TruthBook Religious News Blog

Nation
Posted on Sun, Nov. 19, 2006

Study of prayer shows how similar - and how different - Americans are

By TERRY LEE GOODRICH
STAR-TELEGRAM STAFF WRITER

Eyes open -- or closed?

Heavenly Father? God through Jesus? Adonai? Allah? Or the Goddess?

Family prayer at Thanksgiving?

Quick prayer at bedtime?

Asking through clenched teeth for divine aid to control road rage?

Prayer is getting a lot of attention these days: in polls, in labyrinths, in conferences to fine-tune prayer skills. Bloggers muse about such matters as their favorite postures for praying. Some Web sites post prayer requests.

No matter how often people pray or to whom, when it comes to private prayer, "people say that the most recent time they prayed, it was about family," said Christopher Bader, a researcher in a random survey about religion in America.

The survey of 1,721 people, released in September by Baylor University and the Gallup Organization, showed that three-fourths of Americans pray at least once a week. More than one-fourth prayed several times a day. Of those who prayed regularly, 77 percent prayed for relatives.

He said researchers got a surprise when they asked to whom people prayed.

"Given the evangelical focus on Jesus and the rhetoric about having a personal relationship with him, only 5 percent said they prayed to Jesus," Bader said. "Most prayed to God and sometimes to Jesus. But when they pray, they are thinking more broadly, about the big boss, so to speak."

Fourteen respondents noted that God and Jesus are, according to the New Testament's explanation of the Trinity, the same, along with the Holy Spirit.

Depending on religious affiliation or the lack of it, people also prayed to the Virgin Mary, Buddha, Allah, angels, saints, spirits and "a higher power."

"Nine percent said, 'No one special,'" Bader said.

Baylor researchers said they plan surveys every other year about prayer and other religious issues.

Here is a look at the prayer lives of some Metroplex residents.

Religion survey
The Baylor Institute for Studies on Religion asked about 400 questions in the survey. They included whether respondents think God takes sides in politics, what God's personality is like, whether they watch TV shows like Touched by an Angel, even whether they believe in the paranormal and such creatures as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster.

On the matter of prayer, the survey found:
Women are more likely than men to pray several times a day.

People with high incomes are less likely to pray several times a day than those with low incomes.

About 45 percent of respondents say a table grace on certain occasions; 19 percent do so at all meals.

Senior citizens are more likely than younger people to pray often.

About 53 percent of respondents pray about world affairs.

About 28 percent pray for financial security.

When it came to prayer by religious affiliation and tradition, black Protestants outdid any other group: 74 percent of those surveyed said they pray once or more a day.

"Wrapped in Love"
Fort Worth retiree Mary Weathers prefers small bamboo knitting needles that don't clicketyclack.

Grapevine systems analyst Rosemary Freeman of Grapevine loves to applique butterflies on the shawls she makes.

And stay-at-home mom Pam Young of Fort Worth sheepishly admits that her shawls sometimes wind up with irregular shapes rather than the desired rectangle.

For one hour each Sunday afternoon, they and half- dozen other women cluster in a small room on the second floor of First United Methodist Church of Fort Worth.

They begin with a prayer, then wield crochet hooks and knitting needles to create "prayer shawls" for people in need of prayer and comfort.

The prayer shawls are not magical, and "we're not original; we just took a good idea and ran with it," said Debbie Shrauner, 45, a Weatherford elementary school teacher.
Thousands of people across the country are making prayer shawls, an ancient tradition, the women say.

Jews have long used the shawls as a religious symbol of being enveloped physically during joy and sorrow.

These days, patterns for prayer shawls and books about them can be ordered online.
Since the Fort Worth group formed in January, members have made 51 shawls in colors with such names as cotton candy, Montana sky and Mediterranean.

Some knitters, like 60-something Weathers, have over 50 years of experience; Young, 42, is a novice. Freeman is the record-setter, having made 18 of the shawls.

The women have made shawls for teens heading off to college, for parents of a baby with a heart defect, for a widow marking the first anniversary of her husband's death.

Weathers is at work on an extra-long shawl for a 6-foot-4 fellow to use as he recovers from surgery.

"Sometimes I knit for somebody I know. Sometimes I don't, and that's OK," Weathers said.

Occasionally, the women receive thank-you notes.

As they knit, their conversation hopscotches from husbands to children to the merits of filter-free vacuum cleaners.

At hour's end, they lay aside the shawls and stand in a circle to pray in unison.
"May the one who receives this shawl be cradled in hope, kept in joy, graced with peace and wrapped in love."

