"Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc"

"Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc" happens to be the title of the second episode of the first season of "West Wing," one of my all-time favorite TV shows. No surprise there, I bet. Translated into English, the Latin phrase means "after this, therefore because of this", and so is a rather inaccurate way of explaining the relationship between two events. Cause and effect taken to a fanciful level.

Thinking about that today, my wandering mind fell on "prayer." I believe in answered prayers, and I believe that the answer is sometimes along the lines of "what you want is not in my plan". But there are those times when I pray for something and I see what I think are results. I've had a few of those lately. I try not to pray for specific outcomes, mostly sticking to the 12-Step qualification of "seeking only to know His will." My spiritual thinking, though, is that it is always within God's will for someone to relate to Him, and so I feel comfortable asking for the sick or the scared or the despairing or the bereaved to feel the companionship of a Supreme Being, especially through dark times, but really always. And since I believe that prayer is positive energy, I always pray for people while I'm in the shower because I seem to have a lot of it then. After I give thanks for an abundance of hot water and for sweet-smelling soap, I ask that someone somewhere be refreshed in the same way, and that's about sending my positive energy to wherever there's a lack. We don't know how energy travels from spirit to spirit, and whether God is directing that traffic or not, I'm sending energy. I send it at various times during the day and night, but most often when water is around me. I can't explain that, except that to me water is life-giving and life-affirming.

Today in the shower I thought of the people in Haiti who are digging, with their bare hands, for bodies. And then I thought of the people who are living under bridges in the U.S., or walking the interstates, something I've seen more of this year. And THEN, my mind went to the people whom I know are disappointed with the results of last week's election, and it focused on a particular person, whose name is Bruce. As I thought about the disappointed people, Bruce's being occurred to me because, and I have heard this only second-hand, he is beside himself with fear about what he thinks may happen to the USA with Democrats in charge.

I have met Bruce only a few times, and he doesn't live in the Lowcountry. I know him because he is engaged in a years-long affair with a young woman whom I also know. He is a physician, married, with three teen-age children, and he has many problems. That he has sought to relieve those problems in the ways he has does not endear him to me, but as I have said before, it's not my place to judge anyone. What occurred to me in the shower is that I have fallen short by only deciding not to judge him. I should also have been praying for him all this time. So I am adding his name to my prayer list here as a reminder, but when I pray for him I will also be praying for many others who are fearful or angry or whatever because that is a group that I think has grown in the past week. "Bruce" will be their proxy.

Will my prayers for anyone or anything cause an effect? I will never know for sure, but in recent times I've seen and felt some changes in some situations where I've prayed, so I'm encouraged. I know that when I joined my prayers with many others in a sort of "from our keyboards to God's ears" kind of way, there was an outcome I hoped for. But did the outcome have anything to do with the prayer, which was "Thy will be done"? It would be more arrogant even than I am to claim that. And anyway, many people were praying for something else at the same time.

But in the end, whether we know that "post hoc, ergo propter hoc" applies, "oremus". ("Let us pray" to you non-Latinists.)