Fingerprints of God

by Barbara Bradley Hagerty

  But for every study suggesting that prayer heals a person’s body, there is another one showing that prayer has no effect—or worse, that you don’t want prayer, no how, no way, get that intercessor away from me. Does prayer help people with heart problems in a coronary care unit? Researchers at the Mayo Clinic found no effect.16 Does it benefit people who needed to clear their arteries using angioplasty? Not according to researchers at Duke and other medical centers.17 In other studies, prayer and “distant healing” did not seem to affect the course of HIV,18 did not alleviate pain for those suffering from rheumatoid arthritis,19 and did not ease the plight of those on kidney dialysis machines.20 People with skin warts will get no comfort here: researchers found that people who received prayer saw the number of warts actually increase slightly, compared with those who received no prayer.21 In the most famous study, conducted by Harvard researcher Herbert Benson and his colleagues, prayer backfired, at least for those who knew it was coming.22

  I looked a little closer at this study, which involved 1,802 patients undergoing cardiac bypass surgery. They were split into three groups. Members of one group received intercessory prayer for fourteen days, beginning the night before the operation, but they did not know it. Members of another group were told they would receive prayer, and they did. The third group did not receive prayer. The result left advocates of prayer sputtering and critics of prayer chortling. Patients who received prayer and did not know it, and those who received no prayer fared about the same.The patients who did worst—who had the most complications—were those who received prayer and knew it.

  I have heard many explanations for this surprising result, including the complaint that these prayer studies do not reflect the way people actually pray. How many of us pray for a complete stranger by reading from a script? Most of us pray urgently, passionately, for a person we know and love. It is an intimate act. This critique comforts some people as far as the results of studies showing that prayer has no effect. But what about the Benson study showing prayer is bad for your health?

  One explanation, Anne Harrington told me, is the potential fear that arises when you are about to undergo bypass surgery and the doctor informs you that a trained healer is assigned to pray for you.

  “One reaction is, ‘Oh my goodness, they’re praying for me, I must be really sick.Why am I chosen? This must be bad news,’ ” Harrington hypothesized. “Or, ‘Oh my goodness, I’m now in a study to demonstrate whether prayer is real. I better get well really fast or I’m going to let God down.’ Who knows what they were thinking! But people believe there was some kind of psychological backlash within the patients that led to this unexpected result.”

  Violating the Laws of the Universe

  Richard Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, holds a less charitable view of these prayer studies. I asked him his assessment: Does the prayer of one person benefit another?

  “The answer is pretty unequivocally no,” Sloan said crisply. “There’s recent evidence as well as older evidence which suggests there’s no impact of distant, intercessory prayer.”

  In his book Blind Faith, Sloan has amassed an arsenal of reasons why these studies—even if they support prayer—should be discarded.23 First, they don’t take into account the prayers of family and friends who are going to pray for the patient going into bypass surgery no matter what, even if the patient is in the nonprayer “control group” and researchers tell the family not to pray. A wife will not refrain from praying for her husband just for the good of science—and Sloan argued that those “supplementary prayers” muddy the results.

  Second, he said, the researchers fell into the “sharpshooter’s fallacy,” where you first empty a six-gun into the side of the barn and then draw the bull’s-eye. In this case, the researchers often asked intercessors to pray and then watched to see what happened—declaring victory when, for example, AIDS patients bathed in prayer visit the hospital less frequently.

  “In science you have to specify what variable you expect to be influenced by your treatment before you conduct your study,” Sloan said. “You don’t fish around until you find something afterward.”

  But Sloan’s chief complaint is that prayer studies are “a wild-goose chase that violates everything we know about the universe.”

  “Physicists tell us there are four forces that we know about in the universe. That’s it, just four,” he explained. There are strong and weak nuclear forces, gravity, and electromagnetic energy. None of these could explain how a weightless thing like a thought or a prayer could affect a person five feet away, much less thousands of miles away.

  “There are no plausible mechanisms that account for how somebody’s thoughts or prayers can influence the health of another person,” Sloan said. “None.We know of none.”

  Proponents of distant healing are not troubled by that argument. For years, no one knew how morphine or aspirin or quinine worked. They just knew it worked. Hand-washing was standard medical practice well before anyone hatched a theory of infectious diseases: surgeons and doctors just knew patients fared better when their doctors lathered up. So what if we don’t know how prayers help another person? Eventually, they say, we will.

  I confess my bias here. My own family life was peppered with these “unexplainable” healings.24 We did not chronicle these healings except in memory, but over the past century, thousands of other Christian Scientists have done so in the pages of magazines such as the Christian Science Journal or Sentinel. Perhaps a skeptic could dismiss some of the thousands of unexplainable recoveries from near-fatal accidents or Alzheimer’s or cancer or other diseases, complete with doctors’ verifications. Maybe he could dismiss most of them. But all of them?

  For me, the most satisfying compromise between the proponents and skeptics of prayer came from John Astin, a research scientist at California Pacific Medical Center. Astin reviewed the early prayer studies and concluded that the seeming effects of prayer were real and not just chance happenings. But he also led a study that found that prayer did not help people with HIV.25 When I visited him, he told me he was genuinely puzzled about the conflicting results.