"More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of . . . "
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson

While much of the world is dreaming -- 4 a.m.-- the Rev. Don Miller awakens to his internal alarm clock. Quietly, so as not to disturb his sleeping wife, he heads outside to his "prayer arbor," a wooden swing facing east.

Miller, whose nickname is Man of Prayer, is the founder of Bible-Based Ministries and has led prayer conferences around the globe. Whether he speaks in the U.S., Africa or Australia, his suggestions are the same.

"Keep prayer simple," Miller says. "Don't complicate prayer. Let theologians do that."

Follow a good example -- Jesus -- and keep prayer short, he says.

"I'm a big believer in a minute prayer, or a prayer of 15 words or less," he said. "Many of Jesus' prayers were less than 15 words.

"I praise God in the morning because I'm alive. I praised him one afternoon recently when I drove home from the doctor's," Miller said. "I praised him because I didn't have to have surgery" for a carcinoma, a kind of cancer, but rather just topical treatment.

"You need a quiet time and place to pray. It's hard to have that in today's noisy society, but prayer is the intimate communication between the heavenly Father and his child.

"God likes to hear specific prayers," Miller said. "If we pray for the lost, I hear God say, 'Which one?' But God doesn't get on a loudspeaker; he speaks to me out of his Word, so I carry a little New Testament in my pocket."

When they stay in hotels during conferences, Miller still wakes before dawn. He heads to a corner of the hotel room, with a small flashlight.

"I don't pray outright," he said. "I take a flashlight, get a notebook and write out my prayer. I tell people, 'God can read.'"

"As for having a prayer rug, the idea is that you are bowing to Almighty God. You wash up and be clean for your prayers. The rug is anything clean; you can use a clean bedsheet. There have been times when I've prayed on cardboard."
- Aftab Siddiqui, a Muslim and capacity planner for American Airlines

Praying five times a day is vital to Islam. When Muslim employees of American Airlines learned that management had found a small room for prayer in the company's building near the airport, they were thrilled. A manager ushered them into the room, then took a look at their faces.

"What?" she asked.

Aftab Siddiqui chuckled as he recalled the room, furnished with a table and chairs. Muslims pray in a no-frills space -- better for laying down prayer rugs and bowing, kneeling and touching their foreheads to the floor. The furniture's not a problem, though: They simply move it before prayers.

In January at Dallas/Fort Worth Airport, Muslim employees and travelers began using an airport chapel for their Friday afternoon prayers. "Fridays for us are like Sundays are for Christians and Saturdays for Jews," Siddiqui said.

"When we pray, we have set ways, motions we go through, and we say words from the Quran or prayers of the prophets. But it's personalized, too. We incorporate that. And when you go into a bigger mosque and do a collective prayer, the more the better, because it represents the community.

"People talk about whether to have prayer in schools. For us, it's a daily occurrence in the office or school," Siddiqui said. "It doesn't have to be on a PA system, just a secluded corner. You may spend five minutes, you may spend 30. When I'm on a flight that's three or four hours long and am in the seat, I can do some of the motions. Some I can't. You just do the prayers the best you can."

Providing Spiritual Comfort, One Week at a Time
She travels 11 months of the year, this small statue. She represents Our Lady of Guadalupe, a brown-skinned Virgin Mary who is believed to have appeared as an apparition to an Aztec in 1531.

Each Sunday, Mary Aguirre of Fort Worth drives the statue, housed in a glass case, to wherever it is needed. Church members who want to host the statue for a week sign up at Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church in Fort Worth. They wait eagerly for the statue, said Aguirre, a member of the Guadalupanas, a Mexican-American charity group organized primarily by women.

"She's not hard to move," said Aguirre, a clerk at the University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort Worth. "Most of the people I take it to are from Mexico, because there is a lot of devotion to her in Mexico. She represents the intercessor, the Blessed Mother.

"I take her to homes, we pray the rosary, we sing hymns, and I leave her. A week later, I go back, say the rosary, sing and take her to another home." Those in the home say rosaries throughout their week with the statue.

"Some may want to have a baby. Some may need a job or want to take a trip and don't have money," Aguirre said. "They may have cancer. Some may be illegal immigrants praying for their papers. Some just have kids doing things they're not supposed to."
The statue stays at the church for much of December during processions and other celebrations.

"I love doing this," Aguirre said. "It's like having it at my own home. I feel like I'm home with these people, praying with them."

"Any thoughtful person prays for the well-being of his or her family or community, and it's just human nature if someone is hurting to pray for relief."

- Rabbi Ralph Mecklenburger
"The tradition going back a couple thousand years is that God's name is too holy to pronounce," said Rabbi Ralph Mecklenburger of Beth-El Congregation in Fort Worth, a Reform Jewish congregation.

