Yes, I pray, frequently and daily, but I do not pray to a supernatural being who lives above the sky and who in answer to my prayer will change the shape of history or my own personal destiny.

I do not believe that my prayers can change God’s plan or God’s will. My experience with National Prayer Breakfasts is that they are a bad marriage between fundamentalist religion and super-patriotism, and thus I would have no interest in attending or supporting such an endeavor.

Most of the prayers I hear people talking about sounds to me like adult letters to Santa Claus. I understand prayer to be my attempt to commune with the holy, to be open to the holy, to allow the holy to live through me.

Anyone who tries to answer this question as it is posed in the limits of this format has not raised the real questions that prayer elicits, and runs the risk of turning prayer into superstition.