Prayer 

Harry Neuwirth

        Harry Neuwirth is a freelance writer. He can be contacted at P.O. Box 787, Silverton, OR 97381.  

        Chief among the sustaining elements of civilization has been the propensity for people to join together in prayer seeking strength and courage: tribes, villages, sophisticated modern congregations; unison prayers addressed to a stern but loving God; solitary prayers composed under the inspiration of God as prescribed in the holy books of civilization. Mankind has been throwing up prayers, sacred and profane, from as far back as anthropologists can find evidence of human existence; prayers without number and without end. No surprise then that many people raised in religious families have found it difficult to conceive of God sitting quietly in heaven responding daily to billions of supplications from earth. The possibility must be raised that He doesn’t inject himself directly into our everyday lives.

        If that is so, it raises an intriguing question: if He is not the direct respondent, then where do prayers go, and what purpose do they serve? Before addressing that question, we should recognize that the mass of earthly prayers become a part of the immense spiritual energy sustaining us, our society, and the evolving civilization we find ourselves in. Prayer effects change in ways we cannot clearly fathom.

        C. S. Lewis of Narnia fame, in conversation with colleagues at Oxford University on the subject of prayer, said that he prayed because he couldn’t help it, but that prayer didn’t change God, it changed him: it changed Lewis!

        It doesn’t change God, it changes us. We change: the nature of our being changes in consonance with the thrust of our prayers. The importance of the fact that prayer changes us is almost impossible to exaggerate. God, whether or not he injects himself into the process, instills within us the desire and the means of effecting change in ourselves and our world through prayer.

        What, then, does that say about the intent of our prayers; about their focus. Certainly it casts a dark shadow over “gimme” prayers and “woe-is-me” prayers. It speaks loudly to the power and validity of prayers that solicit self-improvement; that seek wisdom; that would diminish the egocentrism in us; that hope to make us better exemplars to those around us, our families and communities. Who we are has power to influence not only ourselves, but our world, however small that world may be.

        “It [prayer] doesn’t change God, it changes me.” Lewis sensed intuitively that the prayers he cast were not Heaven’s to resolve, though they had great force in God’s world, the world he occupied, working within him, around him, and through him. From the Tree of Good and Evil have we inherited the power of responding to our own prayers without a Heavenly Intermediary?

        Lewis’s intuitive sense now has expression in observable fact: The mind exerts significant and lasting influence upon the brain and consequently upon the character and personality of each of us—for good or ill. The following is quoted from The Mind and the Brain; Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force, written by Jeffrey M. Schwartz and Sharon Begley:  

A mere twenty years ago neuroscientists thought that the brain was structurally immutable by early childhood, and that its functions and abilities were programmed by genes. We know now that this is not so. To the contrary: the brain’s ensembles of neurons change over time, forming new connections that become stronger with use, and letting unused synapses weaken until they are able to carry signals no better than a frayed string between two tin cans. . . . The neurons that pack our brain at the moment of birth continue to weave themselves into circuits throughout our lives. The real estate that the brain devotes to this activity rather than that one . . . to this mental habit rather than that one, is as mutable as a map of congressional districts in the hands of gerrymanderers. The life we lead, in other words, leaves its mark in the form of enduring changes in the complex circuitry of the brain—footprints of the experiences we have had, the actions we have taken . . .

 

The power of attention not only allows us to choose what mental direction we will take. It also allows us, by actively focusing attention . . . to change—in scientifically demonstrable ways—the systematic functioning of our own neural circuitry.  

        What we put our minds to has immense influence over who we become. This is no longer conjecture, but has been established again, and again, and again by neuroscientists working with healthy people as well as people in therapy for a wide variety of mental illnesses. For deeper insight into the plasticity of the brain under the influence of the mind, you are referred to the above book.

        Like Lewis, we cannot help praying.” Unfortunately the thrust of earthly prayers runs a gamut from completely selfless and benevolent, to totally selfish and evil; sacred and profane. The force of that prayer is reflexive: we become evil as we pray for evil; we become benevolent as we pray for benevolence. It could be said that our lives are our prayer! More important still, our children, the generation that will succeed us, the generation that will bring civilization to even greater levels of good or evil, are a reflection of us; a reflection of our character as we change, not God.

        The need for prayer has never been greater since we’ve raised the falsely adopted but growing wall between church and state, thereby driving God out of our schools, our institutions, and the lives of a multitude of Americans. At such a moment it is most important to consider the reality that God has relinquished modest power unto us to respond to our own prayers, reinforcing the need for us to absorb an objective understanding of good, then to pray for good, against evil; to be the effecting agents of our prayers.     Ω