Should You Pray with Your Patient? . . . A Reader Responds

by Alistair Bain | January 22, 2010 11:37 PM EST

I agree with Cinda. I am a counselling student and Anglican priest but my faith is also based on spirituality rather than religiosity. In a secular counselling or therapy context I would never pray with a patient unless specifically requested to. I think the practice of praying with patients is essentially situational and depends on the patient's needs and requests. On the other hand, I am not sure that someone without a faith - and I suggest no judgement or criticism in saying that - can ethically pray with a patient because such an action would be without correlative sense. For instance, to whom or what could a person pray who, for sound reasons, does not subscribe to any faith system? Or can we argue that the needs of the patient and the unique value of the patient-therapist bond over-ride such objections? What the therapist offers as prayer effectively becomes a spiritual placebo - which raises many other questions about the nature and efficacy of placebo treatment. All this also begs the question: what is prayer anyway? Is it something uniquely and indivisibly "religious"? Or would a person of faith (claim to) recognise as prayer the practices of another person who would not claim a faith or assert that they were praying, for instance non-religious meditation? A very thought-provoking issue indeed. My thanks also.

by Kelly Hill | June 17, 2010 9:34 PM EDT

The subject of prayer is something which I am incredibly passionate about and very interested in. I was a 'spiritual' person until a year ago when I came to my faith. I cannot explain the whole story but in short, I had been dabbling in transcendental meditations, buddhism and various other modalilties in order to find meaning in my life and to find out answers to so many questions I had. Whilst on the journey, things started happening that I couldn't fully understand, but that were very real expriences and made me delve further.  I learned Reiki and began practising it and had some fantastic breakthroughs with clients; but something kept bugging me - I didn't feel safe or protected and again the practise was raising more q's than answering them and I kept searching for a better teacher, as many of the reiki teachers I had didn't have the answers to my Q's. AFter pushing myself to the limit and feeling totally exhausted, I had a direct encounter with God and I came back to Christianity. When I say 'back to' I was brought up in a supposed christian family, but like many others, we were not living out the word and only one parent had a faith - my father had none. Looking back I think he was like many others; he knew deep down there was something, but he was too distracted by every day living to really take time out to question and put ideas into practise. I believe this is where so many people go wrong. They label themselves as christian or catholic or something else, but don't really bridge the gap between theory and practise. What happens to so many people is that they lose their lives trying to live the lives of others. Constantly searching outwards for answers, instead of looking within and taking time out to pray for revelation. Praying is like any skill, if we do not practise, we will never get better at it. And if we don' take time out to wait for answers, we will never more forward. I have seen how the power of prayer works in people's lives and I actively incorporate it into my life now. But society and the current systems we have in our culture do not support individuality and creativity and this is something I would love to see change. I come across so many people suffering with depression and this leads me to the Q as to why. I have a very strong belief that in many cases t is simply emotional constipation; that empty feeling people have is their spirit trying to communicate to them that they are in the wrong place. After Jesus' death, we were called into the body of christ  to do the workd we were called to do. Now Jesus himself did not do everything, so we won't be expected to either, but we are expected to do what we were called to do. Everyone has incredible importance in this world and my prayer is that people start to come together to make a difference and we all support each other to live out the lives we were created to live.  We all need to harness the talents, resources, energy and time we have and focus on the mission god has given for our lives.