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So what is prayer? I have prayed for health, safety, even death for those terminally ill to spare them suffering. Am I selfish in this? I suppose, but life itself is selfish: life wants always to live, propagate itself, have more and more life. A rock doesn't feel, doesn't want, doesn't care but we do, and so we are always vulnerable. For those who believe only matter is real, prayer seems folly; for we who either by direct experience or more likely an intuitive sense, believe that there is a force/presence beyond the parameters of our 4-dimensional science operating on the natural world, prayer is a means to address this being, call it Brahman, Allah, Tao, God, or my favorite, the Ineffable.

Yet prayer is not just for asking, or even thanking this Being believers see as taking an active part in history, both writ large as in war and peace, and writ small as in every life. [I suspect there's another force operating on each life, called karma in the East and espoused as the Golden Rule in the West; but karma may also be just the end result of our actions.] Prayer is the way we try to reach out to the Ineffable, and by doing so, overcome the negative aspects of our human nature. If you've owned a dog, you know your pet often seems to strain to understand what you want and in time actually seems to develop a canine 'intuition' that allows him in some measure to 'read' your mind and so suppress his instinctive behavior to bark or bite or relieve himself anywhere he fancies. This housebreaking is really amazing when you think on it: your dog has renounced his wild nature to be able to belong to you!

In an immeasurably more complicated way this may be what happens between a seeker and God. If we try and keep trying we may be able to 'read' a bit, a microdot of God's presence as it permeates each life, the same as it permeates the Universe. And praying for others may be the best way to reach out to the Divine Nature because it helps temper our innate self-centered human nature.
Today society sees science as the cure for all the evils that afflict us: war, addiction, greed, illness, death itself even. 

But even if by some miracle (one that might strain even God's resources!) all that vanished, would we then be happy, content, loving towards our fellow man? Not if human nature is fundamentally conflicted, broken, intrinsically INCOMPLETE. Are the richer happier than the poorer, are the healthier more alive than the ill? Without God, we are just wild dogs.
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