-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
Reading: by Rick Moody from an essay entitled “Why I Pray”
There are no atheists in foxholes, the celebrated formulation goes. It’s an observation that even the least spiritually inclined of my acquaintances occasionally makes. And, indeed, when I ask friends if they ever pray, their experience is mostly in the category of these foxhole prayers. Lily, a producer from northern California, once spoke to me of praying during the Oakland fires, when her parents’ house was in danger. “I prayed to God all night and the next day. I prayed that the house wouldn’t burn, that everyone would be okay, that the fire would stop.” Lily wasn’t and isn’t a regular churchgoer, doesn’t take her children to church, doesn’t believe, and yet she found solace in that moment. Another friend, a novelist, spoke of praying in the middle of the night during dark times: “I wake and simply murmur, ‘Help me.’ Who else could I be speaking to?” Cynthia, a prominent magazine columnist, told me of praying during her father’s struggle with cancer. She adapted a line from Saint Augustine: “Whisper in my heart, tell me you are there.”
These days, on this side of the Atlantic, our military foxholes are few. Yet aren’t there still the metaphorical foxholes, the inevitable pointless deaths or business reversals or romantic failures? And if foxholes, metaphorical or actual, continue to exist, then won’t prayers continue to be mumbled in the dark bedrooms of America or in the first light of small-town mornings? When I got out of the hospital, when I was living alone in a converted filling station in Hoboken, New Jersey, when I was showing up for work and little else, when I was still suffering, in spite of medication, with a number of vexing complaints – then, though I had never gotten down on my knees for anyone or anything, though I had never admitted the possibility that I couldn’t solve my problems myself, though I had never submitted that merely human agencies were not entirely effective, then I began to pray. Regularly. My prayers were unadorned, without thees and thous. They were simple prayers: Give me a chance, please.
The epiphany in this story, therefore, is backward. I never believed in God and, as a result, never prayed to glorify his or her or its name. Instead, I prayed because I was desperate, and thereafter I believed in whoever it was I prayed to – mainly because prayer did me some good. Life improved – as life improved for my acquaintances who pray, whether or not they go to church or believe in a […] God or anything else… I pray, therefore, because prayer works.
Reading: by the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh from The Energy of Prayer (p. 19)
Does prayer work?
Perhaps we believe that if prayer works, then it’s all right to pray. The corollary is, if prayer doesn’t work, what’s the point of praying?
The best way I can answer this question is with a story. There was a six-year-old boy who had a little white mouse as a pet. The mouse wasn’t just a pet; he was the boy’s dearest friend. One day, the boy and the mouse went into the garden to play, and the mouse ran into a hole in the ground and didn’t come back out. The young boy was so sad. He felt that there was no point in living without the mouse. He knelt down, joined his two palms, and prayed fervently for the mouse to come back again. He prayed with all his heart. He prayed as he had seen his mother do, and he mumbled this prayer to God: “I have faith in you, God. I know if you want to, you can bring the mouse back up again.”
The child stayed on his knees and prayed with all his sincerity for over two hours. But the mouse didn’t come back up. Finally, the boy went back inside.
Throughout his childhood, he would pray whenever something bad happened. And what he prayed for never came true. By the time he was in high school, he no longer had faith in prayer.
How Prayer Works
A Sermon Delivered on March 3, 2013
By
The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann
In the spring of 2004, while I was on sabbatical, I had the opportunity to travel overseas and visit a wide variety of religious sites. Cathedrals in Germany, Unitarian Churches in England and Scotland, Hindu Temples and Muslim Mosques in India, as well as the small Unitarian congregations in the Khasi Hills, just north of Bangladesh. The last leg of my travels took me through Hungary and Transylvania, to our partner congregation in Szekelykal, Romania.
All the sacred places I visited were beautiful, and awe-inspiring, and amazing in their own ways. From Westminster Abbey to Stonehenge, from shrines on the banks of the river Ganges, to the temple in Deer Park, where the Buddha is believed to have delivered his first talk. From St. Stephen’s Basilica in Budapest, to the Unitarian village church in Szekelykal, which was the culmination of all my journeys.
