Prayer

A HistoryBy Philip Zaleski

Mariner Books

Copyright © 2006 Philip Zaleski
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780618773602
Chapter 1
The Foundations of Prayer

The story of prayer is the story of the impossible: of how we creatures of
flesh and blood lay siege to heaven, speak to the Maker of all things, and
await, with confidence or hopeful skepticism, a response. The story of prayer,
like that of all treasure sought through the centuries, is rich in myth and
dream, revelation and tragedy, secret maps and elusive clues. Here the
absurd and the sublime sit side by side, while the fantastic and the banal
merge. Consider the following:
A dear friend of ours, a native Tibetan, returned last month from a
visit to his homeland in the high plateau region of Gelok, far east of Lhasa.
Dechen arrived in Massachusetts haggard but smiling, red Tibetan mud still
clinging to his yellow Gore-Tex jacket, bearing with him harrowing tales of
vicious customs officials, of torrential rains and deadly mudslides, of
uncharted mountain passes and hidden valleys thick with wildflowers. At a
welcome-home dinner, he and his wife set up a projector, and we spent the
next few hours poring over his slides. Everyone marveled at the herds of
Tibetan yaks, their shaggy coats and gracile horns so reminiscent of the
prehistoric beasts in the Lascaux caves; at the crowds of Buddhist monks
lighting bonfires or blowing impossibly long horns, looking for all the world like
Lascaux shepherds transported to a Himalayan castle in the clouds. This
was the Tibet of legend, far from the tourist hotels of Dharamsala, an area
until recently forbidden to outsiders and still unvisited by television, pollution,
and indoor plumbing. Bringing out an atlas, we asked Dechen to trace his
journey. His finger landed on a bare white area as large as Massachusetts, a
true terra incognita at the dawn of the third millennium. It reminded us of
Victorian maps of sub-Saharan Africa, of ancient mariners sailing off the edge
of the world. "No one goes there," Dechen said. "Too difficult. Too far." No
one, that is, except a handful of Chinese soldiers and bureaucrats, who have
done their best over the past quarter of a century to suppress one of the
world's great religions. Only in the past few years have the monasteries been
rebuilt in a curious Sino-Tibetan architectural idiom whose bright pastels and
wedding-cake façades threaten to create a new form of Buddhist kitsch.
One photograph in particular caught our fancy, for it seemed to
capture best the spirit of these eastern Tibetans. It depicted a wooden
framework, looming above the tallest monk (and the Tibetans are a tall
people), and consisting of two massive uprights of rough-hewn lumber
supporting four long crossbars. Upon each crossbar stood nine or ten prayer
wheels, each containing a bit of paper inscribed with the traditional Buddhist
prayer om mani padme hum (Hail to the Jewel in the Lotus). As the wind
blows down the mountainside, each wheel spins madly, and the mantra is
flung into the universe like a message in a bottle, drifting on celestial currents
until it reaches its heavenly destination. Of what, we asked, were these
glistening wheels made? At a glance they seemed carved from crystal or
jade, or were they globes of delicate blown glass? "Oh, no," Dechen
explained, refocusing the slide projector for a better look: the wheels were
nothing more than cast-off plastic Pepsi-Cola bottles.
This Tibetan fantasia is a portal into a number of truths about the
world of prayer: that wherever one finds humans, one finds humans at prayer;
that in times of persecution, prayer goes underground, where it continues to
wend its course into the depths of the soul; and that any and all objects —
Pepsi-Cola bottles as surely as enameled statues, jeweled rosaries, or
silvered icons — can be a means of prayer. These jerry-built praying devices
demonstrate, too, that technology and prayer — that is to say, applied
science and applied religion — need not war with one another. The same
evening, Dechen's wife brought out for our inspection an array of homemade
prayer wheels: one turned by hand, a second by wind, and a third — a
particularly cunning device in the form of a lampshade — spun in convection
currents emitted by the heat of a hundred- watt light bulb. The Dalai Lama is
on record as approving an even more technically advanced method for making
a prayer wheel: download the om mani padme hum mantra to your
computer's hard drive, where it will spin at a rate of some fifty-four hundred
rotations per minute, calling forth the blessings of Avaloki tesvara, the
bodhisattva of compassion, as effectively as do the older technologies of
prayer.
Dechen's videotapes, which we watched after the slides,
demonstrated a yet larger truth about prayer: that it alters the face of the
world, revealing unnoticed harmonies and symmetries and knitting together
the natural and social dimensions of our existence. As the souvenir footage
unreeled, we saw prayer wheels spinning in the sun, bees looping and
swirling around those wheels, the sun melting into night as the monks' voices
faded into the mountains, all seemingly one motion, one symphony, one
grand universal gesture of prayer. Viewed from a perspective that we may call
religious but that in truth seems synonymous with human consciousness, it
appeared, for just a moment, as if the entire world was collaborating in prayer.
There is, as Dechen's adventure suggests, nothing strange about
prayer erupting in the oddest of circumstances. We might even say that it
thrives on paradox. Consider this: that prayer deals in eternal truth and yet
has its fads and fashions: a hundred years ago, revival tents sprang up from
coast to coast to house the inspired preaching of Christian witnesses who
passed the torch of the Second Great Awakening to twentieth-century
evangelicalism; fifty years ago, FDR led the nation in prayer through the
static-charged speakers of a million Sylvania radios; twenty-five years ago,
school days often began with a silent meditation; now, at the beginning of the
third millennium, football fields and corporate boardrooms have been favored
arenas of prayer. Or this: that we pray for worldly goods but also pray for
freedom from the desire for worldly goods. Or this: that we seldom pray for
prayer itself. Who but a saint prays for better prayer or, God forbid, for more
time to pray?
What, then, is this paradoxical action that we call prayer? Ask a
team of scholars that question and expect a confusion of tongues in
response. You may even hear a curse, for what is "God damn it!" but a
perverse petition to the Almighty? But sooner or later our learned company
will arrive at something like this: prayer is action that communicates between
human and divine realms.
That is to say: Prayer is speech, but much richer than speech
alone. It is a peculiar kind of speech that acts, and a peculiar kind of action
that speaks to the depths and heights of being. Much of the time, prayer
seems to be nothing but talk: praising, cajoling, or pleading with God;
sending messages to guardian angels or tutelary spirits; appealing to
benevolent cosmic powers. But to pray is also to act. Think of what happens
when a child recites her nighttime prayer:

