The power of prayer
Children kneel at their bedside and recite a familiar blessing (“Now I lay me down to sleep…”). Manny Pacquiao crosses himself before all his boxing bouts. A priest prays for peace on earth, and the congregation in one voice answers, “Amen.”
Prayer is woven into the daily rhythms of life, its ethos embedded in the public and private experiences of millions of Filipinos. Over the centuries, people of every creed and culture and every station in life, whether out of pious faith or primal fear, have reached out to a reality greater than themselves. It has been called “the native language” of the soul — the universal expression of an innate human desire to make contact with the divine. The 16th-century Christian mystic St. Teresa of Avila described prayer in its sublimity as “an intimate friendship, a frequent conversation held alone with the Beloved.” An Islamic proverb states that to pray and to be Muslim is synonymous. And in Hinduism, devotion to prayer is seen as a route to ecstasy.
And yet, while religious traditions throughout history have sought to define it, prayer is hardly the private domain or even the product of organized religion. As James P. Moore observes in his book One Nation Under God: The History of Prayer in America: “Long before Moses parted the Red Sea, before Buddha described the path toward Nirvana, before Christ died on the cross, and before Mohammed revealed the message of the Koran, there was prayer.”
Intimate Dialogues
Whatever the precise nature of its origins, prayer has long been an irreducible feature of virtually every living religion. In Judaism and Christianity, prayer is rooted in a biblical understanding of God as a personal being who hears and responds to His people. In the New Testament, Jesus is portrayed as a teacher and an exemplar of prayer. While He observes the traditional Jewish custom of praying at the Temple and the synagogue, He prays intimately and often at other important occasions: at His baptism, at the calling of His disciples, in the garden of Gethsemane, and at His crucifixion. He instructs his followers to avoid ostentatious prayer (“Beware of practicing your piety before others to be seen by them”), to pray confidently (“Ask, and it will be given to you”), and to desire God’s will ahead of their own (“The kingdom come, thy will be done”).
In Islam, prayer is considered foremost an act of adoration to be incorporated into the daily routine of life through the salat, a ritual prayer recited five times a day while facing Mecca. Prayers of personal supplication, called du’a, are deemed secondary. Likewise, in Hinduism, daily liturgical prayers are emphasized over personal petition and are spelled out in the Vedas, a collection of ancient hymns. And in some forms of Buddhism, monastic prayers are practiced morning, noon, and night to the sound of a small bell.
Prayer And Health
But with all these prayers, the obvious question is rarely asked: What do people actually pray about when they bow their heads, close their eyes, and begin to share their thoughts, worries, desires, yearnings, adoration, and gratitude? The short answer, it seems, is that they pray about nearly everything. A cancer cure. A lotto win. A safe travel. A healthy long life. To seek God’s guidance. To express gratitude for a wish granted. To pass an exam.
A recent survey by the US National Center for Health Statistics found that 43 percent of the adult population had prayed specifically for their own health in the previous year and more than half of those surveyed had at one point in their lives prayed for their own health. And cardiologists say that 97 percent of patients prayed the night before they had heart surgery. In another survey, 40 percent said that they prayed for their health “all the time.” And of those who prayed for their health, 71.1 percent said they prayed about specific diseases like cancer, or chronic pain, and 65.1 percent said that they prayed because of emotional disorders or mental illness. That is why the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine of the US National Institutes of Health is spending $6.2 million over two years to study the link between prayer and health.
And yet, somehow quantifying and analyzing the effects of prayer on health has become a burgeoning field of scientific — some critics would say pseudoscientific — inquiry. Researchers have attempted to see if the efficacy of prayer can be evaluated in the same way as any other treatment, such as doing studies in which some people who were ill were given a dose of prayer with their medicine and others with the same illness received standard treatment only.
Indeed, for most believers, the element of religious life that intersects most naturally with health is prayer. Very serious theologians believe in the power of so-called intercessory prayer to heal the sick, and some very serious scientists have looked at it, too, with more than 6,000 published studies on the topic just since 2000. Some of them have been funded by groups like the John Templeton Foundation — part of whose mission is to search for overlap of religion and science — but others have come from more dispassionate investigators.
As long ago as 1872, Francis Galton, the man behind eugenics and fingerprinting, reckoned that monarchs should live longer than the rest of us, since millions of people pray for the health of their King or Queen every day. His research showed just the opposite — no surprise, perhaps, given the rich diet and extensive leisure that royal families enjoy.
One of the first formal studies on intercessory prayer took place in the coronary unit at the San Francisco General Hospital in 1988. Researchers found that patients who had been prayed for by others tended to recover with fewer complications than those who received standard treatment without prayer. Their need for antibiotics was one fifth that of other recovering patients, and they were one third as likely to develop pulmonary swelling.
Another highly publicized study, which appeared in 2001, is representative of the controversy that attends all attempts to study the power of prayer. In that study, researchers claimed that women in South Korea undergoing in vitro fertilization achieved astonishing results when strangers prayed for them. They were twice as likely to conceive, even though they didn’t know that they were being prayed for. Questions were immediately raised about the study’s methodology, despite the fact that it appeared in a respected journal, the Journal of Reproductive Medicine, and a distinguished physician was the lead author. But in 2004, the New York Times reported that the lead researcher had suddenly withdrawn his name from the study.
Richard Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center in New York and an ardent critic of all the prayer studies, says, “Almost all the studies have such serious methodological flaws as to be inconclusive.” There might simply be a basic contradiction inherent in all these studies. “If they could establish that intercessory prayer works in some objective, measurable way, they would be taking it out of the realm of prayer and into the not-so-well-known realm of some natural phenomenon,” says Carol Zalesky, professor of religion at Smith College. “It no longer would have the spiritual meaning people think that it has. Then, would it still be prayer?” As one survey respondent explained, “I pray mostly for things that can’t be measured.” Sloan adds that even attempting to find a scientific basis for a link between prayer and healing is a “fool’s errand” — and for the most basic methodological reason. “It’s impossible to know how prayer is received,” he says, “and since you don’t know that, you can’t determine the dose.” Indeed, such is the difficulty in scientifically studying matters that relate to religion, faith, and spirituality.
Such exactitude, however, does not dissuade believers. For in the end, prayer is ultimately about realms of consciousness as yet unexplored — about what believers call the soul, or the spirit, or some transcendent part of being. Some believe that all prayers are actually answered — somehow, some place, sometime. But it does not really matter: For those who believe, the true power of prayer resides in the fact that it is what establishes the deep personal relationship that a person has with his/her God.
