A Final Image for Prayer

Let me end this little jaunt through prayer by telling you about a wonderful presentation I heard recently at my church. It was the third in a series we did in our adult forum on the topic of prayer. I kicked it off with a presentation on scientific research on prayer, another set of people talked about being part of our church’s prayer chain, and on the final Sunday two people shared some of their experiences in being prayed for.

The last presentation was incredibly moving. One of the speakers is a lawyer, a former prosecuting attorney who despite having seen much of the seamy side of human nature still has a transcendent faith in the power of divine love and healing. The other person is an artist and nurse who has ovarian cancer. I wish you could have been in the room when they spoke. They were funny, self-deprecating, and insightful. I doubt there was a dry eye in the room when they ended.

Here’s what moved me the most. Teri (that’s the artist/nurse) spoke of being somewhat of a skeptic about prayer, despite having grown up in a devout family and being an on-and-off member of a church herself for years. But when she was diagnosed with cancer, her extended family organized a healing service for her in the Roman Catholic parish in which she’d grown up. She said she stood at the entrance to the church that day and couldn’t believe how many people kept coming to the door. In came her aunts, uncles, cousins, second cousins twice removed, former teachers, school buddies, old neighbors, friends of her brothers and sister and in-laws, and a bunch of people she’d never met before who came because they were part of a part of a faith community and knew that someone was suffering who needed their help.

In the middle of the service, the time came for the laying-on-of-hands. The members of the congregation came forward and placed their hands on Teri’s head, shoulders, arms and back. Teri said it was both an amazing and humbling experience, and that she felt a kind of vibration or current flowing through her.

She used a metaphor to describe what that experience was like, one that I’ve never heard used in conjunction with prayer but one which I think is absolutely lovely. She said that she felt like she was a kite being lifted up into the sky by a string of prayers and that their collective energy was guiding her in flight.

“That feeling still resonates with me even now, eight months later,” she told us. “I haven’t been the same since.  It’s not that I don’t get scared, or grumpy, or weepy at times, but I have a feeling or a knowing that the Holy Spirit is present. Some kind of energetic shift has occurred that has knocked me out of my head and into my heart.”

And then she quoted a line from Rumi, the fourteenth-century Sufi poet who channeled that divine energy so powerfully in his life and words:

All of my life I’ve been knocking at the door, and when it finally opened, I realized that I was knocking from the inside.

What could I–or any scientist or researcher–possibly add to that?