The message came in a flurry of emails on a day that was no busier than usual. It was bad news. An old friend was letting me know that her long-time babysitter had just been diagnosed with colon cancer and was going into the hospital soon for surgery.
"Prayers!" I typed. "I'll keep her in our prayers." What else do you say? How else do you respond to really bad new? The thing is: do you really mean it, and are you really going to do it?
In this case, of course, I meant it and I was indeed going to do it. I'd pray for the babysitter that night or the next morning for sure when I had my usual quiet time on the subway. (Hey, this shouldn't surprise you -- lots of people can be found praying on their way to work.) But you know what? Good intentions, that usual slippery slope, got delayed. There were lots of pressing matters and other people who needed to be prayed for: my sister-in-law's cancer treatments, my kids at loose in the world, my dad's shaky health, the ballooning home equity loan, the mess in the Middle East...
A day or two later I did remember my promise and scribbled her name on a Post-It note and put it as a marker in my tattered pocket Bible so that I'd remember in the morning when I turned to a Psalm.
I don't believe for a minute that God didn't get the message when I typed my email "Prayers!" and anyway, if God cared about this lovely faith-filled woman, he would be on top of it. (Leave alone for a minute the whys of her illness.) But I needed to say that prayer for me as much as for her. Praying for others is at the heart of prayer. As has been often pointed out, the Lord's Prayer is in the first-person plural, not singular. Praying -- and I don't think I'm any better at it than anybody else -- is a joint effort. Faith is about compassion, and how compassionate can you be if you don't pray for others?
Prayer is also where you go when you have nowhere else to turn. I don't care if someone accuses me of being a fox-hole believer; that place of desperation can be a spiritual sweet spot.
Do I know how it works? Haven't a clue. Do I believe it works? Of course I do or I wouldn't prevail. There have been times when I've depended on it. Scared out of my wits in a hospital room before open-heart surgery, I took comfort in a print-out of emails from friends and family promising their prayers. And when I couldn't pray at all, I was grateful to a pair of old friends who called and prayed some sense into me on the other end of the line. What I couldn't do, they could do for me.
There's a lot of goodness in this broken world, and prayer feels like a way of shaking it loose. I have no problems praying for dear friends who think it's a bunch of malarkey. They love me and have to accept that this is some endearing idiosyncrasy of mine like making dopey toasts or breaking into song. When you pray for someone, you learn to love them, and you think of them all day long.
To remember people on my list, sometimes I go through letters of the alphabet. Or at night, when I can't sleep, I'll mentally wander through the office and recall plenty I need to pray for (a colleague's ailing parent, an email in my inbox). And once a week I go through a pile of prayer requests from perfect strangers who've posted on our website at http://www.guideposts.org/prayer.
That babysitter is getting out of the hospital soon and going into rehabilitation. I've been checking in and am attuned because she's on my badly maintained list. "You're so nice to ask," my friend says. But I'm not being nice. I'm doing what I think is essential and will keep trying. "You're in my prayers" is a powerful thing to say and even more powerful when you show how you mean it.
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Rabbi Jennifer Krause: Don't Pray for Christopher Hitchens
There was no significant difference between the outcomes and complications between those for whom prayer was offered and those for whom it was not. The only real significant difference noted in the study was that the people who knew they were being prayed for had more complications than those who were prayed for but didn't know it. It was suggested that knowing about the prayers introduced anxiety, which led to the complications.
Bottom line is that more study needs to be done, but it appears that prayer is most likely inconsequential.
It was certainly more effective to actually help the family. Perhaps it took a bit more effort to babysit than it did to chant magic spells, but it was well worth it to help out this family.
I lost a child to cancer and it was the people who showed up at my door with a dish that were more "godly" than anyone. Don't let praying be like a rocking chair; there's lot's of activity but you're going nowhere.
Whether the praying works or not is irrelevant to the conversation.
Unfortunately, most things in life comprise a zero-sum game. The victory of one army is the defeat of another. The survival of one often means the death of another, or more. Is not the selfishness of praying for only your side to win, or only the people you know to live, antithetical to Christianity and most other religious traditions involving prayer? Besides, if you beg an almighty, infinite being for someone to live an extra year or decade before ultimately succombing to death the same as everybody else, do you think he (or she) does anything but laugh? Praying for someone to live is praying for nothing at all.
Prayer should be reflective, meditative communion with the divine. If you are Christian, follow Jesus' suggestions in Matthew and Luke--when it comes to temporal matters on this planet, all he asks of God is that "Your will be done...as it is in heaven." That's it. Total trust in the will of his heavenly father. THAT'S prayer. Making specific requests, as if god were a local radio DJ, is not.
I can supply the verses if you are unfamiliar with them.
I can supply the verses if you're not familiar with them.
(I have no idea why that didn't go through the first time. There's nothing objectionable or offensive).
if you pray or not
the same thing will happen
entire nations pray and they still get screwed
prayer is BS
wakeup and help yourself
qdog
We don't need God to give us more patience, we need to show more of it. We don't need God to give us strength, we need to find it. We don't need God to help us forgive others, we need to practice it. We don't need God to give us courage, we need to stop acting like cowards. We don't need God's help to accept others, we need to learn more about them.
Do we really think God wants followers who are incapable of solving their own problems? Too many of us have become helpless co-dependents who are unwilling to think, feel, or change our belief systems without first waiting for a sign from above, a warning from below, or until we consult a 2,000 year old book. And that, is a truly horrible outlook for us Christians because our obsession with heaven and our fear of hell will have done nothing to broaden our horizons. Instead, we will spend the rest of our lives waiting for the Divine answers to earthly problems we should already be trying to solve for ourselves.
The church needs to grow the hell up.
I will pray 4 u
qdog
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/523962-thank-goodness-for-christopher-hitchens