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

This prayer constitutes more than a sweet set of words. It sets events in
motion; it puts God and the angels on alert. It affects the child, too, body and
soul; anyone who has recited bedtime prayers as a child knows their value
as a guarantor of a night's sound sleep.
Prayer is at once spiritual and visceral: it stems from heart and
gut as well as head. Prayer is a state of being — when we pray, we are "in
prayer," and when we communicate with spiritual beings, we are "in
communion" with them — but prayer is also emphatically a state of
becoming, a dynamic movement, an incursion into spiritual realms: in the
Trappist monk Thomas Merton's words, "a raid on the unspeakable." Prayer
has been compared to a siege, a storm, a conflagration, a nosegay, a picnic
in paradise. We may also liken it to an athletic event, such as the hurling of a
javelin: a shaft of praise, petition, or penance aimed at a higher power. Like
the javelin thrower, those who pray must be fit: "Whoso will pray, he must
fast and be clean / And fat his soul, and make his body lean" (Geoffrey
Chaucer, "The Somnour's Tale"). And those who pray must try their hardest,
so that prayer can make them fit: "That prayer has great power which a
person makes with all his might. It makes a sour heart sweet, a sad heart
merry, a poor heart rich, a foolish heart wise, a timid heart brave, a sick heart
well, a blind heart full of sight, a cold heart ardent" (Mechtild of Magdeburg,
Revelations).1
Conventional wisdom divides prayer into a number of categories:
petition, confession, adoration, sacrifice, intercession, contemplation,
thanksgiving, vows, and so on. But these classifications disguise the
complexity of the world of prayer. Consider an archetypal prayer of petition,
one so commonplace that it has been lampooned in countless cartoons and
comic strips: a plea to God to change the weather. What could be more
simple and straightforward? But let us examine the evidence:
Among the Papago (Tohono O'odham) of the American
Southwest, rainmaking lies at the heart of ritual life. These Indians inhabit a
landscape of sagebrush and lava rock, dry mesas and desert valleys; without
the downpours of the rainy season, crops would wither and famine ensue. To
ensure an annual harvest, each year the people gather to "sing down the
rain. "Much of what scholars know about this seemingly quixotic practice
comes from Ruth Murray Underhill (1884–1984), an anthropologist from
Columbia University who lived among the Papago in the 1930s and later
wrote a number of classic studies of American Indians, including Papago
Woman, the first published life of a Southwestern Indian woman. Underhill
was a special kind of researcher, more passionate participant than
dispassionate observer: "I met these hard-working but poetic Papagos," she
writes, "and fell permanently in love with them."2 Her description of the
Papago as poetic is more than anthropological romanticism; poetry for these
Indians is a matter of life or death because through their verse they bring
down the rain. Each year in an act of communal supplication they sing:

Come together!

