More on prayer

I see prayer as "re-visioning" the world. Through prayer we recognise
the problems with how things are and focus on how things should be.
Exactly how this works, i.e., leads to real, physical change in the
world, remains a mystery.

I think part of the answer is that "prayer changes us". By focussing
on how things should be, we develop motivation and inspiration to make
changes in the world towards realising the vision of how things should
be.

I think it certainly doesn't work by God magically or miraculously
intervening the world at our request.

Having made these two points, I am not bold enough to say prayer
only works by changing us in the way described above. People have
claim to pray for specific requests and later receive what they prayed
for. I am not comfortable with saying these instances are all
coincidences. However, I am comfortable in saying that if prayer does,
in some way, lead directly to changes in the world, that this
happens through a normal, physical/biological process - just one
beyond the current limits of our scientific knowledge.

(Extract from a post I sent to the insights-l mailing list).