Oh, c*&@: more on prayer

Last updated on: June 21, 2015 at 1:51 pm by Jane the Actuary

Oh, c*&@: more on prayer 2015-06-21T13:51:42-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Hi, everyone. Please pray for healing for my friend R., who is undergoing treatment for cancer, and for his wife and children (four of them, ages 7 – 14) at this difficult time.

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That’s how this post is supposed to go. But:

A couple days ago, I wrote a little post on gratitude, and how I have a hard time with idea of being grateful for life circumstances (even though, in the grand scheme of things, my family’s life circumstances are pretty good), with the fact that this implies (a) God is in charge of the specifics of one’s life circumstances and (b) that if my life is good because of his infinite plan, the reverse is true of others worse off.

A while earlier I had written two other posts on the subject:

At Christmas, I told you, in the context of gratitude and prayer, about a friend recently diagnosed with cancer. And, in January, I updated you on our friend, and on my skepticism about prayer. Here’s what I wrote at the time:

Do you believe in the power of prayer, that is, do you believe that prayers for healing, for instance, will (or might) be answered?

Yeah, I struggle with this. Very often, people use the cop-out of “I pray that God’s will will be done” — but if that’s the case, why bother praying? Same thing with “God answers prayers — it’s just that sometimes the answer isn’t what you expect.”

If I believe, for instance, that God will bring about an outcome with respect to our friend’s cancer battle (the cancer isn’t hypothetical – he’s in a clinical trial right now – just the belief) that will be the “right” outcome for his Divine Plan, then is there a point to praying for healing? Should we instead pray that, whatever the outcome, God provides emotional and spiritual strength to the family?

Or do you believe that, given a sufficient quantity of prayer, we may win the “miracle lottery” and he may be the recipient of a genuine miracle, or the minor miracle that this experimental treatment proves to be successful? (This is the early stages of a trial, just establishing whether the drug has potential, so we’re not looking at double-blind randomized trials, where we don’t know if he’s got the placebo or not.)

The further update? Not good. In fact, really bad. The cancer is progressing despite the experimental treatment, so now they’re trying another, also experimental treatment. My husband is planning on calling today during his layover; they’re currently in Houston (where my husband has his layover, but that’s just coincidence; the layover’s too short to cab it over to the hospital and back) at a specialist hospital.

And — look, in the context of the whole “why I remain Catholic” bit, it strikes me that I don’t have much trouble assenting to all manner of things that cause others to walk right out the door (no women’s ordination? fine by me), but I have a lot of trouble with prayer. Our friend is a good guy. If anyone deserves a miracle, he does. But why would God require an accumulation of a given quantity of prayers, or prayers by the “right” people, or by finding just the right patron saint to pray to?

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