You shall see this thing which we have always done
And what must truly happen.
Because we have planned it thus and thus have done.
Right soon, indeed, it will happen.
It will rain.
The fields will be watered.
Therein we shall drop the seed.
Seed which bears corn of all colors; Seed which grows big.
Thus we shall do.
Thereby we shall feed ourselves;
Thereby our stomachs shall grow big;
Thereby we shall live.3

Such prayer songs bring the Papago into union with I'itoi, First Brother, who
prepared the world for people at the beginning of time and who is instrumental
in bringing the rain. But chant alone is insufficient. Each year Papago women
also collect the red, pear-shaped fruit of the giant cactus Cereus giganteus
and ferment it into a jellylike wine (Underhill says that it tastes "like spoiled
raspberry jam"), which is consumed in a community tahiwua k-ii (Sit-and-
drink) that along with singing ensures the coming of the rain. This is action
by analogy: as the people are filled with liquor, so will the earth fill with rain.
An elder calls:

Hurry! Hither bring, each of you, his syrup.
Soon we shall make liquor!
Soon it will ferment,
Soon we shall drink,
Soon it will rain.4

The people sing:

Now here you have assembled;
Now thus we shall do!
With our singing we shall pull down the rain.5

Sure enough: within a few days of the Sit-and-drink witnessed by
Underhill, the skies opened and the drenching rains of July descended. "The
clouds come because we call them," explained a Papago, "and we call them
with the drinking." The rainmaking ritual ensures not only the watering of
crops but also the stability of the world. Ofelia Zepeda, a Papago linguist,
recalls her mother's belief that if the ceremony were to be neglected or the
prayers forgotten, the world "will ruin itself." Alas, in these amnesiac times
aspects of the rite have been discarded or lost, but the prayers, at least for
the moment, remain. "As a result," Zepeda comments dryly, "the world is
somewhat intact today."6
Let us contrast this example of traditional rainmaking with a more
urbane tale of weather manipulation set in the waning months of World War
II. It is December 1944: the U.S. Third Army surges toward the Rhine. But
General George S. Patton Jr. is troubled, for a drenching rain, with no sign of
letup, threatens his brilliant advance. On December 14, he summons to his
office deputy chief of staff Colonel Paul D. Hawkins and Chaplain O'Neill of
the Third Army. The following conversation ensues:

General Patton: Chaplain, I want you to publish a prayer for good weather.
I'm tired of these soldiers having to fight mud and floods as well as Germans.
See if we can't get God to work on our side.

Chaplain O'Neill: Sir, it's going to take a pretty thick rug for that kind of
praying.

General Patton: I don't care if it takes the flying carpet. I want the praying
done.

Chaplain O'Neill: Yes, sir. May I say, General, that it usually isn't a
customary thing among men of my profession to pray for clear weather to kill
fellow men.

General Patton: Chaplain, are you teaching me theology or are you the
Chaplain of the Third Army? I want a prayer.

Chaplain O'Neill: Yes, sir.7

According to Hawkins, who annotated Patton's blustery 1947 memoir, War
as I Knew It, the general got his wish. The following prayer was printed and
distributed to every soldier in the U.S. Third Army:

Almighty and most merciful Father, we humbly beseech Thee, of Thy great
goodness, to restrain these immoderate rains with which we have had to
contend. Grant us fair weather for Battle. Graciously hearken to us as
soldiers who call upon Thee that, armed with Thy power, we may advance
from victory to victory, and crush the oppression and wickedness of our
enemies, and establish Thy justice among men and nations. Amen.8

