A Family That Prays Together Stays Together Song
Faith may be losing members, but prayer is more than popular than ever. A expect at the myriad reasons why.
In the 11 years that Theresa Cho has served every bit a pastor at St. John's Presbyterian Church in San Francisco, she has aimed to make prayer more than accessible to her diverse congregation. When the 10th anniversary of nine/eleven grew shut, for case, she searched for a simple nevertheless artistic style for her parishioners—and anyone else—to express themselves. Inspiration struck when she constitute a bucket of colored chalk in her office supply cupboard. She placed it on the ground outside the church's entrance side by side to a large sign that read "Write a prayer or give-and-take of peace to mark this day."
Over the following week, congregants and passersby scratched out cheers to the first responders and wishes for a better world: "Stay human." "Blessed are the peacemakers." "Let'south piece of work together." Because the 9/11 anniversary coincided with Rosh Hashanah, members of the Jewish temple across the street added their hopes for the new yr.
"After I took down the sign and the chalk faded, I got phone calls asking, 'Why did you take it away?'" says the dynamic Cho, now 40. "People would walk by on their style to the autobus, and reading those prayers was a moment when they'd interruption and reflect."
Prayer takes countless forms in America today. Across town from Cho's church, Grace Episcopal Cathedral hosts spiritually focused Tuesday-nighttime yoga—participants do sun salutations on mats nether its soaring arches—likewise as Friday-night prayer walks in its limestone labyrinth. At Praise Academy School of Dance in Stoughton, Massachusetts, a erstwhile New England Patriots cheerleader teaches kids and adults how to apply movement as worship. Several times a twenty-four hours, Muslim employees and customers gather at a cordoned-off section of a shopping mall in Tysons Corner, Virginia, to kneel and perform salat, the Islamic prayer ritual, while, across the country, in Anaheim's Affections Stadium, more than 100,000 Christians recently prayed alongside Pastor Greg Laurie as he implored Jesus Christ to alter everyone'due south "eternal address" to heaven rather than hell. And for the 85 million travelers who pass through Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport every year, three chapels offer infinite for worship and reflection, also as weekly Catholic, nondenominational Christian, and Muslim services.
The American Way
Although the shapes, faces, and places of prayer are ever evolving in the U.s.a., the act itself is a fixture in nearly of our lives. Co-ordinate to the 2010 General Social Survey, 86 percent of Americans pray, with 56.vii per centum doing and so at least once a mean solar day. Even amidst people who aren't affiliated with a specific organized religion—a growing group that numbered 46 1000000 at last count and includes not-churchgoing believers, atheists, and agnostics—one in five nevertheless prays daily, according to the Pew Research Center.
Prayer is ubiquitous in America because it'south then flexible and customizable. Says religion scholar Elizabeth Drescher, a kinesthesia member at Santa Clara Academy in California, "Among the traditional religious practices, prayer allows the nigh individual autonomy and authority. That's peculiarly resonant in our civilization, which values personal option."
The word pray is derived from the Latin word precarius, which means "to obtain by entreaty or begging." However, praying is about much more than request for things. Writer Anne Lamott believes that about prayers fall into one of three categories: Aid, Thank you, and Wow (that's also the title of her 2012 book on the subject).
Until the middle of the 20th century, Drescher notes, worship styles were quite distinct. "Catholics, Lutherans, Episcopalians, and other denominations prayed in particular means. Prayer was a specific marker of religion and identity." With mass media, people were exposed to the practices of other sects and faiths, similar Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism.
"Recently, we've been seeing a shift toward more informal just as well more imaginative prayer," says Tanya Luhrmann, a professor of anthropology at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Indeed, if they were live today, pontiffs of the past would no doubt have been dislocated and amused by 1 of the beginning official actions of Pope Francis. Last March, but four days after being selected, he sent his beginning tweet from the papal role: "Dear friends, I thank you from my heart, and I enquire you to continue to pray for me." (The pope, whose business relationship is @Pontifex, has over 3.5 one thousand thousand followers.)
