Are there practical benefits of prayer? Scientific investigations have demonstrated that grapes, corn seeds, and live cell cultures in laboratory flasks were responsive to the prayers of the faithful and that growth in size and numbers was the payoff.

The first piece of evidence came from the ceremony called “Prayers at the Partaking of the Grapes.” On August 19, 2007, I was a participant-observer at a Sunday service according to the mystical liturgy of the Orthodox Catholic Church of the East. St. Luke Serbian Orthodox Church of America in McLean, Virginia was the parish with a flock of about 100 souls led by Archpriest Milorad Milosevich.

Father Milorad’s blessing of the grapes was my first exposure to what Europeans in the Old and New Worlds venerate as a cure-all. The prayer reads in part: “O Lord…You have been well-pleased to let (the grapes) attain maturity. Let us who partake of this offspring of the vine be glad and may we offer it as a gift to You for the cleansing of sins…”

After the inspirational service at a chapel decorated with beautiful icons, the parishioners and guests consumed the blessed grapes with other food during the coffee hour in the church hall. Good cheer filled the air even though wine and other alcoholic beverages were not served. The experience was primarily intended to boost the spiritual well-being of the attendees.

Later I reminded Father Milorad that his ministration that day might have positive results in earthly terms—based on recent scientific research. Consumption of fresh grapes and red wine in moderation has numerous health benefits. They lower bad cholesterol. They contain compounds that promote anti-clotting activity, and they provide anti-oxidants for protection against heart disease.

No wonder Europeans regularly prayed for a good harvest from the vineyards because they intuitively linked consumption of fresh grapes and table wine with optimum health. The blessing that day went as follows: “O Master, Lord our God. Grant them an abundance of Your earthly good things, together with all things profitable to them.”

But did their prayers affect the good harvest apart from the grapes’ DNA, the hospitable soil, favorable terrain, temperate climate, and pest control? The materialist viewpoint would attribute the yield exclusively to genetic and environmental factors. However, to investigate the influence of prayers, we picked two experiments that controlled other factors besides prayer itself. The first was a Filipina’s experiment with corn seeds at the University of the Philippines (U.P.) and the second refers to Japanese (Johrei) healers in Petaluma, California who promoted growth in cultured human brain cells.

Blessing of corn ears is an annual Roman Catholic Church rite in rural Cebu, Philippines. A U.P. Professor of Educational Psychology, Dr. Aurora A. Minoza, a Cebuana with a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, conducted an experiment on corn seed germination under two treatment conditions: prayer and negative thoughts. The third condition (control) had neither prayer nor negative thoughts directed at the seeds.

The experiment was done on Good Friday, a day believed by Filipinos to increase the emotionality of people and the potency of herbal extracts for medicinal purposes. Sixty corn seeds were randomly planted in groups of 20 using perforated paper plates filled with garden soil. They were similarly watered and exposed to sunlight and ambient temperature. The prayed on plate received this blessing: “There is one mind, that mind is God. I am in that mind. So are these seeds. Everything I say about these seeds will produce the desired results.” The second plate was the target of negative thoughts. On the third day of the experiment (Easter Sunday appropriately enough), 5 seeds sprouted from the prayed on plate, 4 from the control plate, and 3 from the negative target. On the eighth day (cutoff date of the experiment), 18 robust plants and one sprout appeared on the prayed on plate. Eleven stunted plants and 4 sprouts grew from the negative target plate. The control plate was in between with 14 plants and 5 sprouts. The trend results were in accord with previous U.S. studies on the “power of prayer on plants.”

Since humans, like plants, begin life as simple cells, a controlled experiment was conducted to find out if laboratory cultures of human brain cells would grow more when exposed to prayer as compared to when they were not exposed. There was no possibility of a “placebo effect” (common among suggestible human subjects) because the brain cells came from dead people, and had been kept in an incubator at a San Francisco research laboratory. The researchers were Dr. Dean Radin, a psychologist, and Dr. Ryan Taft, a molecular biologist. Four Japanese Johrei healers participated in the experiment lasting three days in Petaluma, California. Each healer took turns working in an experimental chamber which was acoustically insulated and shielded from electromagnetism.

Dr. Taft prepared daily 12 sealed flasks of cultured human brain cells. For each session, he placed 3 flasks in a thermally insulated box, but did now know whether the session was for prayer treatment or no prayer treatment (control). During the treatment session, the Johrei healer directed his prayer (intention and projection of “ki” energy from open palms) toward the box from two feet away. The healer did this for 25 minutes without touching the box. Then he left the chamber to wait for the next session. This process was repeated four times a day for each of the three days. The prayer treatment on six flasks was randomly alternated with no prayer treatment on the other six flasks. The results indicated that the prayed on cells grew more as the experiment progressed and by comparison, the control cells did not show a significant trend. “The odds against chance,” according to Dr. Radin, “for the increased growth trend in the treated cells was 1,100 to 1.”

Editor’s Note: This article draws from Dr. Armilla’s data base on Christian prayers, Shamanic chants, Hindu and Buddhist mantras, and their perceived effectiveness. Reader comments are welcome and should be sent to this newspaper’s “Letters to the Editor.”

Fig. 1. Father Milorad Milosevich blesses the grapes, with the assistance of Karsten Sedmera (background) and Father George Kokhno (not shown). Photo by Jose Armilla.

By Jose Armilla, Ph.D.