An Auspicious Day (or the power of prayer)

Yesterday was an auspicious day, connected somehow to the timing of the new moon. So some colleagues and I went to Meenakshi Temple in the center of Madurai.

If you have never been inside a Hindu temple, you should come to Madurai.The Meenakshi Temple is famous for it's beauty. (This photo I found online shows one entryway.)

There's an outer sanctum with large cavernous stone halls, blue stone pillars carved like each of the thousands of gods or goddesses, ceilings and beams painted in shiny bright colors and depicting religious myth, where vendors sell copper bangles or bindis or mantle-sized statues of Shiva.

There's a reflecting pool, with a golden lotus flower statue blooming from it. (Although because Madurai is notoriously dry, ours is very sparsely filled.)

There's an inner sanctum. But that is for Hindus only, so I can't tell you what's in there (I don't know.)

And there are worshipers, paying homage at one of the pillars to the god of their family, or the god of their current need.

Last night, while my friends were in the inner sanctum, I took a seat directly across from a monkey-faced god who had a reputation for healing hunchbacks. A young family approached. The wife said a prayer and a conducted a blessing and then knelt on the floor and directed the blessing at her husband's left foot. It was only as they walked away that I noticed his slight limp.

Last night, as part of their worship, families brought piles of food, milk, coconuts, curd. Many of the statues were ritually bathed in these food offerings every hour on the hour.

While the ritual is beautiful and most of the worshipers seemed to be healthfully middle class, it's still valuable food. To the skeptic in me, it seemed a tiny shame to let it "go to waste."

I suppose my question is, why do "we" in-the-West (or maybe it's just me?) doubt the power of faith?

In one of the pilot projects sponsored by my employing organization, practitioners facilitated a brainstorming session for local self-help group members. These are poor women trying to save their money, earn credit, someday be able to buy insurance or invest in their livelihoods.

The women brainstorming steps that the group could take to reduce their vulnerability to disasters. Among suggestions western agencies would applaud, like a "keep-the-change" program, or a "handful-of-rice" dues payment to be pooled and distributed to families in crisis, was the suggestion of group prayer.

The beautiful thing about the group prayer suggestion was that the women connected it to empathy and to impact. They could lessen the impacts of an emergency, they said, if they opened their hearts to the feelings of the family in crisis.

As cold development professionals in the West, have we forsaken prayer as a way to allow us to empathize with the people we aim to help?

If the people we aim to help are prayerful, and we are not, are we missing some valuable connection with them?

Going deeper, is there some unseen force guiding things? If so, when we consider the phrase "we help people," how in God's name [...] do we include that universal force in our ideal of a completely participatory, yet stunningly effective, all encompassing "we" ?