Meaning varies by tradition

By JEFFREY WEISS
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
In large congregations, small groups and individual hearts, one common response to the horror of Hurricane Katrina has been prayer.
President Bush urged people to pray for strength and comfort for the victims. So did the governors of Louisiana and Mississippi.
The president of the Southern Baptist seminary in New Orleans asked God to show emergency workers how to stop the flooding.
The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church asked Jesus to grant a unity of spirit to those who are helping and those in need of help.
But many Christians, Jews, Muslims and others who now turn to their deity in prayer must also turn past age-old questions:
If God is all-powerful and all-knowing, and if he cares about humanity's fate, what's the point of prayer? Doesn't he (or she) already know everything that we want and everything that we need?
And didn't he allow -- if not direct -- the very hurricane that caused the suffering we're now asking him to alleviate? Yes, the evil in the disaster area increasingly has a human face -- looters, snipers, roaming bands of criminals. But the trigger for the suffering was Katrina, an "act of God."
Didn't he already ordain what has happened and what will happen, no matter what we do?
Why do we pray?
Answers vary
Every faith tradition that includes prayer has its answers to those questions.
"This is a problem that all religions deal with, with different levels of logical consistency," said Mahmoud Sadri, a professor of the sociology of religion at Texas Women's University.
Some religions have simple solutions, he said. Zoroastrianism, for instance, believes in a good God and an evil God. Suffering is caused by the evil God. Prayer goes to the good God.
But for the Abrahamic faiths -- Judaism, Christianity and Islam -- prayers must deal somehow with how a good God can allow (or intend) so much suffering. The fancy theology term for the question is "theodicy."
Many traditions teach that the apparent contradiction is but one of many mysteries of faith.
Lesson from Job
The Book of Job includes one of the most direct treatments of theodicy in Jewish or Christian scriptures. Job is a good man put through unimaginable suffering to settle a heavenly argument between God and an unnamed adversary (ha-satan in Hebrew, which is the source of the name Satan).
Finally Job asks, in effect, why me? God's long and indirect answer starts with one of the most famous passages in the Bible:
"Where were you when I laid the Earth's foundations? Speak if you have understanding ..."
Which is generally interpreted as God's telling Job than humanity can't possibly understand why God does what he does. And implying that we're supposed to simply have faith that, from God's unique perspective, it will all work out for the best.
Traditional Judaism has a couple of answers regarding prayer and suffering, said Rabbi Irwin Kula, the president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership in New York City.
There is the essential unknowability of God reflected in Job. But there's also a biblical obligation to act rather than pray in the face of suffering, he said.
But what about helpless victims, those who can't do anything for themselves? They have a different prayer obligation, Rabbi Kula said.
"We pray in surrender and submission to the mystery of why things happen."
Most important activity
Other religious traditions suggest that prayer is the best and maybe the most important activity for the faithful.
In fact, Exodus proves the value of prayer, said the Rev. Elzie Odom Jr,. executive director of the Greater Dallas Community of Churches and a Methodist minister.
When the Israelites prayed for food and water in the desert, "God did indeed cause the water to come from the rock and manna to come from heaven in a situation that seemed to be impossible," he said.
But prayer is at least as much an acknowledgment that God is in charge as it is a cry for help, he said.
"We demonstrate our obedience in God, our need of God and our belief that God hears our prayers."
But God wants more than just prayer, he said.
"None of us can control the events that affect us," he said. "The thing we can control -- and what is God's call on us -- is our response to those events."
For Southern Baptists, asking whether to pray is not an option.
'Pray without ceasing'
"Prayer is the vital breath of a Christian," said the Rev. Ross Robinson, minister of missions and evangelism at Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas. "The Bible says to pray without ceasing in all things."
Jesus tells his disciples how to pray in a very specific way -- even to ask God to "give us this day our daily bread," pointed out the Rev. Roch Kereszty, an adjunct theology professor at the University of Dallas and head of the theology department at Cistercian Preparatory School, a Catholic boys school in Irving.
Catholic tradition suggests that widespread inexplicable suffering may be a spiritual wake-up call for everyone, including the survivors.
"We pray that the victims of this disaster may experience the love of God, even under these circumstances, and the help of their fellow men and women," he said. "We pray that they may grow in the love of God and love of their neighbors."
Of course, there's no sense that the prayers are changing God's decisions, he said.
Or maybe there is. "God from all eternity has decided what he is going to do," he said. "But he also has decided from all eternity to do these things in response to our prayers."
For ourselves
Delving into that kind of transcendent mystery isn't so much the Lutheran way, said the Rev. Nelson Rivera, a theology professor at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.
Lutherans tend to just say there's a lot about God that can't be known, he said. "The little we know about God we know from Jesus." And Jesus said to pray.
"Prayer is not an act of magic," he said. "By itself it does not change anything out there. It is for us, for ourselves. It doesn't do anything for God -- or, if it does, we wouldn't know about it."
For Muslims, submission to God's will is literally the name of the game. Islam, in Arabic, means "submission." So Muslim prayers mostly make that point, said Dr. Sadri, the TWU professor.
But there is a special prayer, the "Prayer of the Signs," that speaks to natural disasters.
This prayer is reserved for unusual events -- floods, storms and the like -- that might be understood as special signs from Allah.
"We acknowledge that this is a sign, even though we do not understand it, from a benevolent God," he said.
For all the thorny questions about divinity and suffering, most people who are praying aren't worrying about theology, said Nancy Ammerman, a religion sociologist at Boston University.
"When faced with something very big and very powerful, they reach out for whatever big and powerful and caring divinity they believe in," she said. "And for lots of them, in whatever way, that reaching out 'works.' They feel stronger, get their priorities straight, quit worrying about stuff they can't fix, and so on."