Meditations on the Angelus (II) (updated)

Note: I thought that I had updated the scheduled draft, but I was mistaken so the post I had written was lost. Part of what it means to meditate on something is that the meditation is temporally indexed. Which is to say: an attempt to recover it is unlikely to succeed. Here, then, is a new meditation for today on the same subject.

​Last time, I promised to meditate on one question per entry. Here is today's: 

What sense does it make to ask for the prayers of others?

I have asked others to pray for me. I have said prayers for others, bidden and otherwise. It is such common practice that there's a smarmy meme materialists pass around at every tragedy:

There is a way in which this criticism is worth acknowledging and thinking through. 

Perhaps it's all bunk. If there were no God, prayer would be meaningless, right? I propose that this is untrue, and one day I will write about the Jefferson Bible, and explain how the absence of the miraculous strains credulity more than any miracle. For now, I will ignore the question of how so many people came to accept (or at least act as though they accept) the efficacy of prayer. Let us acknowledge at least that whatever else it does, it reinforces social cohesion. Which is to say, it is at least doing whatever the meme is doing, and to it's credit it has a few dozen centuries' head start on the IMPACT typeface. 

In short: if it makes sense to complain about that over which one has no control, it makes sense to pray about things (and prayer has the added benefit of practicing gratitude -- which everyone knows from the internet makes one happier). 

And even if, at the end of the day I am wrong and all of the words fall on the wind and nothing more, our prayers are worth no less than any other words come the heat death of the universe. 

Here then is my literal and direct answer to the question: It makes as much sense to ask for someone's prayers as it does to tell them about your woes, and as much sense to say those prayers as it does to listen to them. And possibly -- if I am right, and God is more than a figment -- it makes more sense.