibility of a conversation with God) that since he can't figure it out, he'll ask the widow.
Obviously at this point he is unhappy with the answer he has given himself that prayer doesn't work, and trusts the widow to straighten him out.

She tells him, because at this point he is open to hearing it, that he was to pray for 'spiritual gifts'.

Spiritual Gifts.

And so we now get to one of the central threads of my investigation of Jim and Huck, as the widow explains what she means:

"I must help other people, and do everything I could for other people, and look out for them all the time, and never think about myself."

Huck again goes into the woods, thinks about it, but couldn't see any advantage to this approach (except for the other people).

But the seed is planted.

Huck recognizes the difference as two Providences.

The widow's Providence showed promise. Miss Watson's Providence left him with a feeling of hopelessness.

He decides that he will choose the widow's way.

This is the first of the great conversations Huck has with himself regarding God and how God moves among humans.

Chapter 8:
"now I reckon the widow or the parson or somebody prayed that this bread would find me, and here it has done it. So there ain't no doubt but there is something in that thing."

This in reference to the 1st kind of prayer that Miss Watson speaks about, petitionary prayer, And because the loaf floats near to shore at Jackson island, Huck concludes the prayer has worked. This kind of thinking, deduction from evidence that has other explanations, like the natural current of the water, is associated with Fowler's Mythic or Literal Faith.
But Huck further observes that there are conditions to this kind of faith in prayer:
"That is, there's something in it when a body like the widow or the parson prays, but it don't work for me, and I reckon it don't work for only just the right kind."
So prayer of this kind depends on a God that grants the effectiveness of prayer only to the righteous, or the learned, or the repentant sinner, etc.
Huck will continue to struggle with this concept, that he is not good enough to warrant God's attention of the gift of getting what he wants in prayer.