Our two congregations had become partners two decades earlier. And so, even though I was visiting for the first time, the minister and villagers treated me like an old friend.
I don’t speak either Hungarian or Romanian, and so the barriers of language and culture between us were clearly felt. Still, despite these barriers and differences, I felt a distinct sense of religious kinship. After spending several days with the minister, Attila Molnar, meeting the members of his congregation, and colleagues in nearby villages, I had a clear sense that, despite obvious differences, congregational life in Szekelykal and Urbana, IL, shares much in common.
There is a universal human experience of mystery and wonder, a longing for connection and understanding that finds expression in a multitude of traditions and practices. There is a common religious impulse shared by all people.
This idea was conveyed clearly in a gift Attila gave me, when I left for home: these praying hands. (Show wooden board.) This wood carving is based on the famous ink drawing by the 16th century German artist Albrecht Dürer. It was a sketch made in preparation for a larger painting. The hands in the painting belong to a praying apostle. As a model, historians believe, Albrecht Dürer probably used his own hands.
* * *
The religious scholar Karen Armstrong once pointed out that, despite the fact that “Hindus, Buddhists, Native Americans, African tribespeople, Jews, Christians, and Muslims all have very different beliefs, … when they address the sacred, they do so in strikingly similar ways.” She writes, “It is surprising that prayer is such a universal practice, since it is fraught with problems. Everybody insists that the ultimate and the transcendent… cannot be defined in words and concepts, and yet… men and women habitually attempt to speak to the divine. Why do they do this….?” (Every Eye Beholds You, p. xiii)
* * *
Why do we pray?
The American medical doctor and author Larry Dossey says we pray, because prayer works. In a book entitled Prayer is Good Medicine, he writes, “It is really no longer a question of whether experiments prove that prayer works; they have already done so.” He says, “more than 130 controlled laboratory studies show, in general, that prayer or prayerlike state of compassion, empathy, and love can bring about healthful changes in many types of living things, from humans to bacteria.” “Statistically speaking,” he says, “prayer is effective.”
For instance,
“in a study by cardiologist Randolph Byrd involving 393 patients in the coronary care unit of San Francisco General Hospital, prayer groups from various parts of the United States were asked to pray for sick individuals assigned to a “treatment” group; no one prayed for those in the control group… This was a double-blind study: No patients, no physicians, and no nurses knew who was and was not being prayed for. Byrd found that the prayed-for patients did significantly better on several outcome measures. (p. 29)
When it comes to prayer, Larry Dossey is a true believer. From Dossey’s perspective science and statistics have settled the question whether the power of prayer is real. But the scientific and medical communities at large don’t share he sense of certainty.
More skeptical scholars see the flaws in studies Dossey cites. They are poorly designed and their results are often not reproducible. The findings are far from conclusive. For instance, a comprehensive study a few years back involving over 1,800 patients showed that prayers offered had no effect on the recovery of people undergoing heart surgery. And patients who knew they were being prayed for actually had a higher rate of post-operative complications, like abnormal heart rhythms. (“Long-Awaited Medical Study Questions the Power of Prayer,” The New York Times, March 31, 2006)
* * *
Prayer may be a universal religious practice, but the power of prayer, the meaning of prayer, and even belief in prayer is not shared by all people.
Millions of people across the world pray every day. And millions more have given up on prayer. Like the boy whose mouse ran away, and who was deeply disappointed because his fervent prayers failed to bring the mouse back, many of us have come to the conclusion that prayer doesn’t work.
We may hear stories every once in a while, of a cancer miraculously cured, or a tumor that suddenly disappeared, and we are told that these amazing recoveries occurred because of prayer. And yet who can doubt that there are countless other instances in which all the prayers in the world failed to prevent an illness, a tragic accident, or a natural disaster?
Prayer is problematic on many levels. Rick Moody captures several of them, when he describes his own childhood experience. Moody writes, as a child in church
“I learned right away that the dialogue implicit in prayer would be, in my case, one-sided. To whom was I mumbling these words? (I hadn’t yet memorized the Lord’s Prayer, so my version was full of stray syllables and patches of humming.) And why was there silence when it was done? The whole notion of prayer seemed founded on falsehoods and prevarications.
