Testimony of Healing December 16, 2013 Issue

Prayer: What does it do?

The Editors

Earlier this year, a Sentinel editor was manning a Christian Science booth at an outdoor festival. The centerpiece of the booth was a “prayer tree”: a spreading branch that had been planted in a large pot, with dozens of small hooks covering the branch. Passersby were invited to write down their prayers—for the community, for others, for themselves—and add them to the tree.

The prayer tree attracted a reasonable number of responses, and the morning passed without incident until a young girl stopped at the table with her parents. After the editor explained the prayer tree to her, she pointed to it and asked, “But what does it do?”

Now that’s a question worth asking again and again! What, exactly, does prayer do? Certainly a request for health, peace, or prosperity doesn’t get priority status from God just because it’s been hung on a branch. And our desires for these things, while usually honest, aren’t specially uplifted simply by asking God to grant them. In the very first chapter of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy writes, “We can do more for ourselves by humble fervent petitions, but the All-loving does not grant them simply on the ground of lip-service, for He already knows all” (p. 2).