Nobody knows
with anything verifiable, quantifiable, or certain, that prayer has any efficacy.
But, but,
"I know in my heart,"
my mom has said often enough.
"The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God."
Psalm 14:1, King James Version
I do not know this God my mother trusts so implicitly.
"Be still and know that I am God"
Psalm 46:10
The Psalmist, King David, left me with a lot of memorable words and ideas. And so I internalized his vision of God. I continue to pray and sing hymns of adoration and gratitude to a loving Creator who allegedly makes all things work toward some greater good.
We do not get to know if our prayers and sacrifices have any effect on the way the world works.
Efficacy
Every funeral, every tragedy, people say they're praying for those who suffer.
Do they just say so, or do they really, earnestly, cry out to God for mercy and hope?
Nobody "knows" if prayer changes anything, or if there's life after death, but we can hope and believe.
Today, an acquaintance on Facebook posted a lone lament, in Latin.
De profundis clamavi ad te Domine
Nothing else - just those words.
In the comment section, we learn that his wife is fighting cancer, and her pain levels have been hellish.
Of course I looked up the Latin:
Psalm 129: De profundis clamavi ad te Domine:
1 Out of the depths I have cried to thee, O Lord:
2 Domine exaudi vocem meam fiant aures tuae intendentes in vocem deprecationis meae:
2 Lord, hear my voice. Let thy ears be attentive to the voice of my supplication.
Next, I came across this Arvo Pärt video:
Okay, my five minutes ended quite some time ago.
To finish off the theme, I'll repeat that "nobody knows" if my prayers ever alleviated anyone's misery. We simply do not get to know. Still, some part of me believes. Other people sense the presence of lost loved ones. You Tube is filled with videos from people who were clinically dead, got to "heaven," but got sent back to their bodies.
And now it's time to head out on my daily dog walk.
Before the chiggers, ticks, mosquitoes, and other hazards keep me out of the meadow.
March is almost ever.
"April is the cruelest month"
is the opening line to T. S. Eliot's 1922 poem The Waste Land.
source: quozio.com
Nobody "knows" if prayer changes anything, or if there's life after death, but we can hope and believe.
For me, it's March and November.
It's WEATHER, not calendar dates, that I find so affecting.
Sunny days in March always bring to mind the day of Julie's funeral, when the vivid blue sky and bright, fleecy white clouds seemed so ill-suited to the occasion.
part of my March meadow walk
Missing from November to March...
I've posted about this many times before.
NOT KNOWING is worse than knowing.
Not knowing if she's alive, maybe being tortured, or dead, God knows where.
Spring rains washed her body out of the culvert, along a lonely gravel road.
We buried her in March 1976, age 18.
All these decades later, her killers have walked free.
Lori, Sister #2 of 5, battled leukemia for half her life--27 years. We buried her in September 2021. Two months later we got the news that Sister #3 was soon to follow.
November 2021: Kelly delivered the news of her cancer diagnosis. Another long stretch of praying, hoping against hope, and waiting, November to March, but ****prayer availeth nothing*** in Kelly's case, or so it seemed. The suddenness, the violence, of cancer! And yet it took more than half a year of brutal pain before cancer could take her. On April 10, Kelly was gone.
Thanksgiving was the last day we saw Julie alive on this earth.
Kelly died on Palm Sunday.
The sun rises and sets.
In just two weeks, a whole year of this Kelly-less world will have passed.
How does my mom carry on? In the garden, and with her Bible. Sewing quilts.
"Keep on keeping on" is her mantra.
Me, I walk these wetlands and the woods year after year, always praying as I go, for whoever is in most need, whoever it may be. When people I barely even know (or don't know at all) ask for prayers, I pray. What good does it do? We do not get to know. I like to think our prayers have some kind of effect on the universe, if only on some level of quantum mechanics and entanglement.
Do my sisters walk with me? Do my mom's mother and father, all my grandparents, aunt, and uncles, "watch over us" as so many would assure us?
That, I will never know.
This, I do know: