Benefits of prayer

Alice G. Walton reports in Forbes,

A new study from Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health finds that kids and teens who are raised with religious or spiritual practices tend to have better health and mental health as they age. But not to worry if you’re not a service-attender. The research, published last week in the American Journal of Epidemiology, finds that people who prayed or meditated on their own time also reaped similar benefits, including lower risk of substance abuse and depression later on.

The team looked at data from 5,000 people taking part in the long-term Nurses' Health Study II and its next generation Growing Up Today Study (GUTS). They were interested in whether the frequency with which a child/teen attended religious services with their parents or prayed/meditated on their own was correlated with their health and mental health as they grew into their 20s. The young people were followed for anywhere from eight to 14 years.

It turned out that those who attended religious services at least once a week as children or teens were about 18% more likely to report being happier in their 20s than those who never attended services. They were also almost 30% more likely to do volunteer work and 33% less likely to use drugs in their 20s as well.

But what was interesting was that it wasn’t just about how much a person went to services, but it was at least as much about how much they prayed or meditated in their own time. Those who prayed or meditated every day also had more life satisfaction, were better able to process emotions, and were more forgiving compared to those who never prayed/meditated. They were also less likely to have sex at an earlier age and to have a sexually transmitted infection.

Read more here.

How does God decide which prayers to answer?

Here are two thoughtful posts on prayer.

First day on the job

At the Conservative Treehouse Sundance reports that the president and vice president and their wives attended an Interfath prayer service.

Conversations with God

Benjamin Dueholm asks at aeon, Why Pray?

‘I’ll be praying for you’ is a phrase that falls between ‘I am thinking of you’ and ‘I will drop off a casserole.’ It affirms a social bond – benevolent intentions embodied in words and mediated by a shared belief in a God who, if nothing else, will note the exchange.

... Islamic salat, the five-times-daily prayer obligation, is highly structured and choreographed. Like the daily office of Christian monasticism, it is a textual recitation stretched across the hours. Here is something more akin to a sacrifice than a conversation. One early source, the Kitab al-Salat, is greatly concerned with the timing of the act and much less with its subjective context and emotive purpose. ‘If anyone performs ablution for them well, offers them at their (right) time, and observes perfectly their bowing and submissiveness in them, it is the guarantee of Allah that He will pardon him,’ the Kitab records; ‘if anyone does not do so, there is no guarantee for him on the part of Allah.’

...prayer is multifarious. It can aim to shift the world’s netting of causes and effects, to strengthen communal bonds, even to resist an economic and political order. But perhaps its most venerable function is to shape the moral disposition of the worshipper.

Read more here.



Dueholm links to Toast, which he refers to as a culture and humor site. Nicole Cliffe writes there about becoming a Christian on July 7, 2015, after being an atheist her entire life.

Most days, I really look forward to my end-of-day prayers as a time when God and I get to have a conversation: I talk, and he talks back to me, in whatever form that takes (nagging, mainly, but we can get to that later.) I pray during the day as well, like sometimes I feel a stupid burst of love for the produce guy at the store, and I’ll pray for him, or I’ll stop what I’m doing (probably tweeting) and just want to express how grateful I am for my life and its goodness. Or I’ll be gripped by anxiety or fear or worry about one of my kids, and I’ll just toss out a oh, man, God, please be with me, today.

...It’s the end-of-day prayers, though, that are the meat of my prayer life, and they follow a sort of general pattern. I start with the Lord’s Prayer, because it’s like a little incantation that places a barrier between me watching Brooklyn Nine Nine and me engaging in a searching moral inventory of my life, which, personally, I find is a big help. Then I go over my day, with God, and the things I did, and the things I wish I had done differently. Sometimes I’m just “yeah, that was not my best moment, there” and I move on and it doesn’t come up again, but if I find that I think about it during prayer TWO nights in a row, I probably need to do something about it.

...The next thing I do is express gratitude. For my life, and what I have in it, and my job, and for individual people. It’s been really good for my marriage to express gratitude for my husband, I have to say. It is very meaningful to thank God or the universe or whatever that a person is in your life and a source of joy to you, and I have been nicer and more patient and more appreciative of him, and several other people, because I think of them as a gift to be grateful for.

