Pray to serve a holy purpose: Remen excerpt #9

Rachel Naomi Remen writes: A patient of mine who is very ill was recently told by his oncologist that there was nothing more that could be done for him. The physician then said, ‘I think you’d better start praying.’ For this doctor, prayer has become a kind of last resort, something to offer his patients when he runs out of ways to help them personally, where there are no more effective treatments. God has become his final referral.

But prayer is not a way to get what we want to happen, like the remote control that comes with the television set. I think that prayer may be less about asking for the things we are attached to than it is about relinquishing our attachments in some way. It can take us beyond fear, which is an attachment, and beyond hope, which is another form of attachment. It can help us remember the nature of the world and the nature of life, not on an intellectual level but in a deep and experiential way. When we pray, we don’t change the world, we change ourselves. We change our consciousness. We move from an individual, isolated making-things-happen kind of consciousness to a connection on the deepest level with the largest possible reality. And then the question ‘How did you become well?’ becomes more a question about mystery than about efficacy. A very different kind of question.

At its deepest, prayer is a statement about causality. Turning toward prayer is a release from the arrogance and vulnerability of an isolated and individual causality. When we pray, we stop trying to control life and remember that we belong to life. It is an opportunity to experience humility and recognize grace.

Sometimes the most powerful prayers are also the most simple. Once, when I was lying on an operating table waiting for anesthesia, one of my surgeons took my hand and asked if I would join him and his operating team in a prayer. Startled, I nodded. He gathered the team around the operating table for a moment of silence, after which he quietly said, ‘May we be helped to do here whatever is most right.’

This traditional American Indian prayer seems such a simple of relinquishing ultimate causality. By means of it, in operating room equipped with the latest technology, we were not alone in the house. The comfort my surgeon offered me was very genuine. I felt my fears about outcome slip away and went under anesthesia holding on to those few words with the deepest sense of peace. Like all genuine prayers, this prayer is a powerful way of embracing life, finding a home in any outcome, and remembering that there may be reasons beyond reason.

Prayer is a movement from mastery to mystery. I used to pray for my patients. These days I pray for myself, too. Sometimes I pray for compassion, but often I pray for harmlessness, the great spiritual quality embodied in the Hippocratic oath. As a human being, I know I can never hope to have the depth and breadth of perspective to know whether any of my actions will ultimately harm or heal. Yet it is my hope I may be used to serve a holy purpose without ever knowing. So sometimes, before I see a patient, I offer up a little wordless prayer: Understanding the suffering is beyond me. Understanding the healing is, too. But in this moment, I am here. Use me. 

 

Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal (Riverhead books, 1996), pages 270-272.