How God Answers Prayers

The 

about the effect of prayer on healing has tweaked my long-standing concern about the kind of God that emerges from people's ideas about intercessory prayer.  Intercession seems often to suggest a picture of a pretty odd God.

The Episcopal Book of Common Prayer describes God as the one who "knows our necessities before we ask and our ignorance in asking."  If this is what we believe, then the needs of the patients being studied are well known to God before they checked into the hospital, received certification from their HMOs, and were divided into the groups who would be prayed for unknowingly, knowingly prayed for, or ignored.   So what kind of a God do we have here, anyway?  Does this God keep files, one for those being prayed for and one for those desolate folks ignored by the faithful?  I suppose this view of God means that some poor person stands before God in desperate need, God checks the intercession file, and announces "Too bad, so sad, not enough prayers came in, so you, friend, are out of luck."  Or, do we have a God who is forgetful of his creation and needs prayers to serve as something of a string around the divine finger to remind God to be compassionate?

I would like to think that God does not run the intercessory prayer enterprise like a popularity poll, with those most prayed for gaining the benefits and others neglected.  I would find it unsettling for God to need to be reminded of his job. If we are to pray for each other, then we need to consider some more mature and compelling reasons for intercessions. 

Intercession reminds us that human life is lived in community. The restoration of health involves people caring for the body, the mind and the human spirit.  Chaplain Marek, at the Mayo Clinic offers an interesting explanation for why the people who knew they were prayed for had (slightly) more instances of postoperative complications.  Perhaps they neglected their medical care during recovery because they thought that prayer covered all bases. It doesn't.  Whenever we pray for the sick at our healing services, at the Episcopal parish where I serve, we always pray for physicians, nurses and all who minister to the suffering, recognizing that we are engaged in common endeavor. 

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