Intercessory Prayer: How Can That Work?

I've never understood intercessory prayer. The theory seems to be that if my friend (we’ll call her Ann) is ill and I say, “Lord, please let Ann recover” (or just think it), this will help Ann recover. It’s like a magic spell: the words cause the event. I don't have a problem if the words are code for, “I love you, Ann, and hope you recover.” In my model of the world, saying this, especially if I’m one of many well-wishers, may indeed have a performative effect. It may boost her immune system or motivate her to work in therapy, and it’s almost certain to make her feel better. It’s win-win, a spiritual placebo, especially if a we pray in her presence, maybe lay on hands—assuming that Ann isn't annoyed by all the commotion. Who doesn’t want to be loved?

     Placebo shouldn't be confused with fake. Rather, a placebo effect is a spiritual effect as opposed to a chemical one. Placebos are, of course, pharmacologically inert substances given in place of active drugs (or anything analogous to that). Placebos are used as controls in a double-blind experiments to make sure benefits aren’t merely reactions to having been treated, but placebos often have real effects. They produce relief in as much as fifty percent of patients, especially with depression, pain, fatigue, and sleep disorders. A fake stimulant actually raises blood pressure and heart rate, and a fake depressant does the opposite. The brain obligingly produces the expected outcomes. In the hippie 1960s we spoke of a “contact high.” 

      Placebos can’t lower cholesterol or shrink tumors, but they are often effective at managing symptoms—some life-threatening—that are regulated by the brain-body connection. Prayer in this connection can work as an alternative medical treatment, like homeopathy, acupuncture, reiku, magnetism, and healing touch. Though these therapies resist double-blind confirmation and are suspected of being placebos, Lissa Rankin defends them in Psychology Today: “Healing thoughts cause healing. Loving healers help create sacred space so people can heal themselves.” 

     What I don’t buy about “intercessory” prayer is the inter part—the idea that it operates through a divine middleman like a duke interceding with the king for one of his knights—the idea that expressions of love are null and void until they have been posted to an Intercession Bureau in heaven, stamped “approved” or not, and then angelically executed as the Lord’s decree. In the process, our intercession presumably passes over the petition desk of the Maker of Heaven and Earth (and of all that is seen and unseen), and he says the equivalent of, “Well, look here. I had planned to smite Ann with sickness unto death, but Bill and his peeps have interceded with me so sweetly that, well, now I reckon I won’t.” Of course, if we’re Catholic, we may fast-track intercessions through Mama to the same desk. Holy nepotism!

     To me, something is theologically rotten here, even allowing that the Intercession Bureau is only my just-so story—something wrong with the concept of a God who wavers in the winds of human will. From the Church Fathers on, I understand that most Christian theology has proclaimed an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God existing timelessly outside of time though manifesting himself through it. Not the tribal god of the Hebrews, who certainly did react (sometime nastily), to all sorts of human acts, but a providential creator. Divine vacillations are usually interpreted as illusions by later theologians such as Henry Suso, a bona fide saint, who imagines God saying, “I am the immutable good, and subsist the same and am the same. But that I do not appear the same, arises from the difference of those who view Me differently, according as they are with or without sin” (Little Book of Eternal Wisdom, VIII). Christian theologies differ on the matter of predestination, but generally agree about divine foreknowledge and providence. In this anthropomorphic but all-wise theistic model, I can’t imagine a divine architect revising his blueprint because of my charitable pleas, no matter how heartfelt.

     Meister Eckhart, in the tradition of Augustine, makes a similar point. In The Book of Divine Consolation, he tells the story of a suffering man who comes to a holy father. The priest offers to pray for God to remove the man’s sufferings, but the man replies, “No, father. They are good for me, that I know well.” He refuses intercessory prayer for three reasons, all based on the assumption that his sufferings must be God’s will. First, God is good, so the sufferings must be for the sufferer’s good. Second, a good person wishes only that God’s will be done, not for God to do his will. Third, such a request would be a foolish triviality before “a rich, loving, and generous God.”  It is, he says, as if he traveled hundreds of miles for an audience with the Pope and begged the pontiff for a single bean. Temporal sufferings are trifles on the scale of eternity. “It is,” Eckhart writes, “a sign of a weak spirit if passing things of this earth cause someone joy or despair.” We should not pray for removal of sufferings, but for the vision to celebrate them as God’s perfect will (Part 3). Of course, in Eckhart’s story, the sufferer belittles his own suffering. If the priest had belittled it—refused the courtesy of a palliative prayer and instead told the man to grin and bear it—that might be a different story, but this one says that God doesn’t need our advice.