  Astin’s hunch is that one person’s thoughts or prayers can influence someone else’s body. But they may not have the firepower to alter the course of a disease.

  “Let’s say you have heart disease,” Astin proposed. “You’ve got a whole array of factors that have come to influence your getting that disease.You have biological and genetic factors, family history, dietary lifestyle factors, psychological factors, depression and stress.”All of these influence cardiovascular function.

  “And let’s say I’m a spiritual healer, and I’m trying to influence the course of that disease in some way, to facilitate healing,” he continued. “Well, that’s not happening in isolation. It’s happening within the context of a whole host of complex factors that are influencing that disease. So it doesn’t even make sense to think it could supersede the influence of everything else.”

  In other words, it is impossible to tease out the prayers for a heart patient from his genetic predilection or the thousands of cheeseburgers he consumed over the years.

  As I was wrapping up my research about prayer, I realized that science has embraced a sliver of my childhood faith, a century after Mary Baker Eddy “discovered” Christian Science. Most medical scientists now agree that mood states like depression—which are heavily influenced by your thoughts—predict disease progression in a variety of diseases. Or, as my mom would say, your thinking is your experience. Indeed, nowadays scientists shout it from the rooftops, forgetting that they were until recently the snipers gunning for people like Norman Vincent Peale, or Norman Cousins, or my mother.

  But positive thinking doesn’t require God, and that is the critical point. Many scientists still deride the core of religious belief. They reject that there could be a force that can infuse prayer with power, call it God or Higher Power or the Divine Mr. Fixit. They reject t
his because that force, or mechanism, would have to operate outside of the laws of nature as we currently understand them. This is the Maginot Line that separates two sorts of scientists and two sorts of science. Over and over again, I would witness fierce hand-to-hand combat at this very divide.

  Later, I learned of a possible—though not widely accepted—scientific explanation for this force. It is called “quantum entanglement”—what Einstein described as “spooky action at a distance.” But I had not arrived at that research yet. And so I tackled another personal question. Back in 1995, when my life appeared perfect from the outside and wretched from the inside, I had hit a breaking point and found in that unhappy moment a new spiritual direction. I had always wondered what triggered that dramatic shift, the kind of turnaround or conversion experience that is so common in spiritual journeys.Was it physical, or spiritual, or both? For that, I had to revisit the most exquisite, and painful, moment of my life.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Triggers for God

  WHEN GOD BREAKS INTO YOUR LIFE, it is as if you are lifted up and plunked down in a new spiritual neighborhood. To your friends, you appear unaltered.You still part your hair on the left and speak with the same slight lisp. But you know, if no one else does, that your thoughts and ambitions and loves—your soul—have moved to a new zip code. You’re not in Kansas anymore. I can say this from countless interviews and from personal experience. As I heard story after story, I began to wonder what triggered these spiritual transformations.What are the forces that push a person off the cliff of agnosticism and into the sea of faith?

  As I searched, I found the usual suspects. Emotional and physical trauma rank high on the list, as does a brush with death. Next to those are the quieter psychological triggers: a poor relationship with one’s parents,1 or stress,2 or even low self-esteem.3

  Yet one antecedent stood out, according to the theologians, soci ologists, and psychiatrists I interviewed: brokenness. Brokenness occurs when life—in the form of addiction, cancer, singleness, unemployment, or indefinable misery—defeats you. It happens when you come to the end of yourself, you have exhausted your own resources, your own strength and resilience to cope with the situation at hand.You surrender, and in that release, you find a strange calm. It is the only way that many a stubborn soul finds God.

  George Valliant, a Harvard psychiatrist in the twilight of his career, put it this way. He told me he used to believe that spirituality could be explained by Freudian principles, or temperament, or as a response to stressors such as poverty. He followed two groups of men from the time they were eighteen—Harvard graduates and men from inner-city Boston. After chronicling their life journeys for more than six decades, he came to a radical insight about spirituality.

  “Looking at those who are spiritual, it has nothing to do with mental health, and nothing to do with good fortune,”Valliant said. “It has everything to do with recovery from brokenness.”

  Of course, many people encounter the “divine” without a psychological trauma.Young people in particular seem to embrace God without the usual upheaval, which is why evangelistic groups like Young Life or Campus Crusade for Christ focus on teenagers and college students. But for those who emerged from youth untouched by the spiritual, I believe brokenness lies at the root of conversion.

  The trouble with studying spiritual experiences is that they’re sly little devils. You never know when one is going to sneak up on you. You can’t schedule one for next Tuesday afternoon at two-thirty and then keep a log of all the emotional and neurological blips that occur in the days before your encounter with God. This research is by necessity an anecdotal and not a statistical affair.