...Now we get into the good stuff: asking for shit.

I ask for everything! Dallas Willard, whose books and life were a real gateway drug for me, once told a friend of his who was going through a just terrible, terrible thing, that you don’t really need to say I mean, God, ultimately I want your will to be done, so only do these things if it’s your will, because, duh, God already knows that his will is what’s going to happen. So go ahead and ask for what you truly want. Is it going to happen? I mean, maybe. The world is a really broken and tragic place. Why would God make my stupid redesign transition flawless because I asked him to, but allow horrible things to happen to innocent people constantly? I don’t know, I’ll ask him about it when I meet him. But I still ask for what I want. Big stuff, little stuff. And for me to be a better person, which is the main thing. I definitely said “I’m still the same person!” to a bunch of friends when I converted, but it’s not really true. I’m not that great, honestly, and I want to be better, so I ask for help with that. I think it’s working, but really slowly.

...Next, and finally, comes my hands-down favourite part of prayer, and the part that I think is great REGARDLESS of your beliefs or lack thereof: praying for other people. I say this because it teaches you who you love, and who’s important to you. What problems facing others have you taken on as your own? Does this change how you deal with them in real life? Can YOU help answer these prayers with money or time or by listening, etc.? I pray for my family, and I pray for my friends, and I pray for Toasties who have said things in Open Threads that I think they could use some help with, and I pray for the people I make this site with, and I pray for people who are sick, or who have sick boyfriends, and I pray for bigger world stuff, and by the time I’m done, I’ve realized that I love all these people I’ve prayed for (you can throw up now), and that’s very meaningful to me.

...Sometimes it’s much easier to pray for someone else than to ask them to pray for you. Especially if you’re someone like me, who’s really hung up on seeming like I have my shit together. I find it really hard to be vulnerable about things.

Read more here.

No call, no show, walk off = lose job

Well it looks like Colorado has the distinction of having the first Muslim conflict of the new year in the US.

A Somali worker cuts and moves on the line as he trims beef in the manufacturing department at Cargill Meat Solutions in Fort Morgan, Colo. (Joe Amon, Denver Post file)

Kieran Nicholson reports in the Denver Post,

About 190 workers, most of them immigrants from Somalia, have been fired from a meat packing and distribution plant on Colorado's Eastern Plains for walking off the job to protest a workplace prayer dispute.

Ten days ago more than 200 workers walked off their jobs at Cargill Meat Solutions in Fort Morgan.

Some workers later returned, but the majority stayed away as representatives of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) negotiated on their behalf.

On Tuesday Cargill, through its attorneys, fired the workers who were holding out, said Jaylani Hussein, a spokesman and executive director of CAIR.

Cargill is a Kansas-based company.

Some of the fired employees have been working at the plant for up to 10 years, Hussein said. Cargill had previously allowed Muslim employees to pray at the plant, even providing a prayer room, he said.

...Hussein said company officials told him the mass dismissal was over a "no call, no show, walk out."

...The workers have previously been using time carved out of a 15-minute break period, or time from their unpaid 30-minute lunch break.

Cargill has a policy stating that any workers who are terminated can not reapply for a position for 6 months.

...Cargill could not be reached for comment Wednesday night. Last week, Mike Martin, director of communications for Cargill, told the Greeley Tribune that employees of all faiths are allowed to use a reflection area, but that because employees work on an assembly line only one or two at a time can use the area, to avoid slowing production.

He told the Tribune company policies had not changed.

The workers earn $14-per-hour and up, and are represented by a union, Teamsters Local 445. About 2,000 people are employed at the plant.

Read more here.

Taping the mouths of an entire country

Peggy Noonan writes in the Wall Street Journal about how the Left has been prayer shaming Republicans in the aftermath of the San Bernardino murders. The best example of a prayer shamer is Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, who

came forward rather menacingly. “Your ‘thoughts’ should be about steps to take to stop this carnage. Your ‘prayers’ should be for forgiveness if you do nothing—again.”