     Another spiritual model of the universe (besides the naturalistic one allowed already) allows for temporal benefits of intercessory prayer, and it makes me wonder if my difficulties may be the result again of a childish literalism in my reading of the term God. For instance, people speak of being moved by God when all they feel is an impulse completely absent distinctive mint-marks (as I’ve called them) of the supernatural. This God, the god of sources as diverse as Marcus Aurelius, the Bhagavad Gita, and John Philip Newell, is a presence in the ordinary human heart, but not merely there. Marcus writes: “Revere the ultimate power in the universe. . . . But similarly revere  the ultimate power in yourself: this is akin to the other power” (5: 21). The Gita repeatedly identifies ultimate divinity with the Atman, the Self beyond desire and duality. Similarly, Newell, a contemporary Church of Scotland writer, addresses God in his “Prayer of Awareness”: “It is in the depths of life that we find you / at the heart of this moment / at the centre of our soul / deep in the earth and its eternal stirrings.” God may be best experienced, not as a heavenly king, but as the unity of being in the flow of the world without and within.

     So, suppose we model our world-view, not as a lawful quasi-kingdom of a father, but as more like the Tao, a flow of chi or maybe a nourishing soup of interacting quarks and synchronicities—catchwords slapped together here, not to mean anything in particular, but merely to gesture offstage toward mystery, which surely preponderates out there beyond the science’s scattered archipelagos of surety. In a Butterfly-Effect universe where everything potentially affects everything else—an “organic” New Age cosmos rather than a mechanical or legalistic one—we may believe that prayers heal Ann even if she doesn’t know we are praying. Bishop James Pike, in his controversial 1964 popularization of progressive theology, A Time for Christian Candor, endorses something like this when he says that the “machinery” of intercessory prayer is mysterious but may involve “parapsychology or the group consciousness.” In any case, he says, the same Being that is addressed lives also in the depths of the ones prayed for (106). So the hope is that we send out healing waves somehow across a spiritual sea.

     Science has, however, planted dismal islands here—at least 17 experiments (some of them double-blind) have tried to measure the effects of prayer. One hypothesized that, if prayer worked, the entire English royal family should be outrageously healthy, being prayed for so often (Elizabeth and Phillip almost confirm this), and another prayed over selected plots of farmland and measured crop yields. One or two experiments found modest “power of prayer” effects and, as I recall, made a splash in Reader’s Digest, but meta-analysis finds no measurable effect on people and things unaware of being prayed over. Maybe it’s worth a try if it makes us feel good. If we model prayer as sending out healthy wish-waves in a spiritual ocean, at the very least, we aren't trying to second-guess providence, telling God his own business, when we intercede.

     Another way of getting around the presumption of our bossing God is compatibilism, a way of harmonizing free will and determinism that goes back to the ancient Stoics and was adopted by Thomas Aquinas. The Stoics believed that nothing happened without a cause, and that God (called Zeus) created the world as a chain of causes directed toward the Good. Human choices are caused by external stimuli interacting with human character, both of them determined by prior causes, so every choice is determined before it happens. Given this, how can our choices be called free or even "ours"? The Stoics (and Aquinas after them, struggling to account for God’s foreknowledge and omnipotence) said our choices are free insofar as they aren't forced by other people or things. We can still be blamed for bad choices because they are compatible with our bad intent, our personal character. Character is destiny: even if we're free to do anything we want, we're not free to want anything contrary to our character. Even if we reason that we're determined by a chain of causes, we can never know those causes, so it is exactly as if we're free.

     We are called, we may understand, to care for our fellow creatures, including Ann, and to follow a natural impulse to petition for her benefit and attain merit for it. If Ann’s recovery is foreordained, so is our praying for her. All of this may be seen as a divine plan—a tapestry, if you want to get artistic—in which our prayers are threads tied to her illness. In this worldview, prayers may even cause her recovery, but are divinely foreknown just as her sickness was. Of course, such casuistry is unlikely to pass through anybody’s mind when they say, “Pray for me.” 

     It's obvious, by the way, that we do something quite different when we pray for benefits (our own or another’s) even potentially under our control. This obviously works as a focusing of will, even as marching orders issued to the subconscious, and may be powerful. Group prayers build team spirit. Just as funerals benefit the survivors, prayers benefit those who pray. They build hope and community. If you believe you're blessed, you're more likely to recognize and seize opportunity. If you have confidence in an outcome—or at least believe it is in God’s hands if you do your part (the devout detachment taught in the Bhagavad Gita)—you may work harder with finer-tuned intuition. You are more likely to succeed. This sort of prayer can be powerful.

     Indeed, anyone undertaking a difficult project is well advised to pray (though focused non-religious meditation might work as well). This is not the highest form of prayer. It cries out in the synagogue, and “they have their reward” (Matthew 6:5). Directing community theatre in the Bible Belt, I’ve had the actors join hands in the Green Room and pray for a great show. I imagine it helped.