Yahweh is the hypothetical reconstruction of the name for God, but "modern scholars really don't even know how it was pronounced," he said.

"Hebrew is only written in consonants. We don't know what the vowels were."

The equivalent Hebrew word is Adonai, he said, and "we pray directly to him."

Pronunciation aside, "it's natural to reach out to God," he said.

"Any thoughtful person prays for the well-being of his or her family or community, and it's just human nature if someone is hurting to pray for relief. It's not just about me, me, me."

He said the most common prayer in the Jewish tradition is for peace.

"I think it's the unselfish prayers that do us the most credit," the rabbi said.

"In modern times, Jews, Christians, Muslims all pray to the same God.

"Hebrew is considered the language of prayer, and Hebrew sounds especially prayerful. You're allowed to pray in any language, but prayer is the language of the heart."

"Instead of beating Bush up, we pray for him. Instead of slapping Congress around, we pray for them."
- Norma Howard, 58, of Fort Worth, a Prayer Warrior and secretary at Antioch Missionary Baptist Church in Fort Worth

The Prayer Warriors begin their Monday night sessions with anointing.

Norma Howard, this evening's leader, takes a quarter-ounce bottle of Oil of Gladness Frankincense and Myrrh-- $4.49 at a Christian gift shop -- and dabs the palms and foreheads of the handful of women assembled.

"There's no power in the oil; it's just symbolic of the Holy Spirit," Howard says.

The women close their eyes and lift their hands, and Howard works her way around the room, touching each woman gently as she utters rapid-fire prayers. She thanks God that one woman does not need surgery; she asks that another receive food as well as spiritual nourishment. Amid a rising background chorus of "Yes, God," and "Thank you, Jesus," she pats medical lab assistant Jerri Colbert, 58, on the shoulder.
The women sit and read aloud from a book about intercessory prayer, then read in unison from a book of prayers.

On a table, a black three-ring binder holds the names of people who have signed up to request prayer. The women pray for those with ailments, those who need money for rent and gas, those who are lost. No politicians have signed the book, but the women pray that they will not take bribes.

Someone knocks on the door, and two women slip away to answer.

It is a man named Reggie, and he says he is hungry. The women load a plastic sack with groceries from the church pantry and invite Reggie to join them. They pray for him.

Afterward, the women give Reggie a few dollars from a collection plate.
"I'll see you ladies to your cars," Reggie says.

Howard grins.
"The Lord's gonna snatch you and shake you," she tells him. "Use that for sodas and bus fare."

"We have very strict rules. If someone wants a specific person to come into their life, we can't ask for that. That's manipulating, and you can't do that. But we can ask for someone suitable to come into their life."

- Kim Hochreiter, 50, of Bedford, a Wiccan

Kim Hochreiter, a resource pricer at Thrift Town in Arlington, said that the Wiccan religion is nature-based and that she and other practitioners pray to what they refer to as the Goddess or a universal power.

"All prayer, in my opinion, is focusing your thoughts on a desired end," she said. "That's what magic is -- to facilitate a change somewhere.

"We use seven-day jar candles sometimes, and you might write a person's name on it and what you're praying for. ... I've never seen a candle last that long [seven days], but that's how you set up your spell: 'May so-and-so be well.' If possible, you keep it lit, but when you go to work, that's not always safe, so a lot of us will put it in a bathtub or kitchen sinks so it doesn't fall out. We believe divinity lives both within and without, and I don't have to go to church to find this."

Members of covens also go to "covensteads" to conduct rituals. "Where I live is mine," Hochreiter said. "We meet on full and new moons and Wiccan festivals eight times a year. After 9-11, we prayed for the people who were injured, that those missing would be found and for the families of those who had physically gone on."

She said her yard has a circle of trees where Wiccans light candles and pray. But "if the weather is 107 degrees or raining or snowing, we do it in the living room. In mine, there are four small round altar tables representing earth, air, fire and water, and a central one that represents spirit."

She likes to pray out loud, she said.

"When I drive to work, I might say something a couple times -- 'May the day go well. May I do the best with what I've got.'"

"Nobody comes to a builder and says, 'I want a home chapel.' This is kind of like a leap of faith. . . . Am I goofy? I don't know."
- Argyle builder Randy Bollig

Early this year in Argyle, Randy Bollig, a Catholic, began building $1 million-plus speculative homes with chapels.

Dave and Donna Perley say they did not buy their home because it had a place to pray and worship.

"We were a little surprised. But we go to church every Sunday, so we appreciate what Randy is doing," Dave Perley said. "Most of our friends are believers and don't go, 'That's weird.'"

The 250-square-foot chapel has images replicating early Christian art in Roman catacombs, including an image of the Virgin Mary and the Last Supper.

