Let Us Pray

The mayor was troubled by the news from the hospital. "The whole city should take time out to pray for him," he said.

The governor was equally concerned. "Our prayers will be with him," he said.

Citizens interviewed on the street echoed the sentiment. "I'm praying for his recovery," said one. "All we can do is pray," said another. "We're all praying," added a third.

The archbishop of the Chicago Catholic archdiocese, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, had been diagnosed with what looked like cancer of the pancreas, a particularly lethal disease. Newscasters, commentators and clergy of all faiths were quick to proclaim that millions of people in Illinois and around the world were praying for him.

At one level, the phrase "I'm praying for you" is merely a polite banality, not intended for dissection. But on another level, offering to pray for another person is far from a banality; it says not only that God exists, but also that the act of addressing God has a real effect on the course of creation.

While this comforting idea is supported by ample anecdotal evidence in both scripture and real life, it's also problematic. A God who will heal a sick old prelate if, and only if, enough people tug hard on his sleeve is at best a malleable, whimsical God without the strength and constancy one normally associates with the creator and master of the universe. On the other hand, the idea that prayer has no impact makes God unreachable and human beings only ignorant actors in a cosmic drama whose twists are all already known to the eternal playwright.

"When we deal with the subject of prayer, we're dealing, ultimately, with the problem of evil," says Father Dennis Krouse `73, professor of liturgical studies at San Diego University. "It also takes us right into the question of free will versus predestination, another can of worms."

Polls show that only 2 percent of Americans never pray. Around 60 percent believe prayers are effective in war. Sixty-five percent of Iowans prayed for rain during the parched summer of 1989. Close to seven in 10 Americans say they support prayer in the public schools -- a debate in which both sides can score points by arguing that prayer is a serious, portentous activity with heavy implications.

But does prayer work?

One November morning a year ago, Duane and Janet Willis and six of their nine children said such a prayer, then headed for Milwaukee in their Plymouth Voyager minivan to visit relatives. Along the interstate, the van ran over a scrap of metal that had fallen off a truck ahead of them. The metal punctured the Willis gas tank and kicked up sparks that ignited a terrible explosion. Five of the children -- aged 6 weeks to 11 years -- were instantly consumed by fire. The sixth, 13-year-old Ben, was burned critically.

Janet and Duane Willis were not seriously injured. Looking upon the scene, Duane told Janet, "This is what God has prepared us for." As she followed the charred bodies of her children to the ambulance, Janet Willis recited from the 34th Psalm, a prayer the Parkwood congregation had been attempting to memorize: "I will bless the Lord at all times. His praise shall continually be in my mouth." That Psalm goes on to observe, "Many are the afflictions of the righteous."

From their own hospital beds, the Willises prayed for their son Ben to recover. When he died the next morning they did not stop praying, nor did they stop praising God -- a bravura show of faith that transformed them, unwittingly, into latter day Jobs, the subjects of an inspirational booklet published by a Wisconsin church that has now sold well in excess of 100,000 copies.

"God knows all of history and time from its beginning to its end," said Duane Willis several months later. "What happened to us wasn't an accident. God is never taken by surprise. God had a purpose for it, probably many purposes. We don't understand God's agenda -- as Isaiah says, `His ways are not our ways.' We asked him for safety and it didn't turn out that way, but it's in the way God answers our prayers that we come to understand what God's will is."

What Willis seemed to be saying about prayers of petition is paradoxical: You can ask for anything you want, but you may get just the opposite if God has other ideas. "Anything you ask, God is willing to give you, but only if it is in his will," is the way Willis puts it. "We ask God to give us what he is going to give us anyway. This may sound like circular reasoning, but God is inscrutable. We are not able to comprehend the vast knowledge of God, the eternal, divine perspective."

Why pray, then? If the human idea of what is good (family safety) can be the exact opposite of God's idea (the incineration of six children), isn't it presumptuous for us even to suggest outcomes to God?

Willis has two responses to that. He first offers several Biblical examples of God apparently changing his mind in response to prayer -- giving Hezekiah 15 more years of life, for instance -- and notes that there is ample anecdotal evidence of prayerful healing in the modern world too. Second, scripture tells us to pray "without ceasing," he points out. "Maybe we can't put it all together. Maybe we don't understand why. But God commands us to pray and God loves us, so we just do it."

So what, precisely, does all this praying really mean? What does it say about faith, about our view of the nature of God? While theologians and lay experts don't claim omniscience about prayer, they do help define the questions.

Why, for instance, would an all-knowing God require us to pray if he already knows not only what we want but also what we need. "He knows what we are going to ask for even before we ask," as Father Krouse puts it. "He knows what is in our hearts."

One answer: "God likes to hear prayers the same way a parent likes to hear expressions of love from a child, or spouses like to hear them from one another," says Biblical studies professor Ronald Habermas of Another answer comes from Irfan Khan, theological consultant to the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago: "God appreciates it if you come to him as a servant. In fact, he expects it. If a person does not pray, God will think him arrogant."

