Prayer

The call to prayer is a pervasive, comforting echo across the Middle East, but a prominent Islamic cleric has urged Muslims to spend less time prostrating and more time working. Sheik Yusuf Qaradawi said people often use prayer to slip away from their jobs longer than they should. "Praying is a good thing . . . 10 minutes should be enough," according to a fatwa, or edict, posted on Qaradawi's website. The sheik's opinion is shared by many clerics and highlights the predicament between economic productivity and religious devotion in a part of the world where piety is prized.

Small cities in California are facing high unemployment, drained treasuries and now what some residents see as an assault on the only sacred moment in municipal affairs: the invocation at the start of city council meetings. Turlock, Tracy, Tehachapi, Lancaster -- all have been threatened in the last few months with lawsuits claiming that prayer at meetings breaches the wall between church and state. Nowhere has the ensuing debate played out more dramatically than in Lodi, where, after a tumultuous five-hour meeting this week, the City Council voted not only to continue invocations but also to allow phrases such as "in Jesus' name."

The Psalms, says theologian Eugene H. Peterson, are God's gift to those who want to learn how to pray. "If we wish to develop our entire heart, mind, soul and strength, the Psalms are necessary," the author of the bestselling "Message Bible" writes in "Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer." "We cannot bypass the Psalms."

Barack Obama's visit to the Western Wall was a public event. The handwritten prayer the presidential candidate left there was meant to be private. But as soon as he doffed the requisite skullcap and left, a snoop pulled a folded piece of paper from a crevice in the ancient wall and offered it to the mass-circulation daily Maariv.

Forget Congress. Forget President Bush. About four months ago, frustrated by the apparently immutable laws of supply and demand, Rocky Twyman turned to a higher authority in his quest for cheaper gasoline. The recent dip in prices, he says, is proof of divine intervention. "Prayer is the answer to every problem in life," said Twyman, founder of the Pray at the Pump movement, whose members huddle around gas pumps and ask the Almighty to lower gasoline prices.

On Easter Sunday, when 2 billion Christians around the world celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, many will be reading, reciting and singing the Lord's Prayer in hundreds of languages in houses of worship both modest and grand. They may be Catholics or Protestants or Eastern Orthodox, theologically conservative or liberal or in between, but in this short prayer, Christians come together.

THE baby's chest was heaving as he gasped, struggling mightily for each breath. Two months old, he lay splayed on the bed in the neonatal intensive-care unit, the tubing and wires to his IV and monitors forming a spider web of filaments around his tiny body. His respirations were becoming more labored by the minute; we would soon be adding a ventilator to his bedside.

\o7 \f7 Prayer does not come easily for most people. All too often, distracting thoughts and feelings surface, perhaps an unfinished project at work, lingering frustration over a spat with a loved one, or simply fatigue. So, how to pray when one doesn't feel like it? By understanding what prayer is, experts say. "Prayer is lifting mind and heart to God," said the Rev. Ronald Rolheiser, a Roman Catholic priest and an expert on prayer who is based in San Antonio.

Sixty-three years ago this week, as Allied troops stormed the beaches of Normandy in World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt led the nation in an extraordinary moment of mass prayer. "Almighty God," Roosevelt said as millions of Americans gathered around their radios June 6, 1944, "Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity."

THE preacher's voice whirls like a storm down a sunlit alley. It rumbles toward the corner, colliding with an echo from another preacher about 150 yards away, and that voice seeps into a third voice rising from a different corner and soon sermons from six preachers are entangled, like a chorus trying to soften the trills of a few showoffs.