  Therefore, I was limited to post facto anecdotes. The question was, where do you locate those stories? Well, if you want to find bees, search for a honeycomb. If you want to find a cluster of ordinary Americans who have enjoyed dramatic, sometimes physical encounters with God, visit your local church or synagogue. But walk past the minister or rabbi studying in his office. Ignore the faithful singing in choir practice. Make your way down to the basement at seven-thirty on Wednesday night. This is where the transformed people are, the people who have been broken and repaired through spiritual experience. This is where the addicts meet.

  The Sudden Alignment

  Just as I arrived at Alicia’s rambling ranch house on the outskirts of Albuquerque, a minivan pulled into the driveway. Before the wheels had fully stopped, two curly-haired blond boys, who looked to be ten and twelve, leaped out. A trim man in baseball hat, black T-shirt, and jeans emerged from the driver’s side. But I was watching the woman who stepped out from the passenger’s side, who waved at me and strode over with purpose. For the domestic normalcy I had just witnessed was built on an entirely shattered spirit.

  Alicia grew up in a safe, middle-class world, in an intact family that lived in the same house for her entire childhood. There were no obvious dysfunctions, until Alicia became an alcoholic. She was nine years old.

  “I remember after everybody went to bed one night,” she recalled. “I went into the living room to look at the glasses and the crystal, and it was all so pretty. And I picked out this bottle that had blackberries on it, and I drank it. And I drank it until I passed out. I drank alcoholically from the very first time. But I also remember that feeling of release, that warmth, and that complete feeling of being okay for the first time.”

  Alicia has little memory of the ensuing years, a testament to the analgesic quality of alcohol, until she dropped out of school in ninth grade. At fifteen, Alicia moved out of her family’s house to an apartment, sharing the $235 rent with other high school dropouts “who wanted to drink like I did.”

  Soon, however, Alicia was outdrinking her friends, and one by one, they dropped away. Then she met Luke (not his real name), another teenager who was able to keep up, and their mutual addiction bound them together. Eventually they married, and the next decade floated by on a sea of scotch.

  “It was just one big long drunk,” she said.“Round the clock. I didn’t have any days of sobriety at all until I was pregnant with my older son. I was twenty-six. That was the first time I was ever clean.”

  I gazed at this woman, with two boys and an adoring husband, with her own real estate business and her razor-sharp mind, sitting docilely at her kitchen table. It was like watching Pollyanna utter a string of obscenities, so at odds was Alicia’s past to her present.

  Staying clean during her pregnancy fueled the illusion that she was not an addict; she could stop at will, after all. Luke continued his affair with cocaine, however. A month after she gave birth to their son, Alicia began using cocaine and painkillers, careful to stay away from her true nemesis, alcohol. During this period, Alicia ran a women’s clothing store that routinely ranked in the top ten of the four-hundred-store chain. Her external life revealed no fissures. Then she became pregnant with her second son.

  “And that was where I started to get to my bottom,” she said, “because in that pregnancy I couldn’t stay clean. I had crossed the line. And I knew I was really sick.”

  The spiral downward continued after her second child was born, as Alicia nursed her infant and tried to care for her toddler. She could barely breathe for the chaos in her life and in her head. She and Luke would spend most of their take-home pay on drugs, calibrating their highs and lows with a mix of uppers, cocaine, and alcohol. She had lost her job, she was stuck at home with crying babies, and she began to plot her suicide.

  “And I felt completely... completely broken. I got angry. How could this happen? That’s when I said, ‘Where are my angels?’ ”

  In retrospect, Alicia draws a straight line from that desperate moment to a sublime one that occurred a few days later.

  One Friday night in May 1996, Alicia and Luke were buying groceries at Costco.

  “It was payday, and he had already spent all the money on drugs.We had loaded the bag and we were in line and he told me,‘You know, we can’t pay for these.’ And
I looked at him. And we had to leave the whole basket of groceries there. We came home and I remember the dishes were piled up in the sink. I just remember laying my head on the side of the sink and feeling the coldness of the sink right on my forehead.”

  She paused, envisioning the moment.

  “And then all of a sudden something literally went through my back and my inside. This alignment took place inside. And it started down low, like in my stomach and in the lower back, and it was just like my spine was being straightened out. It’s like when a cat gets scruffed by its mama on the back of the neck and they get kind of lifted up. And all of a sudden, I knew I was just done. That was it. I took the kids to my mom’s, and came back, and told Luke I was going to get clean and sober, and he had to go. And I was in rehab a couple of weeks later.”

  “What would you say it was?” I asked. “I mean, was it a force from the outside? Was it God?”

  “It was an energy,” Alicia replied.“I guess people who call that kind of energy ‘God’ would say it was God. I call it ‘soul.’ I think my soul got righted at that moment. And everything changed.”

  Alicia has been clean of all addictive substances since that moment a decade earlier. Luke returned, sober, nine months later, and has remained clean as well. She never went to college but has not suffered for the lack. The real estate business she started made a profit the first year. Her rambunctious sons became national competitors in karate, their trophies displayed on practically every inch of flat space in the house. Raised a Roman Catholic, Alicia forged her own sort of spirituality for years before settling, most recently, on Sufi mysticism.