The Efficacy of Prayer?...

"And, maybe, this is everything that really matters."

Agreed.

You know, Svetlana, Kierkegaard made an excellent point, but we don't often think about how prayer changes us in this regard. In my experience, praying for the health and welfare of others helps me in two ways: 1) It helps me to consider whether I have done everything in my power to help the situation. This often leads to ideas of what I can do to help. 2) Once I have done everything within my ability, prayer helps me to realize that I do not have control over all things, that once I have done whatever I can do I can let "his will be done."

http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474977376666

More recent discussion on this topic.

Svetlana-

This is a nice essay.

While I encourage you to consider that "diversity" is not a Christian value, Biblical "literalism" IS. Spiritual discernment is the Gift. The importance and the Power of Prayer is, as you have pointed out, equally as important to the Lord as it is to the disciple. What is mis-understood by many is the PURPOSE of Prayer; the fundamental and passionate expression of Faith.

The Truth's of Christs' message are Spiritually discerned...and His message is so simple, it is no wonder that so very few understand it.

Two thoughts if I may.

I was married for 49 years and 11 months to a woman who I adored. She had a verity of diseases that would fill a medical library. I prayed for years that she would be "totally and completely healed" She died. God answered my prayer. Not in the way I wanted but now she is totally and completely healed.

I pray for a lot of people and a lot of things. People sometimes ask me to pray for them, which I feel privileged but embarrassed, But I always pray the same way. That God will give that person the things they need the most, what is best for them.

I have been around the block often enough to know that telling God how to run His universe is stupid

Great article

... I've already told above about my father. He died quite suddenly, being in the very prime of his life and career. About a year later my father confessor, the Rev. Georgii Chistyakov, has passed away from cancer, despite the fervent prayers not only of myself but in fact the whole community of St. Kosmas and Damian's parish. He was an unique person, probably the most perfect example of a true Christian I ever knew. Since the moment of his ordination he took care about the terminally ill children in one of the Moscow's hospitals, and many of his little friends died right on his hands... now it was his turn. I must admit - believe me or not - that I asked God to save him, taking instead as many years from my own life as it's necessary... so much I admired and respected this man... but now I see that it was both noble and childish. Yeah, dear John, you're right - "telling God how to run His universe is stupid".

Much thanks and blessings to everyone - S.

There are people, like your father and Fr. Chistyakov, that God needs to help him.

Sue-

He always does.

Great article, Svetlana.
'We establish the connection with the ultimate Source of All Being - which helps us to recognize and appreciate our own unity-in-diversity.'.
I soulfully agree with you. That is the essence, friend, as good as saying that we are one. When we see that how can we hate or fight ? We see love and love everywhere. One becomes more human and more, what you call, 'Ultimate source of all being'.
I thank you for this thought purifying work, Svetlana.

Deep and meaningful article Sveta.
It reveals to us a sadness that you still feel about the loss of two wonderful men.
I've had similar experiences and so your words are relevant to me as well.
This is what I've learned about my own prayers.
As you pray, you make an existing channel to God more alive. Not from God's point of view but your own. God has an infinite plan for all of us but it's a plan that we may not easily grasp.
As we pray, something happens within us. We enter the presence of our Creator and we raise ourselves to honour Him. I think that He replies to us by guiding our own words. As we pray, our reason for praying becomes clearer and our request to God takes on a form in which our words contains the own answer.
If we pray for someone who is dying, the prayer is really about us telling God how much we love that person and it's about God telling us that our love is valued by Him.

Whether that person recovers or not, is a God issue. Sometimes what God does is almost impossible to understand but we must have sufficient faith to know that He has a plan.

Chris and Fred - thank you so much, my dear, dear friends, for your deep thoughtful comments! ;-) Yes, it's so very true that practically every one of us has to come through a personal tragedy, sooner or later - and it happens so often that we pray for God to prevent this tragedy, but it still happens, nevertheless. Moreover, if we leave the personal level and proceed beyond it, there's a LOT of things in our world - wars, famine, violence, greed, cruelty - that any one of us who has the good will would want to change, and we all pray for the wars to be stopped, for the hungry to be fed, for the disabled to be recovered, etc., etc. - but still every day we have to witness these very things we would prefer to be eliminated forever. Maybe the clue is as follows: whether we're speaking about the "purposefullness" of our life, or "God's plan", how dear Fred puts it, we almost inevitably presume that our lives DO have the deeper meaning, the higher goal than the survival pure and simple. One of our deepest fears is to lose this assurance. And that's why we need the prayer - to affirm and to deepen our connection with the Ultimate Goal of all existence.

