A prayer is a request made to a saint or divinity.
A prayer is a prayer or a request made to a divinity or a saint . It is a form of communication between people and spiritual entities, the eventual effectiveness of which is linked to the faith of each individual.
For example: "Please raise your prayers for my sister's health" , "The president asked the people to join in a prayer for those affected by the storm" , "The Pope made a prayer for peace in the world" .
To whom is a prayer addressed
Prayers are usually constituted as a request made to God to intervene in some matter. It is possible to pray for the health of a sick person, to improve one's own or another person's work situation, or to reverse the impact of a negative situation, to name a few possibilities.
In some cases, prayers are directed to the saints or to the Virgin . There are also those who make their requests to loved ones who have died, trusting in their possible intervention in earthly affairs. It is important to note that this type of prayers are characterized by a total openness on the part of the person who issues them, by the deep faith of communicating with these spiritual beings to beg them to help them, to watch over them or for those who need them most and who They don't know how to solve their problems.
Prayer is associated with prayer.
Its development
To recite a prayer or to review it mentally it is necessary to be in a quiet environment, without noise or interference from the environment. For this reason, it is common for prayer to take place in temples, at specific times of a service or in a spontaneous visit throughout the day, in one's bedroom before going to sleep or in the morning.
Like all other elements of religion, many consider prayer to be ineffective and prefer to act directly to try to overcome obstacles. However, even some atheists resort to this mode of communication with the afterlife in moments of extreme desperation, when they believe that all is lost and that only a miracle can help them.
Serenity Prayer
The American writer, philosopher and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was the author of the Serenity Prayer , a prayer that asks the Lord Jesus Christ to grant him serenity to live with all that he cannot change, strength to change that which he can, and wisdom to distinguish between both types of situations.
As a curious fact, not everyone agrees that the authorship of the Serenity Prayer belongs to Niebuhr ; Although his wife and daughter, as well as obviously himself, shared this version, editor Fred R. Shapiro , who specialized in getting to the bottom of misattributed quotes, suggested in 2008 that Niebuhr had taken literal phrases from various sources to create his famous prayer, probably unconsciously.
On the other hand, Shapiro made it clear that he respected Niebuhr and considered him an honest and modest individual, and simply attributed the inadvertent plagiarism to his constant research in the field of theology, which involved reading a large number of books and writings. religious.
The term in music, cinema and literature
There are numerous artistic works that appealed to the concept of prayer in their title . In 1964 , the Chilean singer-songwriter Víctor Jara presented "Plegaria a un labrador" . The Argentinean Luis Alberto Spinetta , for his part, is the author of a song titled "Plegaria para un Niño Dormate" .
"Prayers for Bobby" , however, is the name of a film directed by Russell Mulcahy that starred Ryan Kelley and Sigourney Weaver . "Prayers in the Night" , finally, is a novel written by the American Dennis Lehane .