The Power of Prayer and the Multi-tasking of the Magnificent



I turned on the tv this morning and found my favorite tv doctor discussing the "Power of Prayer". I thought it delightful as I have just had several prayers answered and each one of them was answered appropriately. Perhaps not the way I wanted them answered but reflecting on what those prayers actually were leads me to know that they were answered.



Dr. Sanjay Gupta as he is known, CNN's "On Call" chief resident really does reflect the face of American medicine today. Down here in the southwest, I'd guess that at least one out of three doctors is either foreign born or muslim or both. Of course, Sanjay Gupta is the dream boy of the illusory American media i.e. just "foreign enough" to be believable and just "white enough" to not threaten all the usual biases that are so obvious and so unbelievably 'acceptable' in many conversational circles of which I've been witness to. I hear all sorts of things out of the mouths of white people. All the more shocking because some of the deeply prejudiced things that people utter come from the mouths of educated professionals. But anyway, Sanjay is a dream boy doctor.



His little bit about the power of prayer was interesting. The poll that he presented showed that 3/4 of all Americans pray once a week. Not bad I'd say but honestly, once a week? Another large group "meditates" once a week...whatever that means.



First, how do people pray if they don't even know what a real prayer situation is made out of?

Obviously, if people think that once a week is good enough, well...there you go. They are way short of actually maintaining a psychological connection to their prayers. Most would not remember what they ate for breakfast let alone what it was they prayed for a whole week before.

During the little sweet and innocuous vignette called the Power of Prayer, Dr. Gupta shows a little film strip that shows several types of people praying and meditating. The meditating part really was only some isometric gym exercises on exercise mats. Hardly constitutes prayer where I come from. The very last image however was a group of Shia muslims. They were the only group who actually looked like they knew what they were doing. Dressed right, everyone in unison. And I assure you, we do it a little more often than once a week. Three times a day actually and in that, there are five total cycles of prayer involved. Each cycle is complete and entails the washing of body parts prior to the prayer, the call to the prayer which is basically a public service announcement that it is time to drop what one is doing and pray in a timely fashion and finally there is the intention to pray the exact prayer that is being offered i.e. fajr, dhur, asr, magrhib or isha.

Then one sets about to actually "Pray".

I won't go into the details of that because it wouldn't mean much to non muslims.

My point is only this, in order to benefit from praying, a person has to be consistent in offering prayers. That way and only in that way can a person actually remember what it is they prayed for and know in what fashion the prayer was answered. The key to prayer in that sense is that a person prays for the correct thing. Then, the answer to the prayer is really quite easy to perceive. Praying for the wrong thing...well.....it just doesn't work.

And why doesn't it work?

Because, it doesn't fit into the natural law of the Creator who created everything and legislated about it's operation and published a highly recognized book of religious law called The Glorious Quran. Praying for that which is prohibited would self-violate the law of Allah and everyone should know the obvious i.e. that Allah does not violate his own creed.

And how might a person understand the idea that Allah answers all these squillions and squillions of prayers each and every day? Well, Allah doesn't have to answer because he created the system and the system works. It simply functions of its own accord.

The problem with that notion in the minds of the wicked and unsuccessful people of course is that they assume that Allah isn't able to do such multi-tasking.

Wrong. Allah is the greatest multi-tasker because the job gets done without any effort whatsoever. It is elegant, it is true. It is so, so elegant that it fills my heart with love and joy for Allah, the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful and the Best of All Planners.

Do you not know that Allah knows what is in the heaven and the earth? Surely this is in a book; surely this is easy to Allah. -The proof called The Pilgrimage from the Glorious Quran.

A generic guide to Islamic Monotheistic Prayer:

http://www.howmuslimspray.com/