Path of Prayer Reflections on Prayer and True Stories of How It Affects Our Lives

BeginningsI have a friend, Charlie, who was sent on assignment to the island of Bikini. The island is about 2500 miles southwest of Hawaii, and standing there you'd think there is absolutely nothing around it whatsoever, except eternal and unending ocean swells. The island is deserted. Charlie found himself walking on the glistening white sands of an empty and achingly beautiful beach, the sea unfurling itself ceaselessly at his feet. As he walked along, he saw two seashells, each the perfect mirror image of the other, sister shells, lying side by side on the sand. He gave them a nod of passing interest and walked on. A little later he saw two other seashells lying side by side, this pair different from the first but again each one the mirror of the other. He went on and saw a third set of twins, and then a fourth, and by now he was feeling uneasy with this mysterious duplication, and wishing for some signs of untidy civilization when he spotted...two Coke bottles lying side by side on the empty, glittering white beach. Charlie is a spiritual man. He decided that the pairs came as a sign that we are not supposed to live alone. We are supposed to have a partner in our lives. So he got married. Some years have passed, and now he believes that the message of the seashells was not about marriage. He thinks it meant...that we are not alone. There is something out there watching us, watching over us. We link up with it through prayer. All over the world people are praying-billions of people praying. They walk down the street praying silently, or they kneel in churches, bow in mosques and temples, bathe themselves in sacred rivers. They make prostrations, walk on pilgrimages, circumambulate their holy sites. They ring bells, light candles, turn prayer wheels, chant songs, sing mantras, fly flags, float prayers down rivers on lotus blossoms or drop their folded written prayers into a God Box or push them into the cracks of a sacred wall. They burn incense sticks that send their prayers up with the smoke (prayers in almost every culture go "up"). If you were born without knowing anything at all about prayer, do you think that you would pray? I say yes. I think it's integral to the human heart; we cannot help ourselves. We think. We pray. According to one study by the Princeton Religious Research Center, nine out of ten Americans pray. Ninety-five percent of Americans believe that their prayers are answered, according to a Lifemagazine Gallup Poll. A 1996 Time/CNN poll of 1,004 Americans found that 82 percent believed in the healing power of prayer and 64 percent thought doctors should pray with those patients who request it-and some do! "To exclude God from psychiatric consultation," Dr. Arthur Kornhaber of Lake Placid, New York, told Newsweek, "is a form of malpractice." Indeed, so many studies indicate that people deprived of spiritual meaning live shorter, more unhealthy lives than those who follow some religious path-any path-that you'd think the health insurance companies would ask applicants about their spiritual practices as well as about their histories of smoking, drinking, and disease. Dozens of hospitals are studying the effects of prayer on epilepsy, leukemia, strokes, cancer, headaches, heart disease, substance abuse, and a host of other ailments. The National Institutes of Health are funding no fewer than ten studies on prayer. Meanwhile, hundreds (perhaps thousands) of studies have been performed regarding the effect of prayer on everything from bacteria and yeast to shrimp, mice, seeds, and red blood cells. They show that prayer provides statistically significant results. Nonetheless, we have an ambivalent relationship to prayer. Both the Senate and House of Representatives, as well as the Supreme Court, open their sessions with prayer. Yet allowing children to engage in prayer in the public sBurnham, Sophy is the author of 'Path of Prayer Reflections on Prayer and True Stories of How It Affects Our Lives' with ISBN 9780670894642 and ISBN 0670894648.