I told her that either our relatives are okay or they aren't, and there's nothing we can do about it.
Her reply surprised me:
I really LOL [laughed out loud] at what you said. I guess you're right, there is really nothing we could do about it. If something was wrong with any of them, we would have heard.I trusted that her LOL was owing to her relief at realizing that, indeed, we can do nothing about most things, so we might as well free ourselves from the illusion that we can.
In this connection, I had already been musing about people's practice of praying for other people, as though they could thereby improve their lot. I think people pray for others in order to demonstrate that they care while at the same time absolving themselves of any responsibility for the actual outcome. After all, they generally ackowledge that god isn't bound to act on their prayers. They believe that god will either do something or "he" won't. Or, as I say, the people they are praying for will either be okay or they won't. Prayer doesn't come into it.
We're all familiar with something known as the serenity prayer (commonly attributed to theologian Reinhold Niebuhr):
God grant me the serenityThe serenity prayer is itself a prayer, though not on behalf of other people. I suppose that many people who utter it and subsequently think they have come to know the difference would be unsure whether to pray less, or more, in the future, not knowing whether to attribute the effect to divine intervention or to purely psychological mechanisms. (I attribute it to the latter; "god" has nothing to do with it.)
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference....
______________________
When I called my sister in northwestern Arkansas, she told me that she and her family are doing okay, "thank the Lord."
Did you call your sister to see how she was doing, knowing that there was nothing you could do if she wasn't doing well? I see nothing wrong with calling to find out how someone is. I may or may not be able to do anything, but I'd like to know. Do you think we should wait until someone tells us? This post is confusing. Perhaps to no one else, but me.
ReplyDeleteSteve in Germany
There might have been something I could do to help my sister deal with the storm's aftereffects (if there had been any for her). While there's "nothing wrong" with trying to find out how peole are doing, I don't consider it a moral imperative that we do try. I didn't call anyone else in the storm region, for example.
ReplyDeleteBut that wasn't the point of my post, which was simply that praying would have made no difference, even though many people think that by praying they might be helping a great deal. They are wrong.