Sirens and Prayers

(created by Nimue, trapped by James)

I’ve had a prayer practice for more than a decade now. It’s never been a consistent prayer practice because I like to try different things. I find it interesting as a process and learned early on that if anything could be said about prayer it’s that it probably won’t work in the way you think it should.

At the moment, I’m more alert to sound than I have been in the past. As a consequence, I hear a lot of sirens through the day. I never know what sort of emergency vehicle I’m hearing, but it seems fair to assume that each one represents some unfolding crisis. What I’ve been doing for a while now is each time I hear one, offering up a small prayer for whoever needs the help the sirens represent.

I genuinely have no idea whether anything helpful is done for other people by praying in this way. It would be nice to think it did. At the same time, I have no inclination to try and persuade myself that I’m magically saving anyone. However, this kind of prayer has an impact. It means that multiple times in a day, I’m alert to the suffering of other people. There’s a lot of it out there. The need for help and kindness is clearly huge, and if my prayers can’t help with that, at least they can acknowledge it. I find it helps me keep my own situation in perspective. It reminds me that there’s common humanity in how we all suffer. As I said, prayer does not tend to work in the most obvious ways, but it will reliably impact in some way on the person doing it, and that’s probably a good thing.