“How can you pray for someone you don’t know?”

The question was asked candidly, without rancor, and with genuine interest. The person asking the question was seriously ill and I was the chaplain assigned to the floor of the hospital where she was being treated. I had not even offered prayer; I had simply introduced myself and explained that I was a chaplain. Her question brought me up short.

The recent Pew religion poll found that more than half of all Americans report praying regularly. The number is impressive, but it leaves me wanting to know so much more. I wonder what and for whom people pray, what they even mean by prayer, what they understand to be happening when they pray, how it feels to them. Religion in America is a little like sex: media portrayals of other people’s spiritual practices can seem calculated to shock or offend (preachers damning our country from the pulpit, for instance, or church camps that are aimed at producing Christian soldiers in the most literal sense of the phrase), while ordinary people know better than to talk about such intimacies in polite company.  As a result the subject is both overexposed and mystifying.

My own prayer life seems to go in cycles. Several years ago I went through a crisis and began to fear I was incapable of prayer. Old forms and habits had stopped working, and it all felt like empty ritual. Then one night I realized that as I was rocking my baby daughter to sleep at night I was praying. Night after night I was settling in, offering my body and time and attention to my little girl, and in the process I was meeting God. While my mind was replaying scenes from the day, my heart was asking God to be with me in the messiness and frustration and surprising joy of rearing a young child. And that became my prayer time.

Intentional intercessory prayer is a fairly new practice for me, at least when done privately and not in the context of the Prayers of the People in worship. Many of us in the Episcopal Church follow the Anglican Cycle of Prayer, and daily pray for different dioceses and provinces all around the globe. At first it seemed strange to me. I don’t know anyone in the Church of North India. I don’t know their joys and concerns. But God does, and so I trust that when I pray for them I am simply asking that His will be done in their lives (on earth as it is in heaven, I guess you could say).

Back in the hospital room, I knew the patient wasn’t looking for a lesson in theology. If I had anything to offer her, it was going to have to be based on my own experience. So I tried to speak honestly about what prayer means in my life. I tried to be prayerful even as I was speaking, to not get in my own way but rather, if at all possible, to let the Holy Spirit speak through me. When I had finished we sat in silence for a moment. “So,” I asked, “is there anything I can do for you today?”

She smiled and said, “I think you already did.”

If you have ever prayed for a stranger, or have a story to tell about intercessory prayer, I’d be happy to hear from you.