COLUMN: The problem with prayer
Prayer only seems simple. You bow your head, think about something and sometime speak in King James English and await a verdict.
Do I believe in prayer? I believe it’s a good way to calm yourself down and to meditate on a subject or person, but as a tool for world change it starts to fall apart if you think about it even a little.
Prayer should be a vector for peace, but too often we use prayer as a weapon. Like everything from the war on drugs to the war on poverty, some churches have declared themselves “prayer warriors.” This is unfortunate because if it gets down to a war between the Christians and everybody else, the Christians are going to come up short. Many of the non-believers are praying to gods that God-bless-Americans don’t even think exist. Unfortunately the Muslims are thinking the same thing.
How do you calculate prayer power? Does it really make a difference if you have one person praying for world peace or 200 million?
Are there people praying for war or can you only pray for good things? Then, if that is true and everyone is praying for only good things, you’d expect the world to be a little bit better place.
How can we sing “God Bless America” when in Muslim eyes, we don’t even believe in the right god? Furthermore, does God bless America mean all of North America, just the contiguous 48 states or are Hawaii and Alaska included? Is Puerto Rico provisionally covered as a protectorate?
Being so imprecise may be working against us, plus you have to explain all the not-so-blessed things going on. Surely you could deduce the Quadra-hurricane attack on Florida is God’s retribution for last year’s election chicanery, MTV’s Spring Break Special or just the prayer warriors on the other side of the battle having their way with us.
Maybe Utahns over prayed for the flooding rains to go away in 1983 and the result is our six years of drought. It makes it even more confusing when you interface prayer with nature.
In my more evangelical days prayer was described as “talking to God.” This is as good a definition as any, but in reality our legal system believes it sane to talk to God, but insane to actually have a two-way conversation with God. There are an awful lot of people in jail or roaming the streets wearing tin foil hats who claim to talk to God.
So is there a hierarchy to prayer? As Catholics, we often thought of ourselves as superior for spending more time on our knees than most other religions. Plus, we had candles, incense and much more colorful garments than Unitarians or Seventh Day Adventists. But then there are monastic monks who spend their entire lives praying. They ought to have a better success rate. What about persecuted Tibetan monks? Surely their prayer ought to be worth more than the average “now I lay me down to sleep.”
That’s the problem with prayer. After 13 years of being a wise guy in Catholic School, five years as a free-ranging evangelist and another 10 years of church hopping, I know what the answer is to all my niggling questions …”faith.” But then you are back where you started … whose faith?
Dennis Hinkamp can be reached at dennish@ext.usu.edu.