The Power of Prayer Healing - Psychology - Essay Example

The Power of Prayer Healing - Psychology The power of everyday prayer is boundless: It is a documented fact that community prayer services have worked miracles, especially in healing the sick. In todays rushed world, not many people find the time to pray. Even those who do pray are in a terrible hurry. Naturally then, the heart and mind are often disconnected from the words of prayer which are uttered as a matter of routine. Instead of having a heart-to-heart talk with God, we end up merely reciting. So prayer tends to become a superficial and mechanical task thats not particularly pleasing. Unsurprisingly, one often prays grudgingly. There are many ways, however, of perceiving prayer. Everyday prayer can help us to experience great spiritual heights when our hearts are touched by moments of exquisite beauty. These moments of grace may be rare of course, but they could capture our whole life and lift us from the mundane, giving us fresh insight into all the lows in our life. The power of everyday prayer is boundless: It is a documented fact that community prayer services have worked miracles, especially in healing the sick. One example of a mothers unflinching faith in the power of prayer is the story of St Monica who prayed without fail daily and untiringly for her wayward son to be redeemed. Not only did her son change for the better, he went on to become a great doctor and bishop in the church. He was St Augustine. Prayer is not too simply to be defined. Its meaning is certainly to be allocated to several different levels of mental understanding. If the ordinary child was asked for a definition he would quite likely say that prayer is asking God for something. A somewhat older child might venture: prayer is beseeching God to grant you blessings. The answer of a still more reflective child might be: prayer is pleading with God to make you better than you are. These forms of the definition come close to expressing what the word commonly connotes in the general mind. In this form it certainly can be correctly stated to be mans petitions to God for blessings. It has definitely been proved that humans constantly desire and pray for things that are not good for them. If, therefore, many prayers are bad prayers, a law of cosmic justice and balance would have to see to it that they are not fulfilled, or mans fulfilled wishes would ruin him. If there is any efficacy in prayer, we should pray that deity should shield us against our own prayers. From the point of sheer fulfillment it must be an almost certain fact that the prayer exertions of billions of mortals over many centuries have gone wholly for nought. It is doubtful if any prayers have ever been answered, in the literal sense. It is in itself an arrant presumption that God, considered in any sense as a unit mentality, could have the patience and restraint to go along with the farce. If the deity can be thought of as an intelligence that listens, investigates, weights and responds with appropriate action, it is simply unthinkable that even an infinitude of divine love would not lose temper at the endless chorus of pleadings assailing his ears from this one planet alone! Likewise it has never been a matter of rational concern to "believers in prayer" to explain how the cosmic mind can pay attention to all the intricacies, involvements and moral balances needing to be taken into account for a just decision in the millions of different supplications addressed to it at one and the same time every day. But – would be the "explanation"--God has the "miracle wand" lying always at his hand. It might be conceived that he would grow tired of picking it up. Daily prayer is not restricted to only asking for personal favours and daily needs, though even this is legitimate and good. One important reason for everyday prayer is to honour and thank God, even for the little things of life. We are His servants not only in lofty cathedrals where His mysteries appear to us in overawing splendour and enrapturing beauty. We are His servants also in the field or the workshop, at the desk or in the washtub. A theologist writer who advocates daily prayer said: Despite weakness, depression, and weariness, a small shaft is again and again dug by honest labour, and through that shaft a ray of eternal light falls upon a heart buried by the debris of daily life.Daily prayer is meant to transform our lives from lives of gossip, trifles and pettiness and greed to a sincere commitment to God, so that even the way we live in, itself becomes a prayer offering. Norman Vincent Peale describes his encounter with a man confined to a wheelchair who exuded a rare happiness. When he was a child his mother had left him on the front porch while she did her housework. Somehow he got to the edge of the porch and fell headlong, hurting his spine. The accident left him wheelchair-bound since the age of 12. Instead of wallowing in self pity he found strength in daily prayer. So he came to exude an unusual sense of Gods presence and his method of daily prayer was to pray for other people too, by just sitting in his wheelchair, loving them and giving them to God. Prayer can help us overcome daily tribulation; it can infuse fresh hope and faith in us, enabling us to face every new challenge with renewed confidence. Community prayers bring different people together, united in compassion and altruistic intention. Prayer heals. Anecdotes and research on prayer’s clinical effectiveness has become big news of late. A 1997 Christianity Today cover story explains “how physicians and scientists are discovering the healing power of prayer.” Although the magazine acknowledges that “petitionary prayer is not 100 percent effective” it welcomes the conclusion of Georgetown University internist and prayer researcher Dale Matthews: “Prayer is good for you. The medical effects of faith on health are not a matter of faith, but of science.” Is prayer good for you? No one argues that prayer by those who believe in prayer’s healing power might indeed calm the soul, relieve stress, and lead to reduced hypertension, controlled headaches, and strengthened immune functioning. But a sugar pill, offered as if it were a real therapy, can do as much. Such is the power of positive belief (a fact of life that guarantees some successes for the devotees of alternative medicine gurus such as Deepak Chopra and Andrew Weil, regardless of whether their specific recommendations have any intrinsic healing power). But modern advocates of prayer’s power have something more in mind than a placebo effect. Prayers of intercession and petition can change reality, they believe. Did not Jesus say, “Ask, and it will be given you”? Why not, then, pray for health, wealth, parking places, better grades, safe air travel, and even a sunny day for the church picnic? One presumes that Pat Robertson had Jesus’ promise in mind when he asked God to steer Hurricane Gloria away from his Virginia Beach television headquarters: “I felt that if I couldn’t move a hurricane, I could hardly move a nation.” General George S. Patton had the same concept of prayer when ordering that all chaplains pray for an end to winter rains that in 1944 immobilized his troops: General Patton: Chaplain, I want you to publish a prayer for good weather. I’m tired of these soldiers having to fight mood and floods as well as Germans. See if we can’t get God to work on our side. Chaplain O’Neill: Sir, it’s going to take a pretty thick rug for that kind of praying. General Patton: I don’t care if it takes the flying carpet. I want the praying done. The resulting prayer, which was distributed by the U.S. Army with Patton’s Christmas greetings, called upon God to restrain these immoderate rains with which we have had to contend. Grant us fair weather for Battle. Graciously harken to us as soldiers who call upon Thee that, armed with Thy power, we may advance from victory to victory, and crush the oppression and wickedness of our enemies, and establish Thy justice among men and nations. Amen.(1) What about the kinder, gentler intercessory prayers for healing? Do they produce cures? faster recover? decreased mortality? In 1872, an anonymous Britisher proposed a grand experiment that might answer these questions. Choose “one single ward or hospital”for three to five years of sustained prayer by “the whole body of the faithful.” Will the healing and mortality rates there beat those in comparable hospitals elsewhere? If they do, so much the better for our belief in intercessory prayer and our associated understanding of God. If they don’t, so much the worse for our beliefs. The very idea triggered a national “prayer-gauge controversy” that raged in Britain during 1872-73 (2). Should we test the efficacy of prayer as we would test any proposed medical remedy? In the spirit of those Christian founders of modern science, should we approach even our cherished beliefs with such humility that we are willing to check them against the realities of God’s creation? Or is the very idea of testing prayer—and God—as outrageous as most Christian leaders of the day assumed? If experimenting with prayer offends you, said scientist Francis Galton (Charles Darwin’s cousin), then why not examine the efficacy of spontaneous prayers? Galton, who loved to quantify everything from intelligence to female beauty, collected mortality data on groups of people who were the objects of much prayer—kings, clergy, missionaries—and found that they lived no longer than others. Moreover the proportion of stillbirths suffered by praying and nonpraying expectant parents appeared similar. And there things stood until a century or so later, when several American researchers actually decided to experiment with prayer. Although not the first effort—others are recounted by Larry Dossey in Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine (3)—the one that did the most to revive interest in such experiments was Randolph Byrd’s 1988 report of “Positive Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer in a Coronary Care Unit Population.”(4) Byrd randomly assigned 393 patients admitted to San Francisco General Hospital’s coronary care unit to either a prayer or no-prayer condition. The first names of prayer group patients, along with diagnosis, condition, and occasional updates, were given to three to seven “born again” intercessors. In the tradition of double-blind drug studies, Byrd kept both patients and staff ignorant of which condition any patient was in. (This is the standard procedure in therapeutic experiments for precluding any placebo effect.) The results? For six of 26 outcomes, such as the need for diuretics, antibiotics and ventilation therapy, the prayed-for patients did better. The widely publicized conclusion? Prayer works. That is good but hardly surprising news to most Americans, 87 percent of whom in a survey for Newsweek said that “God answers prayers” and 82 percent of whom said that when praying they “ask for health or success for