Beyond that, prayer serves to focus the mind and spirit. "Prayer is a surrender, an acknowledgment to ourselves of the supreme reality before which all must submit," Krouse says. "God doesn't need it; we can't add to the infinite glory of God. But we need it -- to orient ourselves or center ourselves."

Kent State University religious philosopher Jeffrey Wattles says, "Human beings benefit from prayer though a release of anxiety which permits a worshipful direct contact -- as direct as we get in this life -- with God."

These are fine explanations for prayers of adoration, confession and thanksgiving, though many of those tend to put prayer on the level of non-spiritual meditative chanting, divine references notwithstanding. Prayer as yoga makes a certain amount of New Age sense, but it fails to account for why so many petition God for so much.

"God is not a trained poodle who does tricks on demand," says Don Carson, a divinity professor at Trinity International University and editor of Teach us to Pray, a collection of essays on the topic. "One of the first things we must recognize is that our own motives and judgments are corrupt."

Consider the vanity: I know you have a plan for the Cardinal, the petitioner says in effect, but I believe I have a better idea. Please change the universe on my account.

"Yet God made us petitioners, people who ask," says Reverend Raymond Studzinski, a Catholic University of America theologian and the author of Prayer in an Age of Anxiety. "It is our nature, and by asking we are positing a belief that God cares, even if we don't understand the mystery of how it all works."

The truest paradigm for prayer, says Studzinski, is in the Our Father. "The appropriate thing to ask is,~ `Thy will be done,'" he says, "to ask God to accomplish God's purpose."

Jews hold to this view as well, says Rabbi Moshe Francis, dean of the Chicago Community Kollel Institution for Advanced Torah Studies. "We say a prayer on the new moon every month that God should grant us our requests, but only the ones that are for our own good. A young man might pray that he find the right wife, for instance, which is a very important thing in life," Francis says. "But he should never mention a particular person."

Although this sounds reasonable, it creates a conundrum. Consider again the situation with the ailing Cardinal Bernardin: To pray for God's will to be done in such a circumstance is a prayer that does not answer the urgent need inside the human heart to beg for positive results. It says, "Do whatever you think is best," which is, one has to suspect, what God does anyway.

With this understanding, though, the words "Thy will be done" are no longer a request but a statement of fact on the order of "Thy turtles be green." When a belief in God's ultimate goodness is superimposed onto this view, faith itself is crystallized, as Ann Cummings, a Christian Science practitioner and spokeswoman for the First Church of Christ, Scientist, puts it: "God is always perfect, and he made the universe perfect. He is in control, and he doesn't change. But prayer changes our viewpoint of God."

The other side of this coin is fatalism and a certain passivity: Our prayers may matter to us, but they don't really matter to God. John Milton put it this way in Paradise Lost:

"No religion I can think of is purely fatalistic in this way," says Scott Alexander, who teaches comparative religion at Indiana University. Every organized faith that believes in a deity or deities practices some form of petitionary prayer, Alexander notes -- virtually by definition. "If you don't have a God or gods you can talk to and ask things of, you don't have a religion," he says. "You just have a philosophical system."

An emerging theory in the sociological study of religion suggests that human beings are virtually "hard-wired" for this style of faith: "All our human relationships that have any significance involve asking things of one another," Alexander says. "This is, in fact, what gives them their significance." From infancy on, experience reinforces only these kinds of relationships; so naturally, unavoidably, the same sort of relationship develops across the denominational board with the idea of God.

"There are many logical problems with prayer," says Alexander, who is Catholic. "How can God be all-powerful and all-good yet not help Cardinal Bernardin get better? But logical consistency is not what relationships are about. Relationships have tension and conflict. They do not always resolve perfectly. And because we are human, our relationship with God has all the messiness and difficulty of our relationships with people."

A similar way to the same end is to say that an unlimited God cannot be limited by mere human logic, and if he wants to alter whatever is to be such that it always was -- well, that's certainly his prerogative. It is far more comforting and perhaps far more natural to accept some form of the idea that God listens to prayer and changes course sometimes.

Modern anecdotal evidence of answered prayers abounds. Recall the dramatic rescue of U.S. airman Scott O'Grady, who both prayed and was prayed for fervently last summer during the six days from the time he was shot down over Bosnia to the time he was rescued. Another rescue for which prayer may or may not take a bow was the safe return of the Apollo 13 astronauts, an amazing and improbable feat that, the recent hit movie reminded us, was accomplished after Congress had passed a joint resolution urging everyone to pray for them. And although surgical biopsies showed that Joseph Cardinal Bernardin did, in fact, have pancreatic cancer as was feared, doctors said the malignancy did not appear to have spread, and they expressed professional optimism that he would be among the small percentage to beat the disease.

Lawrence Cunningham, chair of Notre Dame's theology department, tells of an experience with a close friend who came down with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. "He was a cultural despiser of religion," Cunningham says. "But I wrote and told him that whether he liked it or not, I was going to pray for him and have my friends at a monastery pray for him. Later, when he pulled through, he admitted to me that it was a tremendous help for him to know of those prayers.

