Dismissing Prayer

I'm in Santa Fe right now, attending a western region team meeting and giving a 1 hour overview of WebSphere on z/OS. We're in a "working lunch" period, and I'm at a table full of FTSS folks. They started talking about a famous site here in Santa Fe, which is a cathedral with a spiral staircase. I haven't visited it, but others at the table related the story: that they had a tower in the cathedral and the ladder proved difficult to climb. So they prayed about it, and out of the blue came a carpenter who built the staircase. There is apparently no record of the carpenter buying the lumber anywhere; the carpenter simply vanished afterwards, and the engineering of the staircase is such that nobody can figure out how it supports itself. Or so goes the story.

But that's not the reason I'm posting this. The reason I'm posting this is because of the mocking tone and utter dismissal of prayer that was shared by seemingly everyone at the table. I shouldn't be so judgmental, I guess -- I suppose I might have shared the same attitude several years ago, and perhaps I still do today.

But it struck me.