The Paradox of Prayer in AARP Magazine

My mother handed me one of her AARP magazines to read about Bob Dylan, but I kept reading finding lots of good articles. I stumbled across this one about prayer and it was very interesting. It was asking the question why people pray more often as they get older when being older means also experiencing many more times that prayers seem to go unanswered.

Prayer is an interesting subject to me. I don’t relate to the type of prayer I see around me so often, the begging for something prayer, the begging God to change an outcome prayer. For every family with a sick child who rallied thousands of people to pray for them and had a healing, there’s another family who did the same and whose child died. I’m not convinced that it is our place to ask for changes in our life. Doesn’t God know what we need better than we do?

Then again I remember in Eat, Pray, Love where Liz Gilbert’s friend tells her that she’s a part of this universe too and deserves to have a voice. Knowing that we are all parts of the larger God, that perspective on prayer makes more sense to me.

But to me prayer has always been about climbing more deeply into our own depths to find the soft voice of God within. It is about listening more than speaking. Chants and formal prayers align our physical and subtle bodies so we can go deeper within. Singing hymns (bhajans) and prayers strips away our limited self, this little husk we think is our self, and opens us up to the larger Truth of our big Self who is God.

Irritatingly, though not surprisingly, the article has no mention of Hinduism at all. They interview Christians, Muslims, and Jews. There is a picture and a quote from a Buddhist. No mention of Hinduism at all.

But then maybe that’s because Hindu prayers get answered. 😛