You Haven’t Got a Pray-er

I recently had a conversation with someone about the power of prayer. Actually, that’s not accurate; it wasn’t a conversation, but more of a monologue.

He had two stories on this topic. Honestly, there may have been more, and I may have forgotten them in the amount of verbiage coming out of this guy.

The first involved his granddaughter. She became ill and her parents took her to a hospital where they refused treatment for some reason. (This is the hospital closest to me and it does have a negative reputation, so I hope I never need to go there.) They then took the girl to Pittsburgh Children’s Hospital. The girl died—but at that point the storyteller prayed for her, a county away, and she revived! (I suspect the hospital staff may have had something to do with that, too.)

His other story involved a brush with his own death outdoors. He came upon a bear, and avoided it, but ran into the bear two more times. (This “it happened in threes” is such a classic story device, I immediately became suspicious.) When he found himself face-to-face with the bear again, the bear began “chuffing,” as if preparing to attack. This man prayed, and suddenly a wolf came out of the woods, stood between the man and the bear, and began barking at the bear. (Wait: do wolves bark?) This chased the bear away.

My question is: did this really happen? Does he think it really happened? Or is it a parable he told in a church sermon? Turns out that he’s a pastor of a small (probably non-specific denomination) church.

Since he spent the day monologuing about what an honest, forthright, and God-loving person he is, I tend to think that maybe he wasn’t being entirely truthful about his stories. What would be the benefit of lying? Two of his parishioners were also present. But if it was intended to impress me, the righteously honest Charles Manson thing wasn’t working for me.

When I tried to tell him the story of seeing the Oberammergau Passion Play in Germany, he wasn’t interested. Clearly, if it didn’t happen to him, it wasn’t important or significant.

I might be impressed with people if they truly had contact with the divine, but if the rest of their behavior indicates that they’re more of a sociopath than a religious person, I think less of them. They turn out to be just human, without a direct line to God, after all.