Science Now Discovering What the Faithful Always Knew

D. J. Tice

D. J. Tice is an editorial page writer for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. This article is reprinted from the Pioneer Press.

Every year at about this time I make a three-day silent retreat at Demontreville Jesuit Retreat House in Lake Elmo. This unusual Twin Cities institution has, for more than half a century, provided thousands of men each year with the chance to withdraw for a few days from the outside world's noise and haste to reflect on their lives.

It's an experience that can make it challenging for a professional controversialist to get right back into the swing of inflicting opinions on readers. But I'll try. The Jesuit priests who guide the thoughts of their weary visitors often discuss-rarely with wholehearted approval-the realm of everyday clamor and strife from which we pilgrims come. For me, these commentaries usually, sooner or later, become a touch uncomfortable.

Almost every year, one of our spiritual advisers will illustrate what's wrong with the world today by quoting some knuckleheaded observation he read in the Pioneer Press.

I find such moments, when journalists are cast in the role of today's false prophets, an excellent aid to humility.

This year, right on cue, one of our speakers recalled a Pioneer Press article (actually, a Boston Globe report the Pioneer Press reprinted) from a few months back. The subject was prayer.

Father K. recalled that the article included the views of a Harvard professor of psychiatry. The professor believes prayer "is the modern brain's means by which we can connect to more powerful ancestral states of consciousness."

It's not hard to see why clergy, who know a bit about prayer, might dissent. It probably seems to betray a certain amount of hostility for the press to ask a psychiatrist when seeking the meaning of prayer. And the notion that prayer is about revisiting some "ancestral" form of thought makes prayer sound a bit like taking a horse-and-buggy ride-an entertaining experience of a quaint, old-fashioned custom, but certainly not an activity that makes practical sense in today's more sophisticated world.

And yet, there was quite a lot more to the article in question than that. Intrigued, I looked it up, and found a rather fascinating dispatch on the attempts of modern science to understand the ancient blessing of prayer.

It is worth repeating the news that, far from debunking prayer, science is confirming its power. It seems that neurologists are these days monitoring the brain activity of "Buddhists and Franciscan nuns" in the act of deep meditation and prayer. It's a curious image of modernity meeting timeless tradition.

The prayer researchers are finding that a part of the brain known to regulate one's sense of one's own body and its boundary with the outside world becomes "a quiet oasis of inactivity" during prayer "for reasons that remain utterly mysterious." This process can lead, at the highest level of devotion, to "a complete dissolving of the self," according to the scientists.

In short, something undeniably real yet ineffable happens during prayer, and it produces a connection to something beyond oneself.

Well, you don't say. One is tempted to speculate that neurology and psychiatry are the modern brain's way of connecting to facts of human experience that were perfectly obvious to every medieval peasant or prehistoric cave-painter.

But that would be snide. That science can record the power of prayer to change consciousness is a fact well worth having.