Prayer - From The Heart, Or Not At All

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Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith

Barak Obama left a prayer at Jerusalem's Western Wall. Stephen Prothero admitted to reading this private communication, if it was indeed private. I mean what celebrity puts a prayer in the most famous prayer site in the world and expects it to remain private. Some seminarian stole the prayer and published it. Prothero says he was struggling with how to pray himself and so gave in to that common but questionable habit of looking over someone else's shoulder to read what was not intended to be public. Turns out it was nothing remarkable. In the end the only true prayer is one that emerges in honesty from one's own heart. It needn't be pretty or erudite or even polite. It does need to be real.

Prothero says that if he was to return to the Western Wall today he would leave a prayer for Obama and McCain. He'd pray that each of them would listen to what the Wall has to says about power and vulnerability, and the delicate and dangerous dance between them. That's Prothero's understanding of transcendence -"the significance of any human being, however large, is dwarfed by the mystery of millions of things we will never fully understand, not least the practice of prayer itself."


Peter