a child or family member.” In a Gallup survey, 3 in 10 Americans reported having experienced a “remarkable healing,” of whom 30 percent credit their own or others’ prayers. “Not so fast,” said the skeptics. For other measures, such as length of hospital stay or mortality, there was no difference between Byrd’s prayer and no-prayer groups. Try enough prayer experiments and take enough measures and you can be sure that some results—just by chance—will be statistically significant. Other experiments on bacteria, plants, and mice as well as on humans have followed. A few have generated publicity. Others, such as a 1997 experiment on “Intercessory Prayer in the Treatment of Alcohol Abuse and Dependence,” few have heard about, because there was no measurable effect of intercessory prayer. All these are a prelude to two new prayer experiments (one small, one huge) funded by the John Templeton Foundation. (Although I serve the Foundation as an advisor and trustee, I was not involved in its decisions and I report here only on publicly available information.) My challenge to readers, and to my invited respondents, is to say what results you predict, and why. In the smaller experiment, Dale Matthews, in cooperation with S. M. Marlowe and Francis MacNutt, assigned 40 patients at Clearwater, Florida’s, Arthritis Treatment Center to one of two groups—a control group receiving no treatment, and a group that received healing prayer with the laying on of hands over four days. Half of the patients in this latter group were additionally assigned to receive six months of long-distance intercessory prayers. Patients in both the control group and the two prayer groups were examined periodically over the next year, rating their own pain and being rated by clinicians who were blind to the patients’ experimental group Throughout history, humans have suffered ills and sought healing. In response, the two healing traditions—religion and medicine—historically have joined hands in care of the sick. Religious and healing efforts were often conducted by the same person; the priest was also the healer. Maimonides was a twelfth-century rabbi and a renowned physician. Hospitals were first established in monasteries, then spread by missionaries. As medical science matured, however, healing and religion diverged. Rather than simply asking God to spare their children from smallpox, people began vaccinating them. Rather than seeking a spiritual healer when burning with bacterial fever, they turned to antibiotics. This wall between faith and medicine is now breaking down again. Since 1995, Harvard Medical School has annually attracted nearly two thousand health professionals from across North America to its conferences on "Spirituality and Healing in Medicine." Duke University has established a Center for the Study of Religion/Spirituality and Health. In 1999, 61 of Americas 126 medical schools were offering spirituality and health courses, up from 3 in 1994.(5) New books such as The Faith Factor (Viking, 1998), The Healing Power of Faith (Simon & Schuster, 1999), and Religion and Health (Oxford University Press, 2000) are appearing. Detecting a renewed convergence of religion and medicine, Time magazine devoted a cover story to "Faith and Healing." A Yankelovich survey found 94 percent of HMO professionals and 99 percent of family physicians agreeing that "personal prayer, meditation, or other spiritual and religious practices" can boost medical treatment. Is there fire underneath all this smoke? Do religion and spirituality actually relate to health, as polls show four in five Americans believe? More than a thousand studies have sought to correlate "the faith factor" with health and healing. Considering two: Jeremy Kark and his colleagues(6) compared the death rates for 3,900 Israelis either in one of eleven religiously orthodox or in one of eleven matched, nonreligious collective settlements (kibbutz communities). The researchers reported that over a sixteen-year period, "belonging to a religious collective was associated with a strong protective effect" not explained by age or economic differences: In every age group, those belonging to the religious communities were about half as likely as their nonreligious counterparts to have died. This is roughly comparable to the gender difference in mortality. (In every age group, sixty-four British and sixty American women die for every one hundred men.) An earlier study of 91,909 persons in one Maryland county found that those who attended religious services weekly were less likely to die during the study period than those who did not—53 percent less from coronary disease, 53 percent less due to suicide, and 74 percent less from cirrhosis.(7) In response to such findings, Richard Sloan and his skeptical colleagues(8) remind us that mere correlations can leave many factors uncontrolled. Consider one obvious possibility: Women are more religiously active than men, and women outlive men. So perhaps religious involvement is merely an expression of the gender effect on longevity. However, several new studies find the religiosity-longevity correlation among men alone, and even more strongly among women.(9) One study that followed 5,286 Californians over twenty-eight years found frequent religious attendees 36 percent less likely to have died in any year after controlling for age, gender, ethnicity, and education. Another followed 3,968 elderly North Carolinians for six years. It found that 23 percent of those attending religious services at least weekly had died, as had 37 percent of infrequent attendees.