For the past 10 years I have prayed before going to bed. This prayer is lazy at best. I do not kneel, nor do my prayers ever exceed 20 seconds. I pray, instead, on my side between my sheets, while I express my thoughts and wishes in a barely audible whisper.
The bulk of my short prayers are consistent. I pray for my mother, my father, my brother and my dog (I refer to him in the present tense though he has been gone many years, and I believe that because he was so good he still deserves to have someone pray for him, regardless.) The rest of my prayers are ever changing and often selfish. They depend on my mood, or the weather, or the timeliness of an event. I may pray for the love of a good man, for good grades or talent.
It is important to note that I am not religious—I am an individual who worships evolution over creationism. I was born into a secular household, though both my parents were raised on the philosophy of a higher power. The impact of such early educations is not entirely noticeable as their parenting was grounded on factuality and personal choice.
I see the Bible not as the word of an abstract being, but instead, as the product of human hands and human minds—and although it is used to promote love and understanding, in the wrong hands it is also capable of exploitation and hate. I do not believe in a vision of God as an absolute being with absolute power. Perhaps, instead, I believe in karmic energy and human consciousness—the idea that one can will something into existence. In the end though, I understand that whether or not God exists is of little consequence, as it cannot be proved one way or the other.
Why then do I pray?
Last Sunday, before bed and after my nightly prayer, I fell asleep listening to a podcast from the HowStuffWorks.com duo, Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant. In the podcast, Josh and Chuck highlighted two different studies on prayer.
The first study was conducted in 1988 by San Francisco cardiac physician, Randolph Byrd. He assembled a list of 393 patients who, on paper, were statistical clones—same race, same age, same heart conditions. He split the patients into two groups: the first group would be prayed for by several local Judeo-Christian prayer groups, while the second group would not. Both groups were well aware of the study as they had signed consent forms. After 10 months, the study found that members of the group who were prayed for recovered from their surgeries in greater numbers than the group that received no prayer at all (85 percent and 73 percent, respectively.)
Another study contradicted these findings. The Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer was published in The American Heart Journal in 2006. Researchers split patients into three groups: the first group did not receive any prayer, members of the second received prayer and were aware of it and the third received prayer but were unaware of the fact. The results found that members of the group who received prayer and were aware of it, surprisingly, fared the worst—their recovery rates were much lower, as they suffered more complications after heart surgery. The other two groups fared about the same. STEP’s findings run completely counterintuitive to general thought, as they suggest that prayer may be harmful. I believe that the contradictions between the two studies arise from the fact that prayer is not quantifiable, as people pray in different ways.
When I pray, I pray out loud and in repetition. My prayers consist of one or two sentences that I repeat over and over out loud, almost like a meditation or a mantra. The summer before my freshman year, my mother was attacked by an aggressive and advanced cancer, and so, each night, I filled my lungs with words in her honor. My mother fought quite hard—her days filled with organic shakes that tasted like toads, hours at the gym even at her weakest. Now, with the cancer in remission, my mother is in much better health. Sometimes I like to believe that my nightly prayers helped in willing her back to life—even if they played just a very small part.
I think, more than anything, I pray to hear myself pray. The words that pass through me at night speak of what I have, what I may lose and what may be. These prayers, filled with familiar words and names (Mom, Dad, Matthew, Max), are like heartbeats. In the chaos of day, they are hard to hear, and only in the quiet of night do they emerge and ease me into sleep.
Thomas Gebremedhin is a Trinity senior. His column runs every other Thursday.
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