The skies cleared within twenty-four hours. A week of perfect
weather ensued, allowing the Allies to advance toward the Rhine. Patton was
ecstatic. Summoning Hawkins to his office, he declared, "God damn! Look at
the weather. That O'Neill sure did some potent praying. Get him up here. I
want to pin a medal on him." The next day, the somewhat abashed Chaplain
O'Neill received the Bronze Star.9
Both Patton and the Papago prayed to change the weather, but
there the similarities end. Patton made his prayer to the biblical God, while
the Papago, in Underhill's words, "call upon the powers of Nature." Patton's
prayer was composed on the spot by a harassed army chaplain, whereas
Papago prayers originate with I'itoi, a supernatural being. Patton's was a
prayer for victory and thus indirectly for death to the opposition ("to crush
the . . . wickedness of our enemies"), whereas the Papago sing for the life of
the corn and thus of the people. Most important, Papago prayer unfolds
within a traditional culture steeped in daily intercourse between natural and
supernatural realms, one that affirms, beyond any doubt, that "singing down
the rain" accomplishes just what it claims to do. Patton, by contrast, issued
his prayer amidst the crumbling monuments of Christendom. His petition
swims with irony. The general was a devout Christian, and there seems no
reason to doubt that he believed God could and perhaps would stop the rain.
He was, however, also a canny man, surely aware that in modern times the
notion of altering the weather through prayer has about it a touch of the
absurd. One suspects that Patton relished this chance to prove his cultural
recidivism; this tension between his action and the prevailing skepticism of
the age gives the anecdote its humor. Hawkins confesses as much, writing of
Patton's spiritual coup that "whether it was the help of the Divine guidance
asked for in the prayer or just the normal course of human events, we never
knew."10
Nor do the complexities of weather making cease here. For while
the Papago know beyond all doubt that their prayers work, this knowledge
may be rather more subtle than it at first seems. Ludwig Wittgenstein writes
in Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough that "I read . . . of a rain-king in Africa
to whom the people appeal for rain when the rainy season comes. But surely
this means that they do not actually think he can make rain, otherwise they
would do it in the dry periods when the land is 'a parched and arid desert.'"11
In light of this observation, it is instructive to ponder the following conversation
reported by Underhill:

"My kinsmen, the wine has fermented," the makai said. "Go home. Prepare
the feast, for in four days the rain will come."
I asked later about that prophecy and whether it was always
fulfilled.
"Oh yes, yes," was the usual answer and Old Salt made me
understand: "The medicine man, he is wise. Maybe the rain come soon and
he says, 'yes, but I counted from when the wagons arrived,' or it come late
and then, 'I meant four days after the wine had fermented.'"12