(10) A "National Health Interview Survey" followed 21, 204 people over eight years. After controlling for age, sex, race, and region, nonattenders were 1.87 times more likely to have died than were those attending more than weekly.)(11) This translated into a life expectancy at age twenty of eighty-three years for frequent attenders and seventy-five years for infrequent attenders. Religious attendance and life expectancy: In a national health survey financed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, religiously active people had longer life expectancies. These correlational findings do not indicate that if nonattenders start attending, and change nothing else, they will live eight years longer. But they do indicate that as a predictor of health and longevity, religious involvement rivals not smoking. Such findings demand explanation. Alert readers may imagine "intervening variables" that could account for the correlation. First, in all the available studies, the beliefs of religiously active people motivate healthier life-styles; for example, they smoke and drink less. Health-oriented, vegetarian Seventh Day Adventists have a longer-than-usual life expectancy. Religiously orthodox Israelis eat less fat than their nonreligious compatriots. But such differences are not great enough to explain the dramatically reduced mortality in the religious kibbutzim, argued the Israeli researchers. In the recent American studies, too, about 75 percent longevity difference remains after controlling for unhealthy behaviors such as inactivity and smoking. Social support is another variable that helps explain the "faith factor." For Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, faith is not solo spirituality but a communal experience that helps satisfy the need to belong. The more than 350,000 faith communities in North America and the millions more elsewhere provide support networks for their active participants—people who are there for one another when stress strikes. Moreover, religion encourages another predictor of health and longevity—marriage. In the religious kubbutzim, for example, divorce is almost nonexistent. But even after controlling for gender, unhealthy behaviors, social ties, and preexisting health problems, the mortality studies find much of the mortality reduction remaining. Researchers therefore speculate that a third set of intervening variables is the stress protection and enhanced well-being associated with a coherent worldview, a sense of hope for the long-term future, feelings of ultimate acceptance, and the relaxed meditation of prayer or Sabbath observance. Such might also help to explain other recent findings, such as healthier immune functioning and fewer hospital admissions among religiously active people. The following chart provides suggested explanations for the correlation between religious involvement and health/longevity: This analysis neither proves that religion is true nor explains it away. A hurricane is not what is left after controlling for the influence of wind, rain, and tidal surge; it is all those things and more. The religious factor, too, is multidimensional. Although the religion-health correlation is yet to be fully explained, Harold Pincus, deputy medical director of the American Psychiatric Association, believes these findings "have made clear that anyone involved in providing health care services . . . cannot ignore . . . the important connections between spirituality, religion, and health."(12) References : 1. G. S. Patton, Jr., War As I Knew It (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), pp. 184-185, cited by J. T. Burtchaell, Philemon’s Problem (Chicago: Acta Foundation, 1973). 2. S. G. Brush, “The Prayer Test,” American Scientist 62 (1974): 561-563. 3. Larry Dossey, Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1995). 4. Randolph C. Byrd, “Positive Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer in a Coronory Care Unit Population,” Southern Medical Journal 81 (1998): 826-829. 5. J.S. Levin, D.B. Larson, and C.M. Puchalski, "Religion and Spirituality in Medicine: Research and Education," Journal of the American Medical Association, 278 (1997), 792-793; see also a recent table showing medical schools offering spirituality and medicine courses, available from C. McVeigh at the National Institute for Healthcare Research 6. J.D. Kark, G. Shemi, Y. Friedlander, O. Martin, O. Manor, and S.H. Blondheim, "Does Religious Observance Promote Health? Mortality in Secular vs. Religious Kibbutzim in Israel," American Journal of Public Health, 86 (1996), 341-346. 7. G.W. Comstock and K.B. Partridge, "Church Attendance and Health," Journal of Chronic Disease, 25 (1972), 665- 672. 8. R.P. Sloan, E. Bagiella, and T. Powell, "Religion, Spirituality, and Medicine," Lancet, 353 (1999), 664-667. 9. M.E. McCullough, W.T. Hoyt, D.B. Larson, H.G. Koenig, and C. Thoresen, "Religious Involvement and Mortality: A Meta-analytic Review," Health Psychology, in press. 10. H.G. Koenig et al., "Does Religious Attendance Prolong Survival? A Six-year Follow-up Study of 3,968 Older Adults," Journal of Gerontology: Medical Sciences, 54A (1999) M370. 11. R.A. Hummer, R.G. Rogers, C.B. Nam, and C.G. Ellison, "Religious Involvement and U.S. Adult Mortality," Demography, 36 (1999), 273-285. 12. H.A. Pincus, "Commentary: Spirituality, Religion, and Health: Expanding, and Using the Knowledge Base," Mind/Body Medicine, 2 (1997), 49. Read More