Love and blessings to everybody - S.

Svetlana, I love what you have said here and John Doyle added a wonderful comment. I wholeheartedly agree! It pains me to watch people fail when their faith is tested - we all go through horrible, terrible, unbelievable, inhumane situations. For every sad story I thought was mine alone, there are hundreds just like it - or far, far worse - out there. To believe that your prayer is changing you is a beautiful thing and more than mere sentiment.

Matthew 7:7 was the verse specifically chosen for me by my pastor when I was confirmed, and it continues to reappear in my life in wondrous ways.

Excellent, S.

Thank you so very much for your kind comment, dear Diana! ;-) I can only wholeheartedly agree with you.

Love and blessings from Moscow - S.

There are so many unknowns ... that's what gives faith its value. None of us understand God's ways as His thoughts are so much higher than our thoughts.
But ... I know one thing; once I eall out to God about a problem He takes over. I believe He is somewhat like a regular parent. If a child asks a favor we take all
kinds of things into consideration. Will it be good for the child. Will it bring about our
overall plan for this child and for the entire family. Does the child need a real boost in
it's life. Like an unexpected award? Is he honoring to us as parents?

Year ago our 13 yr old was hit by a car walking to school. They told us she had a lethal blow to the head and would die within a couple of days. I had just memorized 1 Thes 5:18 In everything give thanks for this is the will in Christ Jesus concerning you."

So we thanked Him and gave her up to Him. And He made her well. It surprised us. I do not think you have to believe with all your heart that He will give you what you want. Your faith is in Him ... not that you know what His plan is.
If you call out to Him He will involve Himself and carry out His perfect will & none of us can know ahead of time what that is. Only that He is faithful.
Great article Svetlana. Thank you for posting it for us.

Dear Glome - thank you so very much for your thoughtful comment! Unfortunately, how we all know, it doesn't always work. Any one of us could give a lot of examples, both from history and from his/her own experience as a proof of this. Was it GOD's plan for the Beslan children to be killed? Was it GOD's plan for millions of Jews to be massacred during the Holocaust? Was it GOD's plan for your neighbor's son or a buddy to be killed in Iraq? Etc., etc., etc.... And if yes, what kind of God it is?...

Blessings and best wishes - S.

It is a God that loves each and the whole unconditionally taking into consideration the eternity ... we have each and all been before, we have a karmic record that requires balancing, if not in one lifetime, in the next. There are no such things as "victims" and "accidents" in the greater picture, there are reasons as well as a time and place for everything.

Before we are born into a life we have a plan based upon a general preview of how things will transpire as to key issues ... during birth we forget all of that, after death we have a review, a recap of what we achieved in this "earth school" ... if we succeeded we get to go onto bigger and better things next incarnation ... if we failed, we get to repeat a similar "class" ... that is the kind of God I relate to ... I did not when my only son was killed at the age of 18 ... but I sure do now. All is well !

Dear Jerry - of course, I'm well aware of the concepts like karma and reincarnation, and moreover, I feel that there's a kernel of truth in them. There should be. It seems that the search of the Ultimate Truth is vitally important for us humans - or, else, we won't be able to face the evil and tragedies which surround us...

Blessings and best wishes from your Russian friend - S.

I understand your agony. I think the first thing we have to ask is 'Why did God create man?' The reason was much bigger than just giving every person 70 yrs of happiness. He could have done that if He wanted.
He said He created us for His pleasure. The same reason we have children. For the joy. But He didn't want robots. He chose to create living beings and then give them the choice on whether or not to become part of His family.

He takes each of us to the point of accepting the invitation or rejecting it. It takes different experiences for different people. Then ... for those that accept being born again into His family ... He has a special plan for each one. Each one will have tests and trials and joys and experiences different from every other one. As we learn to trust Him even in sorrow and obey Him even when we doubt we are being changed from glory to glory He said.
His purpose for our going through all these things are to form us into wonder eternal creatures. Once we die and are with Him and are reuninted with our loved ones that chose Him, we will see that all the pain created much glory. We will see that life on earth only lasted a few minutes. If you know God, He promised "All things will work together for YOUR good.
Knowing Him is what makes the difference because He is real.

Thanks Sveta. Glome, I am not a "normal" Christian (as you probably well know) ... but what you just said above "sounds" very acceptable to me also. :-)

Thank you all again, my dear friends! ;-) Perhaps, regardless of our particular views, it is the right time for us to return back to Søren Kierkegaard's statement quoted above: "Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays". We're not able to change the reality of pain which surrounds us, but it's up to us to lessen this pain, working to the best of our abilities to help and support those who need our love and prayers in every way we can. Everybody can make the positive difference both in the society and in the personal lives of our loved ones.