As the above meteorological invocations suggest, prayer entails a multitude
of forms and a multiplicity of aims. A recovering alcoholic reciting the
Serenity Prayer, a Catholic nun telling her beads, a child crossing himself
before a meal, a quaking Shaker, a meditating yogini, a Huichol Indian
chewing a peyote button, a Zen monk in satori, a Lubavitcher dancing with
the Torah, Saint Francis receiving the stigmata, a bookie crossing his fingers
before the final race, Ebenezer Scrooge pleading for just one more chance,
dear God, just one more chance: all this is the world of prayer. In this world
one may sit, stand, run, kneel, fall prostrate, dance, faint, or whirl in imitation
of the cosmic spheres. One may chant, sing, shout, mutter, groan, or keep
silent. One may make use of nuts, beads, books, flags, wheels, shells,
stones, drums, idols, icons, jewels, incense, flowers, blood, and fruit, for all
these belong to the armamentarium of prayer.
Prayer craves ritual expression, and ritual practice virtually always
includes prayer; for ritual is the sacred theater in which unfold crucial events,
such as blessing of the harvest and initiation into new stages of life from birth
to death, whose successful outcome depends on an appeal to divine powers.
If prayer is, as the nineteenth-century Russian mystic John of Cronstadt puts
it, "the breath of the soul, our spiritual food and drink," then it is ritual that
provides the body language and sets the table for the feast. Even the
psalmist's spontaneous cri de coeur "Out of the depths, I cry to thee, O Lord"
(Psalm 130:1, KJV) avails itself of formulaic words and ritualistic gestures
such as kneeling, prostration, and beating of the breast. This intimate kinship
between prayer and ritual leads to the inevitable chicken-and-egg
question, "Which came first?" Did humans discover prayer and then develop
ritual as a means to tame its energies, creating well-worn furrows for the
masses to follow? Or did ritual come first and give birth to prayer, in the way
that speech gives birth to thought? We have no final answer to these
conundrums, although throughout this book we describe various ways in
which people have tried to resolve them. This much is clear: to participate in
ritual is to enter the world of prayer, and to make a habit of prayer is to open
the door to ritual.
Prayer encompasses heaven and earth; it tangles angels,
paramecia, and humans in its cosmic web. Prayer can be brief — "short
prayers penetrate heaven," says the anonymous author of the mystical
classic The Cloud of Unknowing, who recommends the one-syllable
exclamation "God!" as the ideal prayer. Or prayers can be long, stretching for
months on end, interrupted only by essential needs of the body, as in the
lives of some religious ascetics. Prayer can take place alone or in a vast
fellowship, on the deathbed, or in the wedding chamber. Prayer's scope
extends from the private ceremonies of the morning toilet to the public arenas
of politics and war. Prayer can be a matter of high aesthetics, as in T. S.
Eliot's Four Quartets, or of low humor, as in Apuleius's brayings in The
Golden Ass. Prayer can also be a matter of spiritual surrender, as French
philosopher Simone Weil reveals in one of her letters to Father Perrin: "In
1937 I had two marvelous days at Assisi. There, alone in the little twelfth-
century Romanesque chapel of Santa Maria degli Angeli, an incomparable
marvel of purity where Saint Francis often used to pray, something stronger
than I was compelled me for the first time in my life to go down on my
knees."13
One may be seized by prayer, as happened to the apostles on
Pentecost, or one may lust after prayer, like some of the Virasaiva saints of
medieval India, or one may resist prayer with all one's might and yet pray
nonetheless with all one's might, as famously happens to the atheist in the
foxhole. Prayer may lead one to God, or it may convince one of God's
absence. Prayer can bless or prayer can bite ("When the gods wish to
punish us they answer our prayers," says Oscar Wilde). Prayer may help
one to quit alcohol, stay off drugs, or become a better parent. Prayer may
cure an incurable illness or save an unsalvageable marriage. Prayer works
miracles, not least in the one who prays (Søren Kierkegaard: "Prayer does
not change God but it changes him who prays"). For those who have
contemplated the subject, prayer is a cosmos whose center is everywhere, in
every human heart, and whose circumference is nowhere, in the infinity of
God. Something of the limitless universe of prayer shines brightly through a
Christian lens in the following celebrated poem by George Herbert (1593–
1633):

Prayer
Prayer the church's banquet, angel's age,
God's breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth
Engine against th' Almighty, sinner's tow'r,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,
The land of spices; something understood.

Banquet, age, breath, soul, plummet, engine, thunder, spear,
world, tune, manna, heaven, man, milky way, bird of Paradise, church-bells,
blood, land of spices: this torrent of concrete nouns reveals prayer's depth
and breadth. Herbert's litany contains images of feasting, warfare, art,
religion, agriculture, and industry, which leads to another important truth
about our subject: prayer lies at the heart of culture. In traditional societies,
every significant action begins with prayer. A devout Muslim says bismillah
("In the Name of Allah"), or more completely, bismi-Llahi-r- Rahmani-r-Rahim
("In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful," the opening words of
the Qur'an), before baking bread, negotiating a contract, or starting out on a
journey. A Christian may cross himself before eating, swimming, or retiring
for the night. In parts of Europe, the Angelus bell still rings from church
towers at dawn, noon, and dusk, punctuating the day as decisively as the
call of the muezzin in any Muslim village, and the faithful stop in their tracks
to recite the angel's greeting to the Virgin Mary and echo her glad response.
The world's oldest urban cultures grew up around buildings that
were essentially cultic centers dedicated to sacrifice, propitiation, and prayer:
thus Uruk, the ancient city of Gilgamesh, whose brick ramparts were built for
the goddess Ishtar and whose center was her sanctuary; Angkor Wat in
Cambodia and Borobudur in Java, sites of colossal Buddhist stupas that were
hubs of temporal and spiritual power; and Jerusalem, whose Temple once
seemed the very navel of the earth and whose destruction was the exile of
God. Look at any major ancient ruin, and you will see the remains of a
people at prayer and the signs of an economy that traded in prayer. All art
was originally sacred art — in effect, visual prayer; all drama was originally
sacred drama, telling the deeds of the gods in order to win their assistance.
Much of the productive work of the world has been instigated and hallowed by
prayer. Even today, prayers may accompany as well as initiate our labors:
thus the workers' chants given a secular gloss in the "Heigh Ho" of Walt
Disney's seven dwarves but still sung in more authentic manner in India, as
historian of religion Wilfred Cantwell Smith reported in a national radio talk on
the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1962:

