Is It OK to Pray for Your 401(k)?

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Stay Calm, Says God
All four interviewees said the very act of prayer (appropriately) transfers some anxiety onto the divinity. "The prayer itself is a form of power," says Ali. "We are not frustrated or losing our temper or losing our dignity or feeling lost, because we are close to God." Philip Yancey, the author of numerous Evangelical Christian books, including most recently Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference?, cites Psalm 46, a prayer listing a number of catastrophes but concluding, "Be still and know that I am God." Addressing God, Yancey says, allows us to "bring our fears to someone who seems quite positive that he's able to run the world. You can take the panic and anxiety and transfer that to him." That is the context, says Martin, for the famous prayer of the beatified mystic Julian of Norwich: "All will be well, all will be well, and all manner of things will be well."

In considering the economic crisis, Nevins suggets that the very equanimity achieved through prayer may actually help solve the concrete problem. He says that prayer-induced calm could affect the economic spiral in a way similar to the case of a serious illness in which a miracle cure may not be in the offing, but "doctors have observed that people who have hope are able to have a better quality of life and better outcome in their healing." Says Nevins: "If people stampede and panic and liquidate their assets, then we'll all be in worse shape. So maintaining some perspective that even in times of difficulty we're not alone, and that God is giving us encouragement and strength, has a real observable benefit socially."

Is this merely a psychological effect that could proceed without God? Nevins insists not. "I think that hope and strength and sense of worth are an extraordinary gift that I view as the spark of the divine within our souls."

Widening Your Prayer
Calm can act as a springboard to the most expansive kind of prayer. Yancey uses the model of Jesus, who prayed in the garden Gethsemane immediately before his trial and crucifixion. He notes that Jesus' first statement is "Let this cup pass from me." Observes Yancey: "He's basically saying, 'Get me out of this!' " Yet he quickly moves into a stage of calm. "By the end of the night, he's the calmest person there. He's told God, 'If this cannot pass away except I drink it, thy will be done.' " The final stage of the prayer, Yancey maintains, is uttered by Jesus from the cross when he beseeches, "Father forgive them. They know not what they do." Yancey does not expect that everyone caught in the current economic vice will achieve quite that level of selflessness, but he says, "Once you've transferred those anxieties and achieved that calmness, it kind of clears you to reflect on what God wants done in the world and how you can be part of the stream of what he wants to happen." Within prayer, he suggests, one can also become aware of "people who are worse off," whom Jesus called "the least of these." Someone who starts out praying for his own portfolio, he says, could end up building houses for or helping feed those even harder hit.

Not all the others accepted Yancey's Christology, but they all acknowledged prayer's expansion into compassion. Nevins points out that the recurring refrain on the Day of Atonement, when Jews itemize their sins, is that "repentance, prayer and charity can annul" God's harshest judgment. Charity, he notes, can come even from those hit hard by economic blight: "There's a belief that charity from a poor person might be more meaningful than a grand gesture from the wealthy." Imam Ali cites a hadith (a saying of the Muslim prophet) in which Mohammed, in the face of persecution, prays to God, both admitting that his troubles may result from his own mistakes and asking him to "forgive my people because they are ignorant."

"And that has application in this situation," Ali continues. "We must reflect that our own shortcomings have played a role: our greed; that we don't have social awareness; that the way we see life is so egotistical." And in the face of this humbling realization, prayer enables us to realize that "we have acceptance. We have compassion. We have love."

And all those virtues are accessible starting from what may seem to be the most self-centered of prayers.

(See Finding God on YouTube here.)

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