Real Prayer is Straight-up Gimme!

Zev Chafets investigates prayer in a lengthy piece in the NYT, "The Right Way to Pray?"  He visits Brooklyn Tabernacle, a spiritual director, a suburban Reform synagogue, and a Catholic scholar.  But he was touched by the prayers of kids in a rural Assembly of God church:

Soon I was surrounded by the children of the choir. They wanted their own names written backward, and they also wanted a chance to testify.

“I prayed to Jesus when my grandmother broke her leg,” a little girl said. “Now she can get by herself to the bathroom.”

“Amen,” the kids said.

“I prayed over my sister and cured her asthma,” a teenage girl said. She wasn’t bragging. She just wanted me to know. “A boy named Wayne was burned in a fire,” another boy said. “The whole church prayed for him, and now he’s getting around without a walker.”

The church was filling up now. The pastor came over to greet me and wish me a happy Resurrection Day. We shook on it. He mentioned that he knows Sean Hannity, which was more than I could say. He took the pulpit and began with the traditional announcement, “Jesus Christ has risen!” There was a chorus of amens, and the pastor said, “Give Jesus a big hand.”

There are some 300,000 churches in America, and I could have picked any one to attend on Easter morning, but I liked being in this one. Especially the kids. They didn’t need Reverend Henderson’s prayer techniques, or the high-tech mantras of the Brooklyn Tabernacle. Their prayers weren’t Rabbi Gellman’s suburban Jewish prayers of Thanks! offered to whom it may concern. They didn’t pray to de-center their egos or find transcendence or to set off on a lifelong therapeutic spiritual journey. They prayed to a God with whom they were on a first-name basis, and they believed their prayers gave them power, which they used on behalf of their asthmatic sisters and infirm grandparents and a kid they knew with burns on his body. Sitting in church on Easter morning, I realized that I was probably never going to become a praying man. But if, by some miracle, I ever do, I hope my prayers will be like the prayers of the kids I met at the Love church in Berkeley Springs. Straight-up Gimme! on behalf of people who really need the help.