Prayer can improve personal happiness

Prayer can improve personal happiness. That conclusion may seem strikingly obvious to some and ludicrous to others. Yet that assessment, supported by scientific data, is important in an age of growing fears, financial insecurity, and post-traumatic stress.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts medical school, conducted an experiment with business employees. He offered the corporation’s workers a course in meditation. Half of the volunteers he placed on a waiting list; this constitute the control the group. The other half of the volunteers received a weekly instruction session in meditation for eight weeks. He expected those receiving instruction to meditate daily on their own. Before and after the experiment he measured the happiness of both groups using a questionnaire and EEG tests. People who took the course were significantly happier than the control group four months after the course ended. (Richard Layard, Happiness (New York: Penguin, 2005), pp. 187-188)

The meditation in that experiment was a form of Buddhist meditation. However, unknown to most Christians, the Christian tradition includes a strong emphasis on meditative prayer among some monastics and mystical theologians. The failure of the Church at large to teach meditation widely and to encourage many to engage in meditative practices has spiritually impoverished Christianity.

If God is omniscient – all knowing – as Christian theology generally claims, then petitioning God may seem like a form of whining, pleading one’s case until a beneficent parent relents and grants the child’s wish. Listening to God – meditating – offers an approach to prayer in which the person seeks to know more of God, becoming more aware of God's presence and God's love. Meditation does not preclude intercessory prayer but can enrich the prayer life.

However, that so few Christians spend extensive amounts of time in prayer may reflect the bankruptcy of Christian theology with respect to prayer. God is not a heavenly vending machine, a transcendent entity who delivers the goods when we deposit the right currency (prayers). Although untrained theologically, most people seem to have rejected that approach to life. Otherwise, they would spend more time praying.

Meditation, whether focused on an object in the outer world or on the inner self, can lead to a deeper awareness of the abiding presence, the life-giving force, that we commonly call God. Meditation techniques may have one focus on breathing, an image (e.g., the cross), a phrase (e.g., the Jesus prayer), or an exercise (e.g., breathing). All of these techniques have a long Christian history. The techniques also have a long history in other religious traditions, which suggests the common reality that lies beyond.

Richard Layard, the author who reported the exercise in meditation, is a highly respected British economist, not a man with a religious agenda or mission. Layard argues that happiness is life’s goal, a view to which I subscribe. Paying attention to the inner life, the life of the human spirit, is essential for maximizing human happiness and well-being.

I wonder what the world might be like if everybody spent fifteen minutes per day meditating. Certainly, the amount of fear, insecurity, and post-traumatic stress would diminish even though I am far from being so naïve as to expect that meditation is a panacea for those ills.