Addressing Ambivalence Toward Prayer and Meditation

Prayer and meditation: help manage withdrawal symptoms, lowers blood pressure, normalizes heart rate, increases self-awareness which fosters empathy, increases reports of more conscious contact with God and more. It’s healing.

Withdrawal symptoms are not limited to drugs and alcohol. I personally think the world has been in withdrawal since the onset of COVID-19. We like our habits. We shrivel up without human contact. It is unsettling to need to go buy a pair of running shoes and wonder if in doing so you have put yourself at risk.

Researchers who study such things have been shocked at the effectiveness of meditation. Some say they never expected it. David Foster Wallace was an American author who struggled with substance abuse and depression. In treatment, prayer and meditation were a recommended part of his care. Here is his response:

“So this purports to be a disease, alcoholism? A disease like a cold? Or like cancer? I have to tell you, I have never heard of anyone being told to pray for relief from cancer. Outside maybe certain very rural parts of the American South, that is. So what is this? You’re ORDERING me to pray? Because I allegedly have a disease? I dismantle my life and career and enter nine months of low-income treatment for a DISEASE, and I’m prescribed prayer? Does the word RETROGRADE signify? Am I in a sociohistorical era I don’t know about? What exactly is the story here?” *

If you feel this way about prayer and meditation you are not alone. But if your life is feeling messy, why not give it a shot? It is a deep mystery, but many have found relief, healing and even inspiration as they developed a daily practice of prayer and meditation.

There remains, then a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; for anyone who enters God’s rest also rests from his own works, just as God did from his. Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest...Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.

Hebrews 4:9-11, 16 NIV

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*David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (New York: Back Bay Books, 2006), 180.