The Return of Prayer by Larry Dossey, MD

Life, ultimately, is a mystery.  I cannot judge why someone has cancer and I don't.  In the past year, I have found myself yearning for the mystery, faith, and rapture to be restored to my spirit.  I want more prayer and less analysis....I have always been a heretic.  Now I am a heretic who prays.
                           - Martha Walden

[Cont. from page 1] 

SURVEYING THE FIELD

How much experimental data supports intercessory prayer?  There is a significant difference of opinion.  If one performs an electronic database search using "prayer" as a key word, one will probably retrieve around a half-dozen studies of dubious quality.  On the other hand, physician Daniel J. Benor has written a four-volume work, Healing Research  (the first two volumes of which have been published), which cites nearly 150 studies in this field, many of which are of excellent quality and over half of which show statistically significant results.       

Part of the problem in identifying work in this field is the lack of agreement on language.  Many researchers shy away from using the word "prayer" in favor of a more neutral term such as "distant intentionality."  Even though their experiment may actually involve prayer, they often do not use this term in the titles of their papers.  If their subjects pray, the researcher may say instead that the subject "concentrated" or applied "mental effort" to produce the effect being studied, or they may use terms such as  "mental healing," "psi healing," or "spiritual healing" to describe their work.

Perhaps we should not be too critical of researchers on this point.  Research in the distant effects of consciousness is generally considered to be the domain of parapsychology.  This field is sufficiently controversial without adding the furor surrounding the concept of distant, intercessory prayer.  But the aversion of experimenters to using "prayer" comes with a price -- the difficulty of identifying prayer-and-healing studies, and the underestimation of the number of prayer experiments that exists.

ABOUT PRAYER AND PARAPSYCHOLOGY

Many religious folk are exceedingly uncomfortable about "parapsychology," and they deplore the practice of parapsychologists of equating prayer with mental intentionality, focused attention, concentration, or even meditation.  They often feel that parapsychologists dishonor prayer and are disrespectful of the spiritual traditions in which prayer is embedded.  I sympathize with these reservations; but after exploring prayer and parapsychology for several years, I feel that a clean separation between these fields does not exist and is impossible to achieve.  In experiments in parapsychology in which individuals attempt to influence living things at a distance, they often actually pray or enter a sacred, reverential, prayer-like state of mind to accomplish their task.  On the other hand, when people pray, they often have paranormal experiences such as telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and so on.  Anyone doubting this would do well to read philosopher Donald Evans' scholarly work, Spirituality and Human Nature , or historian Brian Inglis' classic book Natural and Supernatural:  A History of the Paranormal.

Fortunately, the longstanding antipathy between religion and parapsychology appears to be diminishing. The Journal of Religion and Psychical Research,  published in the United States, and The Christian Parapsychologist, published in Great Britain, are notable examples of bridge-building between these fields (note 1). The latter publication was begun in 1953 by a group of British clergy and laymen who were "convinced that psychical phenomena [have] great relevance to the Christian faith, both in life and death...[but that] psychical studies are as likely to lead to harm as to good if pursued outside the realms of the spiritual life...through the practice of prayer, worship and service to [our] fellow creatures."    

As further evidence of the emerging religion-and-parapsychology dialogue, Michael Stoeber, Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion and Religious Education at The Catholic University of America, and Hugo Meynell, Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Calgary, have co-edited a critically acclaimed book, Critical Reflections on the Paranormal, that examines issues of mutual interest to both parapsychology and religion.

» next page ___________________________________________________
During the past thirty years, people from all the civilized countries of the earth have consulted me.  Among all my patients in the second half of life - that is to say, over thirty-five - there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life.  It is safe to say that everyone of them fell ill because they had lost that which the living religions of every age have given to their followers; and none of them has been really healed who did not regain a religious outlook.
                            - C. G. Jung
_____________________________________________