Blessings and best wishes to everybody - S.

If there is only one God then there is only one religion.

There are different forms of worship that are called "religion" and go by the various names we are familiar with: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and so on.

Polytheists might simply perceive these differences or manifestations of God all at once, like looking at the light of a candle through a multi-faceted gem.

Atheists and agnostics are part of the one religion and are necessary because it is only by contrast that we know anything at all.

Why God should wish us to worship Him differently is beyond any of us to answer.

However varied our beliefs and how impossible it is to know God, it is easy to imagine that God would not want us to fight over these superficial differences.

It seems as if God has given us consciousness and thought, mind and soul, and a responsibility to use these gifts to care for the works He has set in motion.

Prayers are the tool we have constructed with God's gifts. Its purpose is to strengthen us for the task at hand. That task is to fulfill our responsibility of caring for the world around us and all that are in it.

For me prayer leads to a reflection on the nature of existence. Sometimes my prayers are sufficiently earnest and as a result I sense a dissolution of self and a strengthening of spirit.

I come to realize that we are not at all separate from one another and that what harms one harms all.

The God is One, the concepts of this God are multiple. How Paul so aptly put it, "For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood" (1 Cor 13:12, RSV). Even the great apostle knew only "in part" and recognized this fact. And then he adds: "So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love." Love is, therefore, of supreme value for any sincere believer, and I can only agree with you, fully and wholeheartedly, dear Mike, that God "would not want us to fight over these superficial differences" which still exist between us. For, indeed, in God's eyes they ARE superficial.

Blessings and best wishes - S.

Svetlana: Thank you for this article. However, I would like to offer what can be considered, perhaps, as some "additional ideas" about prayer. First, I believe that prayer is a perfectly natural aspect of our nature as a special entity (us, the human form of life) having an "umbilical cord" in this physical existence that sustains us in the womb (this natural world universe) to the "mother" that is creating our spirit (God). I think, however, that people generally do not understand what prayer is and how it works or "doesn't work." First, sometimes the answer to a prayer is a very loving but firm, "No." If your own child prayed to you for some candy that you knew he/she was violently allergic to, would you just say, "Yes" and give it, knowing that your adorable child would become violently ill? I think not. Why do you expect God to act differently? Second, what one prays for is based on very limited knowledge as to the consequences of a positive answer as expected and asked for. Did you ever consider the possibility that the saving of your father's life (as asked for in prayer) might exact -- if answered as you wanted -- a terrible consequence on both your father and you? Third, sometimes prayers are answered in a way that we do not recognize because we are not aware enough to see the connection. What if God, knowing more than you -- actually, infinitely more than you -- knows that what you really want is not the thing that you are requesting but something else that is merely being expressed in your mind by a tangential relational "thing?" Then the prayer is answer but in what seems to you like a totally unrelated "thing" but is really what you wanted in the first place. You just don't get the connection. It is you and your limitations (which we all have by our nature) and not God's limitations. Fourth, just the act of prayer and "asking for something" from God is an act of admitting your dependency or feeling of dependency and an admission of personal vulnerability. And this -- this act of admitting dependency -- is the secret key to achieving success and getting help from that Source upon which you admit dependency. These are just some thoughts for you and others to think about on this subject. Thanks again for the article.

Dear Donald - thank you for the interesting and thoughtful comments. The only thing I would like to notice is that they sound good and "correct" in theory. As soon as it comes to practice, it turns out that SOMETHING doesn't work, period. I don't even ask how it could happen that if my father lived till the present moment (he was only 60 when he died), it would have "terrible consequences" for my family and myself. My imagination is simply not rich enough to grasp this. But how these first three explanations you gave could be relevant to the tragedies like Holocaust, or Beslan, or 9/11? Did God decide for some reason that if these poor children stayed alive, it would cause any harm, or that they were unworthy of protection, or that, instead of saving them, He/She would rather prefer not to break His/Her schedule, being busy with someone or something else? Again, please remember that this is a very specific episode with the very specific consequences. One can name a lot of such episodes, in fact, the whole world history is permeated by them. As for the fourth explanation, the childish dependence is actually a not-so-innocent thing, since it inevitably bears hypocricy and fear. And those, in their turn, bear violence. Again, if you want a proof of this, just list through a world history textbook. When Jesus referred to becoming like children in His sermons, He didn't mean that we should be weak and dependent. Rather, He meant that the Kingdom of God was the Kingdom of nobodies (from the social point of view), since that's how children were viewed back in those times.

