The placebo effect of prayer
A few weeks ago, I wrote a column arguing that the only truth worth acknowledging was the truth that one arrived at on one’s own.
Michael Cade, a fellow contributor to WFTC , posted a comment in which he said, among other things, that “even though I’m a crusty-atheistic-material plane-kind of guy, I recognize that prayer, for example, has quantifiable benefits. And I’ve started to wonder about the ‘placebo effect’ of prayer, and ‘placebo theism’ and if I could access all of that without actually submitting to religion, or God.”
I waited a bit before posting a reply, quite simply because I found Michael’s comments did not admit of a quick and easy response. In fact, I have continued to think about what he said because I was far from entirely satisfied with my reply.
I do think that a lot of God talk is simply idol talk — people arguing over their pet notions of the transcendent and insisting that if you don’t agree with one or another of the details they insist upon, you’ve got it all wrong.
But a God who is nothing more than the terminus ad quem of a reasoning process hardly seems the living God into whose hands, the psalmist tells us, it is a fearful thing to fall, and worshipping such a God seems just another way of admiring oneself (if only for being such a subtle thinker).
More important than that, though, is something else I’ve come to realize since writing that column: That I do not pray because I believe in God; I believe in God because I pray.
Michael’s comment got me to thinking of the origins of my own faith.
Now, I am a cradle Catholic, and I can still remember sitting in a pew at St. Veronica’s Church next to my mother when I very young. I presume that the murmured Latin, the statues and paintings, the gold vessels and elaborately embroidered vestments all made some impression on my toddler’s consciousness.
But I remember something else as well: I had, even then, for no reason that I can adduce, a sense of an invisible presence to whom I felt I could address my thoughts and feelings. I do not connect that sense to anything told me by my mother or anyone else. It seems to have come with the territory of being me.
This will prove nothing to anyone — nor is it meant to. And it doesn’t need to prove anything to me, since it is a part of my facticity.
When I was about 12, I paid a visit to my sixth-grade teacher, Mother Elizabeth Holmes, a member of the Society of the Sacred Heart, an order of nuns often thought to be the distaff version of the Jesuits. She was also, I believe, a niece of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. She was a great teacher, who always had time for her students, past and present.
I had come to see her because I was starting to have doubts as to whether there really was a God. What she told me will strike most people — as, I confess, it struck me then — as irrational. First, she said that there was nothing unusual about my having doubts. Everyone had them sooner or later. But, she added, peculiar though it may sound, the only effective way to deal with them was to pray anyway.
It didn’t seem to make a lot of sense to me at the time, praying to someone I wasn’t sure was real, but I did it because I respected Mother Holmes’s advice. It worked. I don’ think I’ve ever seriously doubted the reality of God since.
The principal effect of this on my life as a Catholic is that I have come to see the Church and its doctrines and rituals as means rather than as ends in themselves. They exist to help me maintain contact with that presence I long ago seem to have become acquainted with, just as my native tongue enables me to express myself.
I suspect much the same is true of all genuinely religious people of whatever faith.
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Frank, you might enjoy a recent theological detour on my personal site; my Catholic friend chimed in with his 2 cents in the comments section too:
http://bit.ly/aHBuq0