This post is copied from here.
I’ve always
struggled with the idea of an interventionist God. The idea of treating an
omnipotent power like a vending machine: If you put in faith, good works, and
requests, you’ll get the world to go your way.
This assumes God
operates within a meritocracy. It assumes that the better you are, the better
you’ll be treated by the almighty. It assumes you can get everything you want
if you just pray hard enough, if you’re holy enough, if you never stray. But
when “ask and you shall receive” ends up being your proof of faith, how are we
meant to react when God says “no”?
About 17 years
ago, I was attending church three times a week. My mother had been diagnosed
with cancer and then gone into remission, only to find out that her husband, my
stepdad, had been cheating on her while she was in chemo. After an ugly
divorce, her cancer returned, but this time it didn’t look like she was going
to win.
Church became our
solace. The community we built there helped us through her divorce and her
illness. They prayed our way through each crises, and I prayed with them.
But each time,
God seemed to tell us “no.”
After my mom
died, I kept praying. It was inertia. But it gradually began to feel hollow. I
didn’t throw a tantrum and tell God, “I’m never speaking to you again.”
Instead, it was a slow decline in trust. It was as if I were a child, and my
parent had stopped showing up for me.
For someone who’d
been so embedded in prayer, and the culture of faith, my decision to stop
praying wasn’t easy. When life is hard, hopeless, and confusing, prayer is
often the only thing that empowers us. It’s how we fight helplessness.
But when we stop
praying, helplessness is all that’s left. For most of us, that’s very
uncomfortable. And even after I’d decided to quit, I kept fighting the urge to
pray. I’d think: How much easier would it be to say a quick prayer on the off
chance it might work?
I’d been leaning
on the “We’ll pray for you” method of doing nothing.
Then, I started
to notice how often Christians substitute prayer for more direct action.
When was the last
time you said you would pray for someone? When’s the last time you actually
did? And when’s the last time you did something else to reach out and give support?
Offered a meal, an ear, a social connection, a protest sign? I’d been leaning
on the “We’ll pray for you” method of doing nothing. By not praying, I forced
myself to either admit a passive stance or roll up my sleeves and get to work.
I began to reject
prayers from those around me. When someone told me they were going to pray for
me, I did not feel grateful. I felt resentful. Though I knew they were coming
from a good place, I didn’t want their prayers. I wanted their support,
concretely.
To insult people’s
prayers is to insult their faith. For many, traditional prayer is a central
tenet of faith. I never found a way to have this conversation graciously, to
politely acknowledge another’s belief without being made complicit in it. And
while I wouldn’t say it was easy to decouple prayer and belief, I found that,
ultimately, I still believe in a higher power, even if he doesn’t take
requests.
After giving up
prayer, a part of me wondered: Did I give up on it too quickly? Is it a
valuable tool? Does it actually work?
I did some
research. In a study on intercessory prayer concluded in 2006,
researchers asked three Christian congregations around the country to pray for
1,802 heart surgery patients. They divided them into three groups: patients who
knew they were being prayed for, patients who did not know they were being
prayed for, and patients who were not prayed for at all. Thirty days after
surgery, it appeared there was no significant difference in results between the
group that was prayed for and the group that wasn’t. In fact, the group that was
told they were being prayed for actually had a higher incidence of
complications post-surgery: 59 percent versus 51 percent.
On the other
hand, there have been other smaller studies suggesting that prayer may lend a
helping hand. Reachers in Seoul studied 219 infertile women who
received in vitro fertilization embryo transfers. Remote prayer was conducted
by groups in the United States, Australia, and Canada, and the women were not
informed they were being prayed for. The result? Women who were prayed for had
nearly double the pregnancy rate of those who had not been prayed for: 50
percent versus 26 percent.
Clearly, we still
don’t know whether praying for others works. But maybe there’s a less clinical
benefit. A personal reward for prayer, one only I can feel. I wondered: Could a
daily prayer practice help me achieve some sort of inner peace? Was I willing
to try?
When I was in high
school, a counselor taught me to meditate as a strategy to manage my PTSD, and it soon became a consistent part of my
mental health regimen. I generally feel better when it’s part of my daily
routine, and science backs that up. Meditation has been linked to lower blood pressure and heart rate, reduction
in anxiety, stress, and pain, as well as a heightened immune response.
Meditation soon
became my replacement for prayer.
When meditation
is given a spiritual quality, instead of simply sticking to the secular, it can
be even more effective. In a study of migraine sufferers, one group was asked to
meditate for 20 minutes a day with the mantra “God is good. God is peace. God
is love.” Another group was asked to meditate with a more neutral mantra,
“Grass is green. Sand is soft.” After a month, the group that meditated on God
reported a greater decrease in migraines.
Meditation has
been linked to lower blood pressure and heart rate, reduction
in anxiety, stress, and pain, as well as a heightened immune response.
Once meditation
was already a part of my daily practice, I decided it wouldn’t hurt to give it
a more spiritual charge. In fact, it might help. And because it felt different
from traditional Christian prayer, it was less likely to bring up all the
negative feelings of theistic abandonment.
But how could I
incorporate the highly Westernized version of prayer that I’d been taught with
my Eastern meditation practice? Both would have to shift.
I returned to the
prayers I’d learned growing up, specifically the Lord’s Prayer — a model from which all other prayers should follow. I’m
not a theologian, but I’ve bounced around enough denominations at this point to
understand
that the Lord’s Prayer is essential — it may be one of the only things all Christians can
agree on. When I stopped reciting the Lord’s Prayer by rote and really unpacked
it, I began to realize that my understanding of what prayer should be was warped.
In the Lord’s
Prayer, we’re taught to include three things: praise, submission, and request.
And it’s the last part that trips me up, because there are only three requests
in the Lord’s Prayer: for bread, for forgiveness, and for guidance. That’s it.
How freeing! None
of what Westernized religion had taught me to pray for — health, wealth, personal
success — were there. How much easier
would it have been to accept my mother’s death if I’d been asking for
forgiveness and guidance instead of health? Maybe it wasn’t that
God hadn’t shown up, but that I’d been asking for the wrong things. He’d never
made a promise to fix me, or my mom, upon request.
Instead of
asking, maybe I should have been listening. After all, if you
believe that God gives us gifts and talents, then maybe it’s our job to do the
fixing. With guidance, of course.
I still don’t pray — at least, not in the typical way. I
do try to make time each day, however, to sit and listen. My time with God is a
time of quiet and stillness. It’s a time to let clarity come to me slowly,
gently, instead of demanding it on cue.
I will probably
never tell you that I’ve been praying for you. What I will do is consider the
gifts I have been given, and listen for ways that I can use them to truly help
you. Then, I’ll get to work.
