policy infrastructure and its governing trust infrastructure. In that context, prayer relates to the rules of interactions of the social ecosystem. It comprises an attempt to interact directly with the trust infrastructure, and by doing so to indirectly affect policy in order to either affirm an understanding of policy rules, seek desired changes in them, or to request some special consideration under them. In essence, it’s an effort to affect the trust equation of an interaction.

Prayer can be mundane:

“Hi God, it’s me. I’m still here.”

Or, it can be sublimely profound and urgent (Christian Bible, Matthew 26:39):

“My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.”

We noted above that petitionary prayers are perhaps most intricate because they often seem at odds with our theologies. Such prayers appear to suggest that we expect to be able to barter with the deities, or in some fashion to entice them to take extraordinary measures in return for what we have to offer. At the extreme, we have already seen that prayer presents an entreaty to change the rules of an interaction in an extraordinary fashion, thus forming a mechanism to effect policy change in a manner that falls outside the policy domain.

Prayer has something in common with the characterization of the human emotion system in that the urgency of the prayer seems directly linked to our emotional response to a situation. We’ve observed that the level of the emotional reaction to some sensory stimulus sets the timeframe for a motor response. So it is with prayer; the direr the situation the more heartfelt is our prayer, corresponding to the strength of our emotional response to the situation and our degree of faith in the subsuming trust infrastructure.

Prayer may seek the intercession of intermediate trust arbiters in establishing communication with a deity or in gaining a desired result from the interaction. Thus, prayer may proceed through spiritual lobbyists if you will. Within the Roman Catholic religion, for example, a requirement for sainthood is a post-mortem demonstration that the candidate has successfully interceded with God on behalf of a supplicant. In the movie Patton, reprising what is said to be a true story, General George Patton is shown during the Battle of the Bulge demanding that one of his chaplains prepare a prayer seeking good weather for battle. His primary objective was to obtain good flying weather in order to bring the might of the Allied Air Forces to bear on the ongoing battle. After the weather actually did take a turn for the better, at least for the Allied Forces, the general was then shown telling one of his aides, “Bring that chaplain in here. I want to decorate him. He’s in good standing with the Lord!” From the viewpoint of a trust and policy architecture model, this anecdote presents the trust invocation at the beginning of the battle, necessary for the warriors to transcend their individual emotions, and the return to policy at the end of the battle, where the habitual rules come back to play.

But we shouldn’t leave our examples here as we need to contend with the facts that for a successful prayer to be a requirement from the part of saints indicates its paucity, and that the jocular aspect of Patton’s remark shows that he had little expectation that the chaplain could actually influence the weather. Since it is actually acknowledged that petitionary prayers have little chance to be literally answered, why indulge in them at all? The most natural explanation is that while there may be little chance, the extraordinary nature of success is enough of an incentive; we play the lottery, don’t we? However, that explanation cannot stand on its own. It has to be

Book available at Midori Press (regular)
Book available at Midori Press (signed)
Book available at Amazon (regular)