Living on a Prayer

Ok, I'm not what I'd call a starry eyed Pollyanna. Sure, I was dubbed the cheer-leader of my Modern Chinese History seminar. Sure, people claim to have seen fairy dust wherever I walk. But I'm not without my murkier undercurrents and cynical sarcarsm. This perhaps is evidenced by the fact that those most intimately acquianted with me have found occasion to moniker me evil, twisted, vicious, and a head-case (albeit said with affectionate jocularity; still, there were grounds for sincerity in such epithetical attributions) and my apparent ability to repeat caustically cruel truths in glibly soothing tones; besides, I'm inclined to doubt most things, myself included, in a way that hardly evokes the image of a heartily sincere god-will-provide sort of optimist.

Nonetheless, I do tend to think there is an amorphous value in the power-of-positive-thinking sort of approaches to life. Gratitude, for instance, is a pretty powerful force and one which I've found to be worth tapping dry. I've read fairly convincing studies that recommend it as a means of lowering stress and tangentially the blood pressure etc. Buying into this, I do actually try to run through a list of things for which I'm overwhelmingly grateful on a semi-regular basis. I definitely find it helpful for my overall sense of wellbeing and mood levels.

Recently, I read a related study about the relation of prayer to interpersonal relationships that supplements this idea. I tend to think of prayer as a mostly psychological construct for the benefit of the person praying - a similar mind state to mindfulness, meditation, self-hypnosis. I'm wary of being so presumptuous as to think that the eternal sits at an ethereal desk stamping individualized prayers with yes or no stamps and shufflilng them through an infinite in-box. Why my prayers (my often selfish, petty prayers) should be answered while others' are not, or that I would need to make a specific gesture for an all knowing being to know my predicament or wants... these escape me. That isn't to say that I don't consider many acts of life an act of prayer, because I do have a spiritual bent that's well infused into aspects of my daily life. I suppose it's just the request line mentality has always struck me at best as a means of sorting one's thoughts and motivating oneself and at worst kind of cheapening.

Anyhow, that study I alluded to twenty thousand characters ago found that praying for the well-being of a loved-one for four weeks significantly increases the prayer's willingness to forgive the prayee, as well as the prayer's general level of selfless concern. In a sense, it's like training the brain to be altruistic. The study authors also suggest that it allows the prayer to envision their relationships in more cooperative instead of competitive manners, thus linking it with other studies showing higher satisfaction with interpersonal relationships where prayer is used.

So, this making some sense to me, thought I'd give it a whirl. I'm not up to the whole kneeling at the side of the bed thing quite yet, but in addition to occasionally reviewing all the things I'm grateful for, I'm trying to direct prayers for the well-being of my friends and family more specifically. As always I'm taking requests... and bribes :)