Peggy writes,

Here’s an odd thing. If you really are for some new gun-control measure, if you are serious about it, you just might wait a while, until the blood has cooled, for instance, and then try to win people over to see it your way. You might offer information, argument, points of persuasion. Successful politics involves pulling people together. You don’t use a tragedy to shame and silence those who don’t see it your way; that only hardens sides. Which has left me wondering if gun-control proponents are even serious about it. Maybe they’re just using their wedge issue at a moment of high stress to hammer people on the other side of the ideological and philosophical divide.

As long as they do this, they’ll lose. Which they must be bright enough to know. Which again suggests either cynicism or, perhaps, an assumption that they are so inarguably right that they’re above debate. They certainly point their fingers from a great height. A number of tweets and posts had an air of, “You better be asking your make-believe friend in heaven for mercy.”

I suspect part of the problem is that a number of the progressive finger-pointers do not really know what a prayer is. Maybe no one ever told them. But prayer is a very active endeavor—it takes time, energy, concentration. You have to stop everything and ask God to hear you. Father Gerald Murray defined it for me this way: “Prayer is the movement of our mind, heart and soul in which we confess our belief in God and his goodness. We ask him to manifest that goodness in answer to our petitions.”

In the case of San Bernardino those petitions were for help, consolation and safety for those in danger or mourning.

It is hard to pray, much harder than it is to punch out a series of tweets. What actually is irritating about politicians saying they’re sending thoughts and prayers is the suspicion you sometimes have that they’re not, actually, thinking or praying.

...A connected point, it seems to me, is that Americans are growing weary of being told what they can and cannot publicly say, proclaim and think. We all know what’s going on at the colleges, with the mad little Marats and Robespierres who are telling students and administrators what they are and are not allowed to say or do. This is not just kids acting up at this point, it’s a real censorship movement backed by an ideology that is hostile to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It is led by students who, though they managed to get into the greatest universities in the country, seem never to have been taught to love the little amendment that guarantees free speech and free religious observance, the two pillars without which America collapses. And too bad, because when you don’t love something you lose it.

...There’s been a great gnashing of veneered teeth by the Republican establishment about Donald Trump and his so far unstoppable rise. That rise rests on two issues: opposition to illegal immigration to the U.S. and an obvious and visceral rejection of political correctness and the shaming and silencing it entails.

...Why doesn’t some thoughtful candidate on the Republican side address the issue of shaming and silencing? Why doesn’t someone give a deep and complete speech on what the First Amendment means, how it must be protected, how we pay a daily price for it in terms of anger, hurt, misunderstandings and crudity, but it’s worth it. Why doesn’t someone note that you fight bad speech with better speech, you don’t try to tape up the mouths of an entire country.

The censorship movement is radical. It is starting to make everyone in the country feel harassed and anxious. It is odd to see candidates miss a rising issue that is giving pause to so many Americans.

I pray someone will address it. Literally, I just did.

Read more here.

Praying to a Person

Mushroom writes at Fungle Jungle about the power of prayer:

Cultivating discipline, whether in prayer or some other meditative form such as a tea ceremony or archery (I meditate better doing something rather than nothing), is beneficial. I can appreciate Zen. The difference for us is that we believe our practice leads to a Person.

I know that God does hear us when we pray. I know that He is not deaf to my pleas, and that He does respond -- whether my prayer moves the mountain, causes the mountain to cease to be an obstacle to me, or moves me beyond it.

Prayer is a discipline. It is a comfort. It calms us and encourages us, helps us face challenges and fears. But it is most effective when we understand that it is communication.

Read more here.

Notice the difference between Governor Haley's heartfelt words and Obama's attempts to politicize

Ten very short prayers

From the Saint Peter's List blog, here are ten short prayers we can say during the day.

Thanks to Lexington Green

Clever wiring

Gerard Vanderleun has reposted a very clever piece he wrote in 2005 about God and prayer.

As I was saying, prayer -- with or without God -- makes us stronger and our desires and abilities more focused just by happening. As a result, things you pray for tend to happen to you more often than things you don't pray for simply because your abilities are more concentrated on the outcome. Pretty clever wiring for a God who does not exist.

Read more here.