Next: The changing confront of prayer in America
Stoking Devotion
The Twitter account of Jessie Still (@JessieStill) has a much more than modest fan base: 236 followers. The 38-yr-old Michigan man's page, which boasts a photo of Still's adolescent face, bears the clarification "Husband, dad, lover of God, director of the Furnace at MSU (FurnaceMSU.com). Loving life. Praying." "Prayer furnaces" are evangelical Christian ministries that focus their efforts on organizing congregants to pray together and express their devotion to the Lord publicly and passionately. They are a relatively recent phenomenon in the U.s.a.. Some furnaces organize participants to pray in relays to keep worship going nonstop for days, weeks, and even years.
Nonetheless runs the furnace at Lansing's Michigan State Academy. He relies on Facebook to send out notices and posts instructional videos and audio files on the group'south website, merely despite these modern methods, he sees prayer in an age-old way: as a means to talk directly to God. He says, "I speak with him as I would a friend. Information technology can have the class of a unproblematic conversation, or it might be my reading from a Bible and asking God when I don't sympathise, 'What are you saying?' Information technology can also include my singing or playing music."
Although Still'southward parents were nonreligious, one of his grandmothers was a devout Southern Baptist, and he credits her with helping him get "awakened" at eight years former. "I knew then that God was existent," Still says, "that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, and I believed that I heard his vocalisation. That's defined my life ever since." Shortly afterward, he heard a pastor say that God would bless a person who took the time to talk to him. "And I believed that in my little centre."
Still adds, "Evangelism, or sharing the proficient news that God loves you, is considered a priority for Christians who accept their faith seriously." He thinks that through their collective prayers, the furnace's believers can improve the spiritual climate of their campus, the nation, and fifty-fifty the world. As he writes on the ministry's website, "The glory of prayer is that there are no limits to whom and where you tin can attain."
Helen Jacobs, a Catholic in Burlington, Kentucky, is aiming for a smaller sphere of influence than Yet: her family unit. But non much smaller. The 83-year-old and her hubby, Elmer, have nine children, xv grandchildren, and seven smashing-grandkids, and almost all of them gather in her habitation with their spouses and partners every Christmas Eve. Afterward dinner, Jacobs dispatches her oldest granddaughter to fetch the purse of plastic rosaries for distribution amongst the xl family members.
She says that people who aren't familiar with the Rosary think it'due south just rote recitation, but she views the prayer ritual as an opportunity to contact a higher ability: in this instance, the Holy Mother. "If y'all're not feeling right or y'all're worried most something, you tin can talk to Mary most it. Information technology's a closeness that you tin can feel."
Though Jacobs has traditionally led the Rosary, recently she'due south been teaching the girls to pb and the boys to respond. "I did it to get them more involved," she says, "and it works out good." With her actions, she is striving to ensure that new generations in her family volition enjoy the solace and strength that religion and its rituals can provide.
Connecting to a Creator—And Kin
Other Americans are taking prayers from traditional religions and customizing them to reverberate their own preferences and experiences. Tanya Marcuse, 49, grew up in a nonobservant Jewish household, as did her hubby, James Romm. But after they started a family unit, they joined a progressive congregation in Woodstock, New York, and they've sent their 3 children to Hebrew school. "We decided to have a Jewish practice not considering we had an overwhelming spiritual belief," explains Marcuse, a photographer. "It was nigh wanting to have a community and a clear Jewish identity that was larger than a cultural one."
Every Fri nighttime, Marcuse'south family unit says Sabbath prayers, although they use the term Creator rather than God or Lord. "Even if I don't believe in God," she says, "I didn't create my own cocky. Prayer is a mode of reminding myself of that and teaching my children to remember a position of humility. It's a manner of recognizing the bigness of things so far across ourselves. I don't remember that's a man with a beard who has a plan, simply I do believe that things are a lot bigger than any ane of us. That attitude has been tremendously helpful to me in good and bad times."
