Prayer works, but...
The evidence is good that prayer works. Suzette Haden Elgin for example comments in her Linguistics & Science Fiction newsletter (Jan/Feb 98, p. 8):
Doctors are in a serious bind with the literature on the effectiveness of prayer as healing agent, frankly. Larry Dossey is correct when he writes that if comparable studies and results were available for a new drug, medpros would risk charges of malpractice if they failed to use it when appropriate. The major thing holding back such actions at the moment (other than the traditional cultural subservience to doctors) is a matter of social class. Doctors and scientists are upper class by definition; "faith healers" and those who rely on them absolutely are not; and class distinctions of that sort are powerful repressive mechanisms. And then there is the problem of *control* of prayer as a healing agent; no one has any idea how such things as "size and strength of dose" could be standardized and controlled.
In my struggles to heal severe health challenges, I eventually realized that my fear of the world was preventing me from reaching out for this kind of healing. I needed to do something like pray. But once I got over my classist prejudice against it, there was still a problem: theism no longer works for me. How can you pray when there's no being to pray to?
Metta taps directly into universal creative energy
Ann Barker of the Green Mountain Sangha described this on TheravadaNet:
"May X have such and such" sounds in English as if we are asking for something. It does sound like a prayer, and can feel like a beseeching. In fact, there's another meaning to these words in English which is a far closer approximation to the import of the practice.
These words are to convey something much more like the use of "Let there be (light and so on)" as these words are used in the book of Genesis in the Judao-Christian Bible. We use the word "May. . ." in metta practice to bring something into being. Like this" "Let it be so!" We use the power of the words to create, the power called Logos in biblical study.
One of the important differences between these two understandings is this: the "Let it be so" meaning brings home to our minds that the power to do these things lies within ourselves. As there is not in Theravadin Buddhism a teaching about an outside deity to whom we pray, this shift is important. The power of the word, the logos-power, is in this case within ourselves, rather than within a deity.
Another analogy for this distinction might be the way we might speak to an "inanimate" object. We plant a seed in a garden, and we say: Grow! as if our words create the event. Or we might say to a cloudy sky or to physical pain: Go away. In other words, Let it grow! or Let it go away! Our words create the event.
(Email to list, on 21 October 98.)