I was raised in a household that practiced Serbian Orthodox Christianity. I learned the Lord’s Prayer in the language, went to church for Easter and Christmas, and celebrated our patron saint day. Despite not considering myself a religious person, I still go to church for those occasions, and I still consider my religion to be Serbian Orthodox. Yet there is one thing that I can never bring myself to do: pray. Perhaps it’s because I don’t believe in a god or gods, or perhaps it’s my personality. To me, prayer has always had implications of giving up control, admitting powerlessness, and asking a higher power for help. As someone who strongly holds to the principle “if you want something done right, do it yourself,” and who can’t stand group projects, I find that kind of trust in a higher power disconcerting. Prayer seems like a last resort: when things are completely and unquestionably out of an individual’s control, they pray as a final attempt at fixing whatever dire situation they happen to be in. Yet there are many who believe in daily prayer, or at least in prayer in the absence of extremities. In fact, prayer in whatever form is a staple for most, if not all, major religions — including my own. I set out to understand what it is about prayer that is so empowering and calming to people across cultures, races, and generations.
For whatever reason, I always associated prayer as being under the blanket of religion. However, unlike my view of prayer — one of seeking out a higher power — some people use prayer to seek out and understand themselves, regardless of religion. Tony takes a spiritual approach to prayer, seeing it as a very personal process “Prayer establishes a connection to the deepest part of ourselves,” he explains. To others, it is not so much a process of self-discovery as it is simply about being calm, or wellness. Nik* was raised Muslim, but later began to identify as an atheist. He believes that people pray because it makes them feel good. “I used to pray and it gave me peace, but I can’t pray anymore in a traditional sense,” he says. “I believe the only secular form of ‘prayer’ possible is meditation,” These are all very personal reasons for prayer, completely unassociated with any external power. It needn’t have ties to an organized religion, or address anybody or anything — just as long as the individual gains some kind of emotion or feeling from it.
For some, there is no particular personal or religious reward from prayer; rather, it is as much of a habit as attending church on Christmas is for me. In many cases, prayer is associated with a religion, but it is more about family and cultural context than about the religion itself. Amrit was raised Sikh, and finds that she prays regularly, because her religious upbringing taught her to. “Because from a very young age my parents instilled praying into me, I do it instantaneously when I pass by a [Sikh] temple,” she explains. “Does it mean I’m religious? No, it’s just habit.” What struck me about this statement is how much family beliefs play into one’s habits, whether the personal beliefs — such as a belief in God — are present or not. For as far back as I can remember, my family practiced the traditions of Serbian Orthodoxy, but it occurred to me that it had never been discussed, nor did I know exactly how my parents felt about religion: did we say the Lord’s Prayer on Christmas because we truly believed in it, or simply because it was an action dictated by generations of habit? There is no better way to find the answer than to go straight to the source of my upbringing: my mother.
It turns out that, just as the habit of praying is internalized through upbringing, so too are personal views—even if they are unspoken. My mother’s view of prayer was identical to my own. She believes in problem-solving, not praying, and sees prayer as a passive approach for every-day problems. She explains that she was raised in a Communist household, where prayer and religion were non-existent – not naturally, but because that was the nature of the system at the time. It wasn’t until her adolescence that she began attending church, as a form of teenage rebellion against her parents’ communist values — something that sounds strange to me, but that managed to aggravate her family and bring her closer to religion. “I believe that the ritual of prayer is important because it brings back something spiritual,” she tells me. “But I don’t personally believe in it. The few times in my life that I’ve believed in prayer have been times of extreme misery, when I have no control over the situation — such as during the [Bosnian] war, when we were waiting to find out whether your father would be mobilized to fight.”
Most people — including myself — would at least consider praying if somebody they loved was gravely ill or in some sort of danger, and there was nothing they could do to help. It seems that, regardless of personal approaches and beliefs about prayer, extreme situations are often the ones where prayer comes in as a resort. This phenomenon has been the subject of growing research since the mid-1960s, when the first medical study of intercessory prayer was published. The first mention of efficacy of prayer was by Charles Darwin’s cousin, Sir Francis Galton, who wrote in 1872 that a controlled study should compare the recovery of injured patients based on whether they received prayer or not. To date, there have been mixed results as to whether prayer really improves the condition of critically ill patients. In 1999, an extensive Kansas City study found that prayer might have actually made a difference. Cardiac patients were divided into two groups, and volunteers from a local church prayed for one group, while the other group did not receive prayer within the parameters of the study. The former group, though they were not told that they were being prayed for, seemed to improve. However, a more recent study found that recovery from heart surgery was unaffected by the prayers of strangers; in fact, those that were told that they were receiving prayers appeared to have higher rates of complications after their surgery, such as heart palpitations. Researchers hypothesized that this was due to the stress from the expectations caused by prayers. Similar studies have been done with terminally ill patients, suffering from diseases such as cancer or HIV/AIDS. Some have shown that patients who practice prayer show improvements, though intercessory prayer still remains debated. No matter what the reason is behind the improvements of prayer — whether the will of a higher power, or a placebo effect — in situations like this, a ritual like prayer may be the only thing that brings hope. Other studies have found that prayer and meditation in a variety of religions — including meditation through yoga — have similar results on recovery, suggesting that it may be more an effect of the cleansing, calming process than the prayer itself. There are also studies that have shown that those with a long-term commitment to their faith and their prayer tend to live longer, and be healthier than those that never pray or attend a religious institution. There are many ways to interpret this information, but we have yet to find one all-encompassing explanation. Is it the power of prayer, or is it some other factor?
People pray for a variety of reasons, in a variety of ways, and to a variety of idols. Some do so out of habit, as part of a cultural context, or because they believe in a religion that dictates this as an admirable behavior. Others do so to get in touch with themselves, to reach a calm place, more as a secular meditation than a traditional prayer to a god. Our society is an individualistic one that places a huge emphasis on getting things done, and getting them done right, so prayer doesn’t always seem to fit into the everyday demands many of us experience. The fact remains, however, that we are sometimes placed in dire situations: illness, war, loss, and pain. It is in the face of these things that we may feel helpless, and it is then that even the most secular, self-sufficient individual is willing to turn to a ritual such as prayer.
*Some names have been changed
