Bended knees vs defiant ego

Here’s the prayer challenge recently posed: Should everybody pray for Mitt Romney to win the coming presidential election? Below is my view on it.

“You know prayer is a funny business. The believers endorse it without questions. The critics denounce it without reservation. Some attribute it to the hand of God. Others attribute it to pure luck or the gambling hand of random chance.

There is a case where a prostitute named Hilda prayed for deliverance from her dastardly "vocation" and she was duly delivered. Another case of Billy Graham praying against her daughter's divorce and he was quietly disappointed.

This reminds me of one incident I read. A pastor once heard a mother giving testimony that her 2 year old son fell into a swimming pool and the lifeguard revived him by artificial respiration. The mother exclaimed, "Isn't God wonderful?" Then, sitting in the congregation, quietly and hidden, was another mother whose son also fell in a swimming pool, was pulled out, but make it he didn't.

I guess for every petition posted to God that are victoriously answered, there maybe ten or more petitions anonymously marked "return to sender". 

One author wrote, "Biblical prayer is impertinent, persistence, shameless, indecorous. It is more like haggling in an outdoor bazaar than the polite monologues of the church". Another wrote, "Prayers like gravel flung at the sky's window, hoping to attract the loved one's attention." Any takers?

I am always afraid of the "sharpshooter's fallacy" when it comes to prayer. Imagine a NRA member empties the barrel of his gun into the wall of his barn and then walks over and conveniently draws the bull's-eye around the bullet holes. In a church context, this fallacy can turn fanatical as captured in this admonishment, "If it comes true, it's God's glory. If not, its your own folly." 

There's a seminary joke about a man who steps out of a curb and a car narrowly misses him. He exclaims, "Providence was looking out for me." Then, the next day, he steps out again and is hit by a car. He is admitted, treated and finally recovered. He exclaims, "Isn't it marvelous how God spared him?" Third time unlucky, he is hit by a car and died. At his funeral, some say, "Well, God saw fit to take him home."

Personally, I used to pray in Court to win a case until I realized that some of my Christian opponents were praying the same thing. Then, it dawned on me that being all-powerful and all-knowing is not "all-blessing" because how do you decide on whose side should your favor rest?

This again reminds me of a poet's prayer called the "good war" during WWII. It goes like this: "Gracious Lord, oh bomb the Germans. Spare their women for thy sake, and if that is not too easy, we will pardon thy mistake. But gracious Lord, whate'er shall be, don't let anyone bomb me."

Someone once asked Gandhi this, "If you were given the power to remake this world, what would you do first?" He replied, "I would pray for power to renounce that power." I think Christians who think that prayers will be answered 100% are filling in the shoes that are too big for them to fill. For a less stressful and more fulfilling earthly existence, I humbly recommend that they forthwith resign from being the general manager of the universe!

After that, my prayers in court are restricted to "give me strength" rather than "give me victory".

So, when it is proposed that everybody prays for Romney (however silly this is), I suspect that they will do the same in the Obama's camp. What should God do then? Doesn't this make God a republican by default or an unabashed market driven capitalist? Should prayer be even used for such thing? Maybe, prayer should only be used when everybody can unanimously agree on the desired outcome like healing from cancer or certain death, or for finding a dog or passing a school test. But then, if the latter is answered, we will have a society of top but ordinary scholars.  Very democratic but hardly practical.

As such, I think even Einstein would relent (or have second thoughts about the science of prayer). When a doctoral student at Princeton once asked him, "What is there left in the world for original dissertation research?" He replied, "Find out about prayer. Somebody must find out about prayer." Well, to borrow X-files' tagline, "the truth is out there." Or it may forever stay out there, who knows?

That's the whole "shebang" about prayer, it is beyond empirical verification. There are just too many variables, factors and issues involved for any dependable distilled conclusion. At best, it is an inferring correlation and not a direct causation. The sample group would be too uncertain, the bias effect too unwieldy, and the result too unreliable for science to ever nail down any affirmative answer.

I think it was Oscar Wilde who said, "when the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers." This may sound wholly irreverent but there is some truth to it, if but only a smidgen. I always believe the phenomena of prayer somehow works the same way that those HDB hopefuls do when they unyieldingly queue up at the lottery booth. The difference is that one is petitioning to a definite hope and other to their charming luck.

Most of the time, for some prayers which are already foregone or predetermined (I know the charismatics will cast stones at me for this), and with the benefit of serene hindsight, it is not the results that matter. But it is the bended knees that counts. Pardon me, I am just being pragmatic.

So, the effectiveness of prayer in most cases is not so much in the results as it is in the act. Characters are changed, hope revived, and efforts redoubled with sincere petitioning. For the true believers, it is a peace of mind that is usually the bigger miracle rather than an act divine.

Let me end with the words of FB Meyer, "The greatest tragedy in life is not unanswered prayer, but unoffered prayer." So, if I have to choose between bended knees and a defying ego, I’d choose the former in a heartbeat. Cheers out.”