A religion reporter’s social media cup runneth over of late with prayer requests for the sick. Strangers feeling communal responsibility inspires, but endless parades of those in need of medical miracles depress. As I’ve seen requests pile up exponentially in my feeds, something unusual emerged in the language.
Orthodox Jews try their best to name names when praying for sick people. They may beseech God to heal Abraham Isaac ben Sarah, or Rebecca bas Rachel Leah. (They invoke the patient’s mother rather than father and add middle names if applicable.)
Christian requests I’ve seen proliferate online lately appeal with less specificity. “Please in your charity pray for a miracle for a friend of mine” tweeted Kathryn Jean Lopez, of National Review, recently. “I am grateful.”
A few weeks later, Lopez tweeted, “Please in your charity please pray for Julio. Things are not well.” And a few days later: “Another one: In your charity please pray for Jason, struggling with COVID.”
A month ago, Sohrab Ahmari, op-ed editor at the New York Post, tweeted, “Can you please pray for the intentions of a dear friend?”
The relative-anonymity of these requests raises questions. I’m unaware of a reason to assume Catholics are firmer than Jews are in their belief that God can read minds. Many Jews believe in an omniscient God, surely capable of knowing the identity of a sick person regardless of how much, if any, of the name is articulated. I asked Lopez what’s going on here.
Lopez meets most of the people for whom she asks for prayer intentions on New York streets and buys them food, gives them money, and prays for each individually. “I always ask the person’s name and give mine and try to have a conversation,” she said. “It’s getting harder, to be honest, because there are so many seemingly high and violent people on the streets. I have stories from just the last 24 hours.”
She sometimes promises she won’t be the only one praying on their behalf.
“That’s frequently well-received, especially in post-Covid days,” Lopez said. “I think if you are living on the streets, you have to have some connection to God, or it would be unbearable. Which is, of course, why there’s the violence and drugs too.”
I wondered if privacy is a factor, and Lopez confirmed it is. “I guess I just don’t think the whole name is necessary. I never really thought about it,” she said. “The even more veiled requests are when someone asks me for a serious intention, and I want more than me praying, because there is a power in numbers. More prayer, not less.”
“Now that I think of it, maybe there is something of a biblical approach to it—where we know people by their first names,” she added.
That jibes with the most famous prayer for a sick person in the Torah. Per Numbers 12:13, Moses (no last name) implores God to heal his sister Miriam’s leprosy. His prayer is just five words: “God, please, heal her now.” (The Hebrew na can mean “please” or “now”; I’ve used one for each iteration in the verse.) Moses assumes God know he’s praying for Miriam (no last name), though he doesn’t name her.
Rabbinic commentators suggest Moses may have prayed concisely, so the larger community wouldn’t think he was, nepotistically, affording his sister special treatment. But there’s something noteworthy too in his specific kind of vagueness.
When the healthy pray for the sick, they do so extrospectively and introspectively. Prayer is a two-way street, and one might say those who pray both shape and, in some ways, are shaped by their prayers. Praying is active, and the supplicant doesn’t remove him- or herself from the conversation with God. Quite the opposite. It’s not unusual for the prayer to introspect—even inadvertently—in the process.
The quote has been variously attributed to many writers, that there’s cause for apology for writing too long, because one lacked the time to pare the letter down. The same may go for praying. There can be merit in appealing to a higher power in a short-and-sweet manner. And when a prayer includes no name, or merely a first name, it is a cousin to an abstract painting.
It’s less literal and naturalistic, but what it sacrifices in comprehensive detail it may well make up in versatility. With Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” it can say, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”
Thought provoking. I admire you for doing this as a serious piece, affording those requesting prayer for others the respect and dignity they deserve. We should admire those trying to do something spiritual to help someone whose suffering they are not physically able alleviate. But, I see so many people on social media requesting and sending "healing thoughts" and similar sentiments to people they barely know or do not know at all, that it makes the cynical side of me wonder whether these are simply today's Hallmark Cards. Do the people sending "healing thoughts" or prayers, really think about or pray for the recovery of the stranger in question? Maybe I'm just a bad person.