In my parish, there were unclothed emperors wherever I looked. Adults prayed to God (whoever or whatever that was) who never answered, and they prayed for the kinds of virtues that they rarely manifested in their own lives, or they prayed (I believed) for stuff, for rain and good health, with results that were inconclusive…. “
If we don’t believe that prayer works, what’s the point of praying? Do we believe, or don’t we believe? That’s the question that prayer and religious practice seems to hinge upon. “We tend to equate faith with believing certain things about God or the sacred,” Karen Armstrong writes. “A religious person is often called a “believer” and seen as one who has adopted the correct ideas about the divine. Belief is thus seen as the first and essential step of the spiritual journey.” This is a very common way we often think about religion.
And yet, as Karen Armstrong has discovered, “the history of religion makes it clear that this is not how it works. To expect to have faith before embarking on the disciplines of the spiritual life is like putting the cart before the horse.” Faith is not the point of departure, but rather the destination we approach once we decide to embark on the religious journey, once we decide to engage in religious practice, once we decide to pray.
“All the great teachers of spirituality in the major traditions have, …insisted that before you can have faith, you must live a certain way. You must lead a compassionate life…, you must perform [certain] rituals… all traditions insist that you must also pray. Prayer is thus not born of belief and intellectual conviction; [but rather just the opposite] it is a practice that creates faith,” Armstrong writes.
Our actions shape our awareness. This is the lesson Armstrong finds in religious history. It is the same lesson Rick Moody was surprised to learn, when he had his “backward epiphany.” For the better part of his life, Moody was not a believer, and so he didn’t pray. But then in a moment of desperation, at a time when the challenges of life almost overwhelmed him, when he found himself trapped in a metaphorical foxhole, he began to pray. Even though he never believed in God, he began to pray. And once he began to pray, because it did some good, he began to believe.
* * *
If we do pray, who is it we pray to? This is the question Thich Nhat Hanh asks.
“Who is the person to whom we pray? Who is Allah? Who is God? Who is Buddha? … Who is Our Lady? When we practice looking deeply into [the] matter of prayer, we find more questions than answers.
Where is the line where oneself ends and the other begins? For Buddhism, this is possibly the most basic question…
If you think that the Buddha is a reality wholly separate from yourself with absolutely no relationship to you whatsoever, and that you are standing down here and Buddha is sitting up there, then your prayer… is not real because it is based on a wrong perception, the perception of a separate self…
You and the Buddha are not two separate realities. You are in the Buddha and the Buddha is in you.” (p. 29, 31)
Karen Armstrong writes, “When men and women pray, they are in some profound sense talking to themselves. This does not mean that they are not also addressing the ultimate, since all the world’s faiths do not see the sacred as simply Something “out there” but as a Reality that is also encountered in the depths of our own being.”
And even if we are the only ones who hear our own prayer, our prayer still matters.
* * *
Prayer may not have the power to do everything, but prayer can do something. Prayer may not always be able to move mountains, nor lure a child’s runaway pet mouse out of the ground, but nevertheless prayer can sometimes do us some good.
Sometimes simply saying “help me” can provide us with a sense of solace. Sometimes simply saying “Give me a chance, please,” can ease our desperation, and help us remember that there are some problems in life that we won’t be able to solve alone… and that’s OK.
* * *
Prayer is a universal human practice. It doesn’t require elaborate rituals, it doesn’t require many words. Prayer can be as simple as placing the palms of our hands together. This gesture will be equally understood in the hills of Transylvania, and the prairies of the Midwest. It will be understood in old English churches, and in any village in India.
In India it is both a prayer and a greeting. You say, “Namaste.” Namaste is Hindi, and means, the Sacred within me salutes the Sacred within you. Namaste. Even when the word is not spoken, the meaning of the gesture is understood.
Whether or not we believe,
May we resolve to lead a better life.
May we resolve to be more compassionate and kind in all we do.
In this way, all our prayers,
Whether or not they are ever spoken,
Will surely be heard.
Amen.
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