It was interesting to observe the reactions prior to and after Hurricane Matthew’s passage through the Caribbean. Based on local and international media reports and alerts from The Weather Channel, most Jamaicans made the requisite preparations. Naturally, people of faith, on hearing that Hurricane Matthew was a direct threat to Jamaica, began praying for God’s mercy on the country. Post-Matthew analysis reveals that Hurricane Matthew did indeed take a most unusual turn and shifted from Jamaica. This fact had some social commentators becoming unhinged. They screamed, “There is no proof that prayers can shift the projected path of a hurricane.” They piled on, “This is ridiculous, senseless,” while the people of faith simply smiled, giving thanks for yet another answer to prayer. The critics, while berating others for not providing proof, are themselves yet to provide the evidence that prayer did not impact Hurricane Matthew’s strange turn from Jamaica. They are asking from others what they fail to do themselves.

There is overwhelming scientific evidence which shows the positive impact of prayer in the medical field; one only has to

Google the topic to see the vast body of work in this area. Research at San Francisco General Hospital looked the effect of prayer on 393 cardiac patients. Half were prayed for by strangers who had only patients’ names. Those patients who were prayed for had fewer complications, fewer cases of pneumonia, and needed less drug treatment. The results of these experiments have also surprised medical practitioners as seen in an ABC News report under the heading ‘Can Prayer Heal?’ Drs William Harris and James O’Keefe at the Mid America Heart Institute obtained some interesting results. To avoid the placebo effect, patients were not told that they were part of any kind of experiment. For an entire year about 1,000 heart patients admitted to the institute’s critical care unit were secretly divided into two groups. Half were prayed for by a group of volunteers and the hospital’s chaplain, the other half were not. All the patients were followed for a year and then their health was scored according to pre-set rules by a third party who did not know which patients had been prayed for and which had not. The results revealed that the patients who were prayed for had 11 per cent fewer heart attacks, strokes and life-threatening complications. Dr O’Keefe, after this result, said: “This study offers an interesting insight into the possibility that maybe God is influencing our lives on Earth. As a scientist, its very counterintuitive because I don’t have a way to explain it.”

In another research Dr Elizabeth Targ, a psychiatrist at the Pacific College of Medicine in San Francisco has also tested out prayer on critically ill AIDS patients. The patients got the same medical treatment, but only half of them were being prayed for; 10 of the prayed-for patients lived, while four who had not been prayed for died. In a larger study, Dr Tang found that people who received prayer had six times fewer hospitalisations, and those hospitalisations were significantly shorter than the people who received no prayer. Dr Tang said: “I was sort of shocked. In a way it’s like witnessing a miracle. There was no way to understand this from my experience and from my basic understanding of science.” (

ABC News)

Separate studies from Duke, Dartmouth and Yale universities show the following:

* Hospitalised people who never attend church have an average stay of three times longer than people who attend regularly.

* Heart patients were 14 times more likely to die following surgery if they did not participate in religion.

* Elderly people who never or rarely attended church had a stroke rate double that of people who attended regularly.

* In Israel, religious people had a 40 per cent lower death rate from cardiovascular disease and cancer.

The scientific evidence is clear prayer does have a positive impact on the health of individuals. By extension, why can’t the people of faith say that it is their belief that prayer had a role to play in the strange trajectory of Hurricane Matthew?

The matter of great import and urgency now is for us to provide support to the people of Haiti not to ridicule people of faith over their prayer life. I take this opportunity to encourage us as a Jamaican family to give generously at our places of worship, school and work to the Haitian cause. Based on the willingness of the Jamaican/Haitian governments we could send our skilled workmen to assist in the construction of houses in Haiti. We would definitely do a better job than the charities and foundations that collected billions in 2010 but little was done to improve the lives of Haitians.

marshburns@hotmail.com