Prayer, religion and faith in older americans

There's hubbub aplenty at this strip mall coffee shop in Irvine, Calif. A scrum of small children is being herded about by their barely-keeping-it-together moms and nannies, the sound

system is playing Motown classics, and the espresso machine is hissing in one corner. Around Christina Levasheff, though, there is a palpable sense of quiet. She sits across a small table

from me. Although she smiles softly, her eyes don't convey the same emotion. Pretty and vivacious, she nevertheless carries that vaguely haunted look you see in the faces of parents who

have lost a child. "God wants us to meet him where we are." - Christina Levasheff, Walnut, CA. Ben Baker Around her neck, Christina wears a pendant bearing a photo of Judson, the

little boy who was an active, exceptionally bright 2-year-old until, almost overnight, he developed symptoms of Krabbe disease, an untreatable condition that relentlessly destroys the brain.

The best doctors in the country told Christina and her husband, Drake, to take Judson home to die. But Drake, a Christian theologian, and Christina had other plans, and they came to believe

that God did, too. They prayed for healing. So did their friends, relatives and a vast network of believers they didn't even know. "We didn't plan a funeral," she tells

me. "I had in mind this celebration-of-life party that we were going to have when Judson was healed. We talked about what that would look like, when everybody was expecting a

funeral." The funeral came before Judson turned 3. That was seven years ago. "People come to me and say, 'Well, God did heal your son. He just healed him in heaven,'

" says Christina. She smiles again, but two tears slide down her cheeks. "My response to them is, 'That's not what I prayed for.' " I sit there and, like those

well-meaning friends, I don't know what to say. Then Christina — who runs a nonprofit organization for Krabbe disease research (JudsonsLegacy.org) — says something that would surprise a

lot of people. "I still believe in the power of prayer," she says firmly. "I'm conflicted, I'm angry, and I hurt. I tell God, 'I don't know how to

reconcile what I'm feeling with who you say you are.' But I still believe that God wants us to meet him where we are." It is that paradox of prayer — the belief that there is

power even in prayers that seem to sail off into some cosmic dead letter file — that comforts and confounds believers and skeptics alike. It seems that as long as humans have endured the

cares of this world, they have been praying. Anthropologists say prayer is one of the earliest recorded behaviors of human beings — the cave paintings of Dordogne, France, may well embody a

16,000-year-old prayer ritual. "Pray, but be prepared for the outcome." - Rabbi Tzvi Hersh Weinreb, NY. Ben Baker Aside from Buddhists, and even there you'll find exceptions,

"I don't think there's any society on earth that doesn't interact with gods and spirits," says Tanya Luhrmann, a Stanford University professor who, in the course of

writing one of the most influential books on the subject, has studied prayer internationally. Luhrmann and I were sitting in a lunchroom on the Stanford campus. Outside, bright-as-anything

students dodged raindrops from a late-afternoon shower, confident in their academic pursuit of absolute, calibrated truths. In books such as _When God Talks Back_, Luhrmann, soft-spoken and

almost unnervingly serene, has made a career of measuring the immeasurable. "As far back as we have writing to describe human behavior, where there is religion there is prayer,"

she says. As for the disappointment that almost everyone encounters sooner or later from prayer, Luhrmann suggests it's actually an essential part of the prayer experience. "In

fact," she says, "prayer may be more comforting when it is not answered, because, for many, prayer is about the relationship with God, not about the goodies. Christians sometimes

say, 'Not getting what you need materially can lead you to understand that God wants you to depend on him more deeply.' "Then again, Christians often say that God actually

does answer all our prayers. He just doesn't give us the answer we want." But, as Luhrmann explains, "prayer is an action. It makes you feel like you're doing something,

even if it hasn't yet helped." Like lots of people, my earliest memories include prayers at bedtime: "God bless Mommy, God bless Daddy.…" (Happily, my parents never

forced us to recite the terrifying "If I should die before I wake….") Raised Catholic, I learned by rote a lot of prayers that I can recite even today, 40 years after I abandoned

Rome's liturgical prayers for the free-form riffs of the Baptists and, later, Presbyterians. America is a praying country, and the older we get, the more we pray: An impressive 48

percent of Americans ages 18 through 29 pray every day, Pew reports, but for the 50-through-59 age group, the number grows to 61 percent — and the 70-plus crowd is downright pious, with 70

percent checking in on a daily basis. Among faith groups, 86 percent of Protestants say they pray every week, followed by 82 percent of Muslims, 79 percent of Catholics and 44 percent of

Jews. Of those unaffiliated with any religion, 65 percent pray weekly. The Pew statistics indicate that most prayers are simply letters from home — missives of praise and gratitude or casual

requests for nonspecific blessings — that flutter upward in the course of day-to-day life. But then there are the S.O.S. signal flares: the rocket-powered petitions that demand the

attention of a God who, depending on your belief system, may require serious cajoling or else is constantly on call, lovingly awaiting any such emergency alert. Is anybody listening? We seem

to think so; the numbers are consistent across generations. Among people 50 or older who pray, one-quarter report having received a specific answer to prayer in the past week (the Pew

questioners did not differentiate between positive and negative answers to prayer). And another 35 percent or so say they received several such answers in the past year. In contrast, about 9

percent say they've never received an answer to prayer, pretty close to the 6 percent who report that they never pray at all. Those inspiring stories about answered prayer — miraculous

or humdrum — constitute the feel-good side of prayer. But every day the faithful must deal with the uncomfortable reality that an awful lot of the time, prayers go unanswered — or, worse,

seem to receive a resounding "no."