I remember a scene in India some years ago when my wife and I were one
summer at a mountain resort in the Himalayas, and were out for a hike in the
hills; we came upon a work-gang busy in the construction of a rude mountain
road. It was, of course, all hand labor; they had crushed the stones with
hammers, and were now rolling them with a large and very heavy roller.
Rather in the fashion of sailors working to a sea shanty, they were
rhythmically pulling this heavy roller in spurts of concerted effort: the foreman
would sing out La ilaha illa 'llah [There is no God but God], and the rest of the
gang, then, would put their shoulders to the ropes and with a heave would
respond Muhammadur rasulu 'llah [Muhammad is the Prophet of God]. This
went on and on, as they continued to work, with a will and with good strong
heaves. La ilaha illa 'llah he would chant; Muhammadur rasulu 'llah would
come the vigorous response. Such a scene represents, of course, a kind of
living in which a split into religious and secular had not come — or had not
yet come — to segment life.14

If prayer lies at the heart of culture, then it stands to reason that
the dominant prayers of a society will reveal to us its preeminent values.
Consider, for example, the way that the ethos of Zen meditation permeates
Japanese culture, giving rise to characteristic forms of architecture,
landscape, interior design, poetry, calligraphy, martial arts, and rules of
social etiquette.

Old pond
A frog leaps in
Plash!

With these three lines, the seventeenth-century poet Matsuo Basho created
a new style of haiku, indeed a complete aesthetic, that cannot be understood
without an appreciation of Buddhist meditative prayer. The special genius of
Basho 's verse lies in its ability to fuse Buddhist teachings on transience
and "suchness" with the indigenous Japanese love of nature, finding material
for prayerful contemplation in the leap of a frog, the fall of a cherry blossom,
or the sound of a horse urinating against a rock.
We can detect similarly rich cultural meaning in the ritual prayer
(salat) of Islam. Five times a day, all Muslims are expected to turn their faces
in prayer toward the shrine of the holy Ka'bah in Mecca. What better way to
express the belief that the only secure foundation for human community is
reverent submission to the oneness of God? When prayer is performed
congregationally in the mosque, the sense of unanimity in adoration is
palpable, as worshipers line up to perform the intricately choreographed
series of r?k'ahs (prostrations and Qur'anic recitations) under the direction of
the Imam. In the context of the annual pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca,
the centripetal force of this prayer can be overpowering. So Malcolm X
discovered when he made his first pilgrimage to Mecca, as he testifies in this
letter to his followers back in Harlem:

Never have I witnessed such sincere hospitality and overwhelming spirit of
true brotherhood as is practiced by people of all colors and races here in this
ancient Holy Land, the home of Abraham, Muhammad and all the other
Prophets of the Holy Scriptures. For the past week, I have been utterly
speechless and spellbound by the graciousness I see displayed all around
me by people of all colors.
I have been blessed to visit the Holy City of Mecca, I have made
my seven circuits around the Ka'ba, led by a young Mutawaf named
Muhammed, I drank water from the well of the Zam Zam, I ran seven times
back and forth between the hills of Mt. Al-Safa and Al Marwah. I have prayed
in the ancient city of Mina, and I have prayed on Mt. Arafat.
During the past eleven days here in the Muslim world, I have eaten
from the same plate, drunk from the same glass, and slept on the same
rug — while praying to the same God — with fellow Muslims, whose eyes
were the bluest of blue, whose hair was the blondest of blond, and whose
skin was the whitest of white. . . .We were truly all the same (brothers) —
because their belief in one God had removed the white from their minds, the
white from their behavior, and the white from their attitude.15

Prayers have this diagnostic value: they present in microcosm the
longings, beliefs, ideals, and assumptions that drive the inner life of
individuals and the corporate life of human cultures. In prayer, the dreams of
a civilization take lucid and articulate form. The evidence cannot tell us
whether there is an instinct to pray inscribed in our biological nature, but
there are grounds for suspecting that prayer is as universal as language and
as old as any other cultural artifact. To investigate this possibility, let us
trace prayer to its prehistoric roots.

Copyright © 2005 by Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski. Reprinted by
permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.



Continues...

Excerpted from Prayerby Philip Zaleski Copyright © 2006 by Philip Zaleski. Excerpted by permission.
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