"But I don't want to give credit," Cunningham says. "The idea that God is some sort of cosmic dispenser of favors who capriciously attends to those who happen to get his ear leads us into a theological swamp. If you came to me and said `My mother is sick' and I had the power to help her, I would help her every time. Yet God doesn't.

"And yet," Cunningham pauses, "I do pray for my friends and family. What does this mean? I believe that under this mystical reality we call God we express some sense of solidarity with those we pray for."

Duane and Janet Willis's continuing ability to see the accidental deaths of six of their children as an "answered prayer" is perhaps the purest form of this sentiment. But whether that tragedy was a non-answer, an answer from an evil spirit or an answer that had a better and more noble and loving purpose than we can ever know and understand here on earth, is immaterial when it comes to a purely practical point: Sometimes we pray for health and get a healing; sometimes we pray for health and get more sickness. So does it matter if we pray for health?

This is where science tiptoes gently into the back pews. If intercessory prayer "works," then the researcher in us says we ought to be able to see this empirically. Those people who are prayed for, on average, ought to live longer and be healthier than people who are not prayed for, regardless of whether they even know they are being prayed for.

Not surprisingly, few rigorous studies have attempted to isolate and examine the power of prayer, perhaps because such experiments have no satisfying results for the believer. Yet if prayer doesn't work in a measurable sense, it ends up in the same dubious category as quack remedies, astrology and tarot cards, with no more than anecdotal claims for effectiveness. And the assurance "I'm praying for you" carries no more comfort than the assurance, "You'll be okay because your moon is in Jupiter."

A 1965 controlled study of 38 rheumatic patients, some of whom were prayed for and some not, found in the end that prayer had no measurable effect; a similar 1969 laboratory study of prayer conducted on 18 children with leukemia hinted at a slight positive effect, but the results lacked statistical significance.

By far the most ambitious study took place in 1982/83 at San Francisco General Hospital, where Dr. Randolph Byrd studied 393 patients admitted to his coronary care unit. Born-again Christians outside the hospital were assigned to pray for a randomly-chosen group of 192 patients, while 201 patients in the control group received no such attention. The patients, doctors and the hospital staff did not know which patients belonged to which group.

"Fewer patients in the prayer group required ventilatory support, antibiotics or diuretics," Byrd wrote in a 1988 Southern Medical Journal. "In the prayer group, 85 percent were considered to have a good hospital course after entry, vs. 73 percent in the control group. . . . A bad hospital course was observed in 14 percent of the prayer group vs 22 percent of the controls."

His conclusion: "Intercessory prayer to the Judeo-Christian God has a beneficial therapeutic effect."

When people say they've heard of studies showing that intercessory prayer really works, the Byrd study is almost certainly the source. One academic research team composed of Jeff Witmer, a statistician at Oberlin College and an active member of the United Church of Christ, and Michael Zimmerman, a biologist now at the University of Wisconsin in Oshkosh and a professed atheist, surveyed the editors of 38 medical journals for leads on published or unpublished studies of prayer. They found nothing but the three studies referred to above. "The idea that many studies have proved prayer works to heal people was an urban legend," Zimmerman says.

As Zimmerman and Witmer wrote in the winter 1991 Skeptical Inquirer: "Many of the complications listed are not independent of one another, so that a single patient was more likely to manifest a range of symptoms rather than just one. Because of this problem, Byrd's analysis is not persuasive and there is no way to assess the efficacy of the prayers."

"What kind of God would it be who would only cure people if enough people pray for them?" asks Zimmerman, the atheist. "If God's truly beneficent, why wouldn't he do what he thinks is right?" Yet, says Zimmerman, "I believe that prayers for others can make a difference. Any time a group of friends says to an ailing person, in effect, `We really care about you, we're really thinking about you, you mean a lot to us,' that's bound to pick up his spirits." And that sometimes leads to healing.

Witmer, the Christian, echoes Notre Dame's Cunningham when he adds, "I still pray to God for people who are ill. I hold with the idea that prayer changes us, not God; that when I pray for someone, I am reorienting myself to caring for that person and that person's family, as opposed to me literally telling God what to do."

"Some of this laboratory evidence shows that one can accomplish negative outcomes through prayers," says Dr. Larry Dossey, a Santa Fe, New Mexico, physician and author of Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine. "Studies show you can manipulate living things toward a healthier or more unhealthy direction. With that presumption, prayer could be the source of all sorts of mischief, and the implications are rather frightening."

What if a group of researchers were able to pray hard enough that an otherwise ineffective or even dangerous new medication would cure the disease they engineered it to treat? If they used those test results to secure FDA approval of the drug, a great fraud on the public could result.

In the final analysis, said Indiana University's Scott Alexander, "We don't know what's best for us, but that we bother to ask underscores that the relationship with God is important to us. If God gave us everything we wanted, that really wouldn't be much of a relationship, would it? God would simply be an extension of our desires. He wouldn't be a real Other. He wouldn't be God.

The seeming illogic of prayer, the contradictory assumptions behind it and the impossibility of explaining how or why or when it works, can become, in this light, not a weakness in the theological argument but a strength.

"Sure, God does not save every child the way a human parent would," says Alexander. "He doesn't behave like a human being. He is different. That's what makes God God.