Blessings and best wishes - S.

I just want to say that this is one of the most thoughtful (in the literal sense of being full of thought) groups of people I have ever encountered on Gather. I appreciate so very much that you all take the time and effort to actually think before you respond. I am so often disappointed with the shallowness of what I read. This is a wonderful, spiritual group...and I feel that it is a "real" group with a sense of connectedness. God bless you all.

Thank you from us all, dear Rebecca... you're so very welcome, and may God bless you, too. ;-)

Warm regards from Moscow - S.

Svetlana said ... a long time ago;
Dear Glome - thank you so very much for your thoughtful comment! Unfortunately, how we all know, it doesn't always work. Any one of us could give a lot of examples, both from history and from his/her own experience as a proof of this. Was it GOD's plan for the Beslan children to be killed? Was it GOD's plan for millions of Jews to be massacred during the Holocaust? Was it GOD's plan for your neighbor's son or a buddy to be killed in Iraq? Etc., etc., etc.... And if yes, what kind of God it is?...

God said in the Bible "The day of our death is better than the day of our birth." Of couse we all know that ... the sadness is in those left behind.
I reread these from an old alert to myself. Such a good article. I thought more as I read through & of course no human can answer you question because Jesus said "If you ask anything according to my will you have the thing that you asked of me." We don't always know His will ... but there are other difficult things about prayer to me also.
If I ask God for something ... why do I need to ask others to pray? I take Him at His word that He will respond to my prayer. Yet, in every book of the NT the apostles and writers say they covet the prayers of the Christians. They knew Him and walked with Him. Paul spent 3 years in the desert with Him. He knows Him well. And Paul always asks for prayer. So I ask for prayer and pray for other even though I know they pray because Paul knows something from Jesus that I don't know.

I thought about the holocaust as you also discussed. There are two things that I considered. there are approx 109 people dying every minute. That is 6,540 an hour; 156,960 people a day; 57,290,400 a year. That means a normal year brings death to over 57 million people. I'm not sure how long the holocaust lasted. 2 yrs? That would have only added 3 million people to normal amount yearly.
I am not minimizing the situation; just trying to look at the whole picture for a minute.
For our little minds, seeing 100,000 die in the tsunami was overwhelming. We couldn't imagine God allowing that ... yet it only added a few to the overall monthly amount of those dying on the earth.
Also ... we try to view all the deaths at once. But each person only died once. Like someone in a car wreck. Or a disease. Or a drowning. Each one only experienced their own death. Not the brunt of all 6 million or all 100,000.
Also, God had been with each one from the day they were born ... He said the day of their death was in His hand. He prepared each one. He was there with them. All of the young children went to be with Him. Had they grown up they may have rejected Him. He knew that. He weighed that in.
I'm not trying to give answers here. I don't know any. Only trying to think of how our human mind needs to break the numbers down to one. One at a time. Then, to me, it is somewhat more manageable to grasp.
Too bad you can't post it every year or so. Good material gets lost in the back pages.

Thank you so very much for such a deep and profoundly honest comment, dear Glome... yes, there's a LOT of things which are beyond our understanding. Like the recent tragedy in Mumbai, for example... I can't help but remember our great writer Dostoevsky and his discussion in "The Karamazov Brothers" about building happiness on "a single tear of an innocent child". In my opinion, the question can't be resolved for as long as we stay inside the theistic concept of God. Let me elaborate a bit over it. Centuries of human history taught us to view God as a kind of father figure or heavenly king, the ultimate power we can appeal in case of trouble - for some, even a tyrannical power. But, as history shows us, tyrants are not only feared, they're also held responsible for everything that is going on, even the things which are beyond their reach. I tend to view God as a process, not as a personality, much less a tyrant.

Again, I remember this "Christian" koan from a great Orthodox teacher, Simeon the New Theologian: "If God is indeed Almighty, is He able to create a stone He couldn't move by Himself?". And the answer is: "Yes, and this stone is called "human soul"". ;-)

Blessings and best wishes - S.

I don't read a lot of fiction like many knowledgable people, but I do read. I think I can say your great writer, Dostoevky, is my favorite writer. At least at this moment, I can't think of one that grips my thoughts and feelings more. Yaaaaaa for Russia! :)

And mine, too, dearest Glome... "Crime and Punishment", "Idiot" and, of course, "The Karamazov Brothers". With SUCH literary geniuses, Russia obviously have a future! -)

Hugs and blessings from Dostoevsky's Motherland - S.