COMMENTARY: Prayer, (un)answered and otherwise

c. 2008 Religion News Service (UNDATED) “Do your prayers get answered?” That was the first line of an e-mail waiting for me one recent morning. It was a response from a friend who had been anxious about an impending, crucial business meeting. I told my friend I’d be praying for him. He thanked me, but […]

c. 2008 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) “Do your prayers get answered?”

That was the first line of an e-mail waiting for me one recent morning. It was a response from a friend who had been anxious about an impending, crucial business meeting.


I told my friend I’d be praying for him. He thanked me, but insisted he didn’t want to bother the Almighty.

“How do you know your prayers get answered anyway?” he asked. “What do you think when they don’t get an answer? Is no answer the answer? Doesn’t it trivialize prayer to pray for, say, a parking spot in the same lineup as praying for someone who is sick?”

In a series of exchanges that followed, I explained, as I understand it, that there is nothing too big or too seemingly trivial for God to care about; that prayer is us having a conversation with our Maker and that I didn’t think we could say anything that would make God stare blankly or throw up God’s hands and storm out of the room.

And I believe all of that.

But it got me thinking: Why do we pray?

Not long ago, I followed the story of Kim Kalicky, a nurse, mother of four and wife of a Chicago paramedic who has been battling Hodgkin’s lymphoma for several years. Not long before last Christmas, the cancer came out of remission with a vengeance, and Kim desperately needed a bone marrow transplant.

In May, Loyola University Medical Center sponsored a marrow donor drive, in part with the hope of finding a match for Kim and several other women. The drive was a success _ 101 people turned up to give tissue samples to an international registry of more than 8 million donors.

The day after the donor drive, Kim had an appointment to see her oncologist. Her physicians had decided that radiation to reduce the size of new tumors along her spine was too risky, and were recommending an intense five-day in-patient course of continuous, intravenous chemotherapy.

Kim wasn’t thrilled. But, being the irrepressibly plucky woman that she is, she resigned herself to this new twist in her long battle with cancer.

As the doctor left the examination room, a transplant coordinator was waiting in the hallway. A moment later, the doctor poked his head back in the door and said, “You have a match!”


“A match! A perfect match!” Kim squeaked at me over the phone, her voice cracking with emotion. “I was jumping up and down and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so I did both.”

The donor hadn’t been one of the 101 kind souls who turned up for the marrow drive; it was a different match from the international registry. The timing may have been purely coincidental, but it sure felt providential to Kim and those of us who have been praying for her.

Now, Kim isn’t out of the woods. She weathered the five-day chemo cycle well, with fatigue and a little pain, but without any debilitating nausea.

Doctors want to get the cancer under control before attempting a transplant, and Kim may have to endure another round of chemo before she’s deemed ready to go. And the donor has to undergo further examination to make sure everything’s kosher for a transplant.

A tiny woman with enormous, staggering faith, Kim is certain whatever happens next will be a blessing. While her donor wasn’t at the donor drive, someone else’s might have been.

“I am so blessed,” she says. “God is good. All the time. Just trust God.”


Would things have turned out differently if people hadn’t been praying for Kim to find a donor?

I have no idea. No one does. Still, we pray.

Some say it’s a fool’s errand, but I don’t think so.

In the 1993 film, “Shadowlands,” about C.S. Lewis’ relationship with his late-in-life wife, Joy Gresham, who is battling cancer, there’s a scene about prayer that I often ponder.

When Joy’s disease goes into remission, a clergy friend tells Lewis that God is answering his prayers.

“That’s not why I pray,” Lewis says. “I pray because I can’t help myself _ the need flows out of me. It doesn’t change God; it changes me.”

(Cathleen Falsani is a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and author of “The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People.”)

KRE DS END FALSANI700 words

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