What Is Prayer? What People Are Doing, Across Traditions

Most traditions recognise several categories and rank them, usually placing asking for things at the bottom:

• •Petition, asking for something for oneself, and intercession, asking on behalf of another, which is the form the word suggests to most people and the one most traditions treat as the least developed
• •Adoration or praise, directed at the divine for its own sake rather than to obtain anything
• •Thanksgiving, which several traditions structure as a daily discipline of noticing
• •Confession, acknowledging failure, which in some traditions is formal and mediated and in others private
• •Contemplation or meditation, in which the aim is a state of attention rather than any content, and which shades into practices that are not obviously prayer at all
• •Liturgical prayer, recited communally from a fixed text at fixed times, where the individual's feelings are not the point and participation in something continuous is

The practical arrangements reveal what each tradition thinks prayer is for. Islam prescribes five daily prayers at set times, with fixed postures including prostration, a required state of ritual purity, and orientation toward Mecca, which makes the practice a bodily discipline synchronised across the world, alongside a separate and freer form of personal supplication. Judaism sets three daily services with fixed liturgy, a strong preference for praying with a quorum of ten, and a structure of blessings covering ordinary acts including eating and waking. Christianity spans an enormous range, from liturgical traditions with a daily office of psalms recited by monastic communities for fifteen centuries to extemporaneous personal address. Hinduism includes puja, the offering of light, flowers and food to an image, which is understood as hospitality toward a guest. Buddhist practice includes chanting, recollection and, in some forms, requests to bodhisattvas, in a framework with no creator god to petition. The Quaker meeting removes words, clergy and programme entirely, with a group sitting in silence and anyone speaking only when moved to.

Two features recur across traditions that have no historical contact. The first is counted repetition, using a physical aid: the mala of 108 beads in Hindu and Buddhist practice, the Muslim misbaha of thirty-three or ninety-nine, the Christian rosary, and the Orthodox prayer rope used with the Jesus prayer repeated continuously until it accompanies the breath. The second is posture and movement, including prostration in Islam and in Orthodox Christianity, standing in Jewish prayer, kneeling, circumambulation of a sacred object, walking a labyrinth, and the full-body prostrations of Tibetan pilgrimage. Both features suggest that prayer is treated as something done with the body and through repetition rather than as a purely mental act, and practitioners across traditions describe the same effect, which is that the physical framework carries the practice through periods when the feeling is absent.

Two separate empirical questions have been studied and they have very different answers. The first is whether intercessory prayer affects the health of a distant person who does not know they are being prayed for, which has been tested in randomised trials, most prominently a large multicentre study published in 2006 covering over eighteen hundred cardiac surgery patients. It found no effect on recovery, and a slightly worse outcome in the group that was told it was being prayed for, which the authors suggested might reflect performance anxiety. Reviews of the literature reach the same conclusion. The second question is what prayer does for the person praying, and here the findings are more substantial: regular practice correlates with lower reported anxiety, better coping with illness and bereavement and greater life satisfaction, with the mechanisms plausibly including the same ones that make meditation effective, alongside social support and a sense of agency in situations where nothing else can be done. Imaging studies find that different types of prayer engage different networks, with recited liturgy resembling recitation and personal address resembling conversation with a person.

The theology of unanswered prayer is the hardest question in this area and every tradition has had to address it. If the divine is good and capable, the failure of a sincere request is difficult to account for, and the standard responses fall into a few families: that the answer was no or not yet for reasons not visible, that prayer changes the person praying rather than the situation, that the divine does not intervene in natural processes, and that the whole framing of prayer as a request is a misunderstanding of what the practice is. C. S. Lewis's late writing on grief and Jewish responses after the Holocaust are among the more unflinching engagements with it. Practitioners describe long periods of apparent absence, which the Christian contemplative tradition names the dark night and the Buddhist tradition treats as an expected stage, and most traditions advise continuing the practice through it, which is one reason the fixed times, the beads and the recited texts exist.

Prayer covers several distinct activities, including petition, praise, thanksgiving, confession, contemplation and fixed communal liturgy, and most traditions rank asking for things lowest. The structures differ sharply, from five daily prayers with fixed posture and orientation to a silent meeting with no programme at all, and two features recur independently: counted repetition using beads or knots, and the involvement of the body through posture and movement. Trials find no effect of intercession on distant strangers, while regular practice correlates with better coping in the person praying.