Perley said his wife plans to hold Bible studies and prayer in the chapel soon.

"You know, with your day-to-day work and dealing with the kids, you just kind of go, 'Hmm. I think I'll go in there for a while.'

"It's not that it's any greater than any room in the house; we don't worship the room," Perley said. "But it reminds you what you are supposed to be doing. It keeps you in check: 'Did I say the right thing? Did I do the right thing?'

"You don't go in there to say a bad word, I'll tell you that right now."

"Be still and know that I am God."
- Psalm 46:10

"I'm not very good at sitting still," said the Rev. Fritz Ritsch, pastor of St. Stephen Presbyterian in Fort Worth.

Neither are a lot of people.

Now, a new outdoor prayer labyrinth that is always open offers members of the Fort Worth congregation - or anyone else in the community - a place to pray in peace even if they're on the fidgety side.

Church members dedicated the labyrinth on a recent Sunday night. Worshippers held candles as they stood in a ring around the labyrinth, designed by a local landscape architect on a hill overlooking downtown Fort Worth.

Then they wound their way through the labyrinth, with a "round trip" of about a quarter-mile. Some wore jeans and T-shirts; others were clad in dresses or business suits.

Prayer labyrinths, which have been around since medieval times, have been criticized as a pagan symbol. But many people are showing a renewed interest in them, with some Web sites selling portable and temporary labyrinths.

There are a handful of prayer labyrinths in Tarrant County, and those who walk them say the winding paths are symbolic of life's complexities. They find the labyrinth conducive to prayer and meditation as they wend their way to the center and back.

Wendy Larmour, 42, a mechanical engineer and member of St. Stephen, said the church's labyrinth, which is wheelchair-accessible, has "a wonderful design." She said she has also prayed in the church's indoor labyrinth, made of canvas.

"It's a completely different feeling in a labyrinth," she said. "I had a severe emotional meltdown one day, and in the center of the labyrinth, I felt safe. I didn't understand it, but it's healing. It's a surrender. You have to let go."

The labyrinth allows for individuality, Ritsch said. At the dedication, teens zipped through the labyrinth; most people strolled; and one man walked slowly, using a cane for support.

"Is this the plan? I went through all this to end up here? Well, let me tell you something, Mister. You're not funny!"
- The character Robert Barone on Everybody Loves Raymond, glaring heavenward after a rough day

The Rev. Bayard Pratt of Bedford's Martin United Methodist Church doubts that God would take offense at that.

"The Psalms are full of people venting. Job vented as well. That's anger -- that's a God-given emotion," Pratt said. "I think railing at God is healthy."

When he prays, he said, "I begin with the premise that God is a God of grace, rather than vengeance, and that we're forgiven before we ask.

"When I look at my own life, there's a comfortableness that develops, a sense of awareness," he said. "I don't know that I have a routine. It's more that I constantly find myself seeking God's presence in the conversation," he said. "There's the ability to be real and human, to say, 'God, my patience on the highway is not in the top 10.'"

As for why God sometimes does not seem to answer -- or at least does not give the desired response -- those conundrums have been around for as long as humanity.
Pratt does not have an answer.

"When someone is critically ill and we pray for them, they may or may not get well," Pratt said. "If they do, we thank God. If they don't, we need the presence of God.
"We can't comprehend God. We put God in a box and make him too small. Our language is the way we state our desires to God. But I think how God responds to us is a very different thing."

On a sunny Friday in September, at an outdoor table at Weinberger's Delicatessen in Grapevine, the Lagerstrom family of Flower Mound was ready to eat lunch.
But first, a prayer.

"We always pray before meals, whether publicly or at home," said homemaker Marianne Lagerstrom, 38, of Flower Mound. Her husband is corporate trainer Steve Lagerstrom, 47; their children are Andrew, 8, and Liza, 6.

No matter that sometimes singing waiters are making a to-do over a nearby diner's birthday.

"I know we're talking to God, and he can hear us anytime, anyplace," Marianne Lagerstrom said. "You don't worry about noise drowning us out. It comes from a need inside to be thankful no matter where you are and who may be watching."

They do not always close their eyes to pray.

"The other day, I said, 'Let's do an open-eye prayer,' because we were with some people who are not pray-ers, and I didn't want them to feel self-conscious or weird about praying in public," Lagerstrom said. "I like to do that, too, so the children can see my face and we can pray face to face."

The prayers go beyond gratitude for food. "I have a wayward sibling -- I don't know if that's 'Christian-ese' -- but I pray for him all the time," Lagerstrom said.

"We hold hands sometimes during our prayers, but we're not ritualistic. It's just whatever we do at the time. It's like talking to a friend -- you don't always hug."