Patrick Rosal, a writer in Brooklyn, New York, was raised by Catholics, but he has spent most of the past xx years as a "straight-up atheist." Nonetheless, he prays often, almost automatically and especially in moments of emotional turmoil. "I'd be lying if I said I knew what prayer does for me," says Rosal, 45, "just I find myself making the sign of the cross out of nowhere."
He attributes this reflexive practice to his deeply ingrained Catholic roots. His father was a priest before he married Rosal'southward female parent, and the family'due south household was steeped in organized religion. Rosal'south parents held masses in the domicile, had a library filled with theology volumes, and hosted monsignors visiting from their native Philippines. Rosal played guitar at church building folk masses. He says, "There wasn't anything in our lives that was not continued to religion."
After years of non believing, he has recently begun to consider the possibility of a supreme being. "Equally a writer, I've always had a relationship with mysticism and bewilderment," he says, "so how could I exist sure there'due south no God? I felt like information technology was depriving me of an opportunity of wonder."
Rosal finds himself praying most every day simply non only equally a Catholic. Earlier meals, he occasionally makes atang, a nutrient offering to his Filipino ancestors—including his female parent, who died of kidney affliction in 1995. In those moments, he feels a bond with her that bypasses the logical, linear world. "I experience a piddling bit like I'thou talking to her," he says.
Worship that rises out of caring for loved ones, living or dead, is common among religiously unaffiliated Americans like Rosal, observes Drescher. "Prayer, in its broadest sense," she says, "is an attitude of deep concern that provokes behaviors like contemplation, meditation, and chanting, which are meant to focus that concern and compassion."
Proverb Cheers
Prayer, of course, is also expert by Americans who've separated it fifty-fifty further from faith or spirituality. Sociologist Phil Zuckerman, a professor of secular studies at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, interviews atheists and agnostics for his research. While a large percentage run into prayer as casuistic, he reports, some acknowledge its value equally a means of projecting goodwill into the world. "It's nigh focusing your heed on a hopeful outcome," he says. "If you think near people you dearest and your wishes for them, perchance that will put beneficial energy out there." This impulse toward positivity is what has made Twitter a fertile forum for prayer, with users creating hashtags like #pray4philippines and #pray4boston to quickly and succinctly evidence empathy and solidarity in the face up of tragedies.
Offline, the positive energy that so many people are expressing through prayer is appreciation for life's gifts. Princeton, New Jersey, mom of iii Lisa Marcus Levine, 52, says, "While I don't give thanks to God, I do try to cease and requite thank you for things throughout the 24-hour interval: the sunrise, my kids, my dogs." In Philadelphia, Jennifer Woodfin, 44, and her family pause at the start of every repast. "Nosotros don't say grace," explains Woodfin, a bookstore manager, "but we agree easily and smile at each other in a moment of gratitude for being together."
Amidst people who don't identify with a particular organized religion, Drescher says, the word prayer is used "to describe an emotional, psychological infinite that holds both anxiety and promise. In the same way that the word grace shifted from something with a religious pregnant to something that indicated fluidity and elegance, I encounter people who say prayer to indicate practices they think of as prayerful."
Even for the devout Rev. Theresa Cho, praying sometimes means leaving her church building, putting on her sneakers, and going for a run. "Information technology may audio funny for a pastor to say," she admits, "but a footling over a year agone, I had a difficult time praying." While she withal believed in God, she had doubts whether she was doing with her life what he wanted her to exercise, and she couldn't detect the words to inquire for guidance. And then she recalled her years of high school track. "Running was often how I'd get through bug," Cho says.
Her favorite route takes her through San Francisco'due south winding streets to Golden Gate Park then to the paths that lace the shore. She doesn't listen to music. "I run and hear what's effectually me," she says. "I let thoughts go into my mind, and I elevator up some in prayer. Information technology's been a manner of rediscovering how to connect with God." Then, after stopping to catch her jiff past the park's sandstone cantankerous, she turns around and heads back dwelling house.
Source: https://www.rd.com/article/why-we-pray/
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