Why We Pray What We Pray

An excerpt:

One of her visitors asked some pastor from a recently established church to come and pray for her. I happened to be there when the pastor came. And I wont go into details what he said and so on but just to tell you what is left in me after that.

And that is his gospel is the presently highly popular one, namely the wealth and health gospel, or the "name it, claim it" gospel. I talked about this some time back, in relation to testing God. And so he was claiming in Jesus name that my mum will be healed and so on, and suffer no pain, etc etc. It is kind of standard mantra that people utter at hospitals' bedside.

What's new is my realisation why people pray this way.

And what's that?

The poor and the sick will always be with us. When Jesus was on earth he did not go about to eradicate poverty or sickness. Instead he preached love. He did heal a few, because of his compassion - for example the case of the people hacking a hole in the roof to lower a paraplegic to a spot where Jesus can touch him - but that was not his primary intention.

Instead the poor and sick were given to us to love.

But we disdain such burdens, especially the burden to love. And I am sure you have felt such burdens before, either due to relationships, social customs or commitments. It is our natural self to want to be unburdened, especially that to love.

And so we pray, in seemingly caring language, that the sick be healed and the poor be blessed with work and lottery earnings and so on. But really they are praying for themselves. For if the poor can feed himself and the sick can walk, then you can love without need to demonstrate it, but just to say it, and without even your conscience accusing you of hypocrisy.

To pray for the sick to recover is really not love for the sick but to remove from yourself the obligation to love and care. It is easy to claim this and that in Jesus name, in a moment and to walk away from it, but it is not easy to stay, to love and to care, continually day after day, in silence, and in pain, and even unappreciated.

This is the most cynical view I've heard so far.

It may be so, but can you deny that it is not true? And actually this is also the short answer to why there is the poor.