A man nearing forty has hungered since his teens to be a novelist. He has readied himself, even earned a Ph.D. in English literature. While rejection slips from publishers contain phrases like "streaks of brilliance," for some reason his novels don't make it into print. One Christmas he visits his mother for dinner, and for the first time pours out his frustrations. She confesses that for years she has prayed for him to fail as a writer. Apparently there were private family issues, including infidelity, divorce, and alcoholism, that she feared would spill into view through her son's writing if he succeeded as a novelist. Her prayers, she assures him, came out of love. (He doesn't stay for dinner. Additional steps, including prayer for himself, lead to publication of a novel.)
What's going on here? Prayer for someone to fail in his career? Is this really prayer? Does it have actual power? And who's listening to it anyway?
Larry Dossey, M.D., has been doing significant research into the beneficial effects of prayer in healing the sick. More recently, he has also explored what he calls "negative prayer," the apparent power of prayer to harm as well as help, in his book Be Careful What You Pray For...You Just Might Get It. It's subtitled, What We Can Do About the Unintentional Effects of Our Thoughts, Prayers, and Wishes. Be Careful What You Pray For...You Just Might Get It. (Harper-San Francisco, 1997), pp. 27-28 Dr. Dossey's exploration isn't confined to hexes, curses, sorcery, and so on—likely cast members for murky tales. The book looks at some elements of mainstream prayer, engaged in by churchgoing individuals who are praying out of "love" and often, though not always, for the "good" of the targeted individual. As tales from the dark side go, the novelist's is pretty light compared with some of the examples in Dr. Dossey's book.
