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RETHINKING THE MEANING OF PRAYER By John Shelby Spong

In 1981 my wife Joan received a cancer diagnosis that was determined in all
probability to be fatal. Because we were a well-known and publicly identified
family (I was Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, New Jersey), the news
became public knowledge almost immediately. resources of our people and our
friends were quickly mobilized. Prayer groups throughout the diocese and even
in ecumenical settings added my wife to their list of special intentions. Her
name was spoken regularly during the prayers of the people in public worship in
almost all of our churches. Those actions communicated concern, caring, and
love to both of us, and we received that caring with deep appreciation.
Remission did appear to have been achieved, and Joan lived for six and a half
years from diagnosis to death.

This was beyond anything the doctors had led us to believe was possible. As
this realization of a prolonged remission began to dawn, the people who were
most concerned and whose prayers were the most intense began to take credit for
her longevity. “Our prayers are working,” they claimed. “God is using our
prayers to keep this malevolent disease at bay.” Perhaps there was present
still that ancient but unspoken assumption that this sickness was the work of
the devil and that this evil work was being thwarted by the power of God loosed
through the prayers of God’s people.

Despite my gratitude for the embracing love that these people demonstrated,
both for me and for my wife, I could not help but be troubled at their
explanations. Suppose, I queried to myself alone, that a sanitation worker in
Newark, probably the city with the lowest per capita income in the United
States, has a wife who had received the same diagnosis. Because he is not a
high-profile person, well connected to a large network of people, socially
prominent, or covered by the press, the sickness of his wife never comes to
public attention. Suppose he is not a religiously oriented person and thus
prayer groups and individual petitions in hundreds of churches are not offered
on his wife’s behalf.

Would that affect the course of her sickness? Would she live less time from
diagnosis to death, endure more obvious pain, or face a more difficult dying?
If so, would that not be to attribute to God not only a capricious nature, but
also a value system shaped by human importance and the worldly standards of
social elitism? Would I be interested in worshipping a God who would treat my
wife differently because we had had opportunities in life that the sanitation
worker had not had? Do I want to attribute to the deity a behavior pattern
based on human status? The answer to all of these questions is no, no, a
thousand times no! ...