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Jesus’s strongest passage about the power of petitonary prayer is in Mark 11, where he talks about the faith that can move a mountain (v. 23). After that image comes one of my favorite verses in the whole Bible, where Jesus says, “All things for which you pray and ask, believe that you have received them, and they shall be granted you (11:24). (Neat!) In the next verse, Jesus offers one, and only one, bit of advice for getting right with God so he will indeed grant these petitions of ours: “And whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your transgressions.”

Interestingly enough, this is precisely what I’ve discovered in my years of trying to improve my ability to get prayers answered. The main thing I always have to do is to first rid my mind of “anything against anyone”—any negative feelings whatsoever, from anger at someone in public who somehow got in my way to annoyance at people who happen to annoy me to irritation with friends and relatives whose attitudes happen to irritate me. There’s a passage somewhere in the Episcopal liturgy (& probably in many other liturgies as well) that says, “Create in me a clean heart, O God,” and this seems to be what it’s getting at.

Once we do this forgiving, this turning over of our negative feelings toward others to God and asking him to take them away, we find that our “hotline to heaven” suddenly works. We can actually ask for things that are in line with Love and God will give them to us. That’s because by submitting our angry or irritated wills to God’s will, we prepare ourselves to collaborate with the God of Love!

I believe, as Scott Peck did, that most illnesses & other physical conditions are psychosomatic & deeply spiritual. To truly get well, the person must undergo a spiritual (or psychic) transformation, in which he or she accepts, on the deepest level possible, forgiveness & salvation & the love of the God of Love. Understanding “salvation” as healing, as salve for our wounds, applies here.

The healing/salvation doesn’t have to mean the person is completely cured of all illness or deformity. In our mission as Jesus’s followers, many times all we can do is demonstrate God’s love & acceptance by loving & accepting & helping the afflicted ourselves; if they feel loved & accepted even momentarily, they will in that small way have had a taste of salvation.

So it’s up to us as Christians to never tire, never cease carrying out our mission of active & radical love & healing.