En español | There's hubbub aplenty at this strip mall coffee shop in Irvine, Calif. A scrum of small children is being herded about by their barely-keeping-it-together moms and nannies, the sound system is playing Motown classics, and the espresso machine is hissing in one corner. Around Christina Levasheff, though, there is a palpable sense of quiet. She sits across a small table from me. Although she smiles softly, her eyes don't convey the same emotion. Pretty and vivacious, she nevertheless carries that vaguely haunted look you see in the faces of parents who have lost a child.
"God wants us to meet him where we are." - Christina Levasheff, Walnut, CA. — Ben Baker
Around her neck, Christina wears a pendant bearing a photo of Judson, the little boy who was an active, exceptionally bright 2-year-old until, almost overnight, he developed symptoms of Krabbe disease, an untreatable condition that relentlessly destroys the brain. The best doctors in the country told Christina and her husband, Drake, to take Judson home to die.
But Drake, a Christian theologian, and Christina had other plans, and they came to believe that God did, too. They prayed for healing. So did their friends, relatives and a vast network of believers they didn't even know.
"We didn't plan a funeral," she tells me. "I had in mind this celebration-of-life party that we were going to have when Judson was healed. We talked about what that would look like, when everybody was expecting a funeral."
The funeral came before Judson turned 3. That was seven years ago.
"People come to me and say, 'Well, God did heal your son. He just healed him in heaven,' " says Christina.
She smiles again, but two tears slide down her cheeks. "My response to them is, 'That's not what I prayed for.' "
I sit there and, like those well-meaning friends, I don't know what to say. Then Christina — who runs a nonprofit organization for Krabbe disease research (JudsonsLegacy.org) — says something that would surprise a lot of people.
"I still believe in the power of prayer," she says firmly. "I'm conflicted, I'm angry, and I hurt. I tell God, 'I don't know how to reconcile what I'm feeling with who you say you are.' But I still believe that God wants us to meet him where we are."
It is that paradox of prayer — the belief that there is power even in prayers that seem to sail off into some cosmic dead letter file — that comforts and confounds believers and skeptics alike.
It seems that as long as humans have endured the cares of this world, they have been praying. Anthropologists say prayer is one of the earliest recorded behaviors of human beings — the cave paintings of Dordogne, France, may well embody a 16,000-year-old prayer ritual.
Aside from Buddhists, and even there you'll find exceptions, "I don't think there's any society on earth that doesn't interact with gods and spirits," says Tanya Luhrmann, a Stanford University professor who, in the course of writing one of the most influential books on the subject, has studied prayer internationally.
Next page: America is a praying country. »
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