Prayer changes things. Seriously.

[The Great Open Dance]

Being prayed for is different from not being prayed for. When my father was having quintuple bypass surgery at the age of sixty-three, I told many people about it and generally got one of two responses: “I’ll be thinking about you” or “I’ll be praying for you.” One parishioner, Cay Youngdahl, who was very much a person of prayer, asked me the specific day and time of the surgery. As I told her, she wrote the details down in her calendar and reassured me, “I’ll be praying for your dad.”

I’m not sure what those prayers did, if they steadied the surgeon’s scalpel or strengthened my father’s spirits, but they calmed my soul. Through prayers of intercession, people entered my world of concern. They did not leave me stranded or alone; instead, they provided the comfort of community and promised me that, no matter what, they would remain. Under no circumstances, no matter how trying, would I be ghosted.

God for us inspires the church in which we are for each other, and prayers of petition express this persevering loyalty. Prayer tends to people in a world that is inattentive. Prayer allows us to be intimately present to one another through God, and this presence, in an age of distraction, changes things. It deepens our awareness of one another, thereby revealing our basic unity. It momentarily allows the self to forget the self and all its preoccupations, jettisoning personal anxieties from the center of the universe to the edge, where they belong. Prayer reminds us that the self is not the hub but the spoke of the revolving wheel, shifting our disposition from self-consciousness to self-surrender. There, the quieted soul can finally hear God’s assurance, “You are my beloved.”

Living in a universe that is prayed. Prayer expresses our gratitude toward God for the mystery within which we live, which none of us earned yet all of us received. It arises naturally from our astonishment at the inconceivable surprise of living, from our gratitude for being present within the unfolding of time. As gratitude, prayer participates in a boundaryless God who celebrates the whole and wants us to as well. In this conception, prayer is more like singing than asking, a joy we are swept into rather than a duty we practice.

Prayer comes naturally to some people but is a struggle for others. And that’s okay. An inability to sit and speak with God is not a spiritual weakness; God gives different spiritual gifts to different people so we can fulfill different roles in God’s community. Prayer is a spiritual gift, but other spiritual gifts can become prayer, and prayer alone is never a substitute for action. When Joan Cheever was fined for feeding the homeless in San Antonio, she explained, “This is how I pray. I pray when I cook. I pray when I serve.” Prayer is not a substitute for action; it is our motivation to action, and all action toward the kingdom is prayer. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 230-231)

*****

For further reading, please see:

Heschel, Abraham Joshua. Moral grandeur and spiritual audacity: essays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996.

Stillspeaking Writers' Group. God Is Still Speaking. Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2024.

[marble falls]

1. Prayers work. We are all connected.

[Wiz Imp]

2. Largest Study of Prayer to Date Finds It Has No Power to Heal

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-mar-31-sci-prayer31-story.html

The largest study yet on the therapeutic power of prayer by strangers has found that it provided no benefit to the recovery of patients who had undergone cardiac bypass surgery.

In an unexpected twist, patients who knew prayers were being said for them had more complications after surgery than those who did not know, researchers reported Thursday.

The complications were minor, and doctors surmised that they could have been caused by the increased stress on patients worried that their conditions were so bad they needed prayers.

Father Dean Marek, a Catholic priest who was involved in the research, said he wasn’t surprised by the results.
“I am always a little leery about intercessory prayer,” said Marek, director of chaplain services at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. “What we have in mind for someone else may not be what they have in mind for themselves.... It is clearly manipulative of divine action and personal choice.”

Your "faith" is completely contradicted by science. I trust science.

[anciano]

3. Wonderful OP, a very thought provoking essay....

Last edited Thu Jul 2, 2026, 12:42 PM - Edit history (1)

It brings to mind two quotations that address this concept, one from a classical theological philosopher and the other from a modern spiritual teacher:

"Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays." Søren Kierkegaard

"If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change." Wayne Dyer

Thanks for sharing.