Naturally, being a scientist who specialises in how the brain works, he clearly has his feet firmly planted on the ground especially where things supernatural are concerned. "At home, I often spend time in a quiet place - a shed in my garden. I go there to try and pray or to be silent. At times I say to myself that this is superstitious, that no one is listening to me, that it's all nonsense. At other times I am furious and angry, but I don't know who with. On other occasions, and without knowing why, I just end up crying. I don't have those experiences in which you feel you are being held or embraced (though I feel envious of those who do); what I experience is something I don't really understand. I don't think God is understandable".
At one point Kasinski was asked does he believe in the power of prayer. He replied: "I do but I do not think that God necessarily answers our prayers on our terms. My father spent most of the Second World War in a prisoners-of-war camp. He told me that he was hungry most of the time and wished that I would never experience hunger in my life, as it was a terrible thing. He has since passed away, but funnily enough, sometimes, when I am eating, I can feel it is as if I am feeding him, that I am helping sustain a person 65 years ago who couldn't have even conceived of my existence then".
To explain this time-warp concept a bit better he said that "In the British Journal of Psychiatry there was a article describing a really interesting experiment on prayer. The names of people hospitalised for TB some 100 years ago were randomly divided into two lists. One list was given to a prayer group which read the names on it aloud in their weekly meetings for about 10 weeks. The other list was kept in an office. After this they looked at the results and found to their astonishment that the people who had been prayed for, had, a hundred years earlier, had better medical outcomes than the ones who hadn't been prayed for.
"Now this doesn't make any sense at all in terms of cause and effect in daily life because it's asking for something that has already happened. It does, however, bring to mind the idea that when you pray you are in a dimension that is outside of time and space, as well as the belief that when we pray or are celebrating mass we are all in Holy Communion with God and all the faithful, past, present and future - we are all in an Eternal Present".
This is a very interesting concept which I have often thought about. I have called it "The Present Continuous." I feel that, while we know that God is not effected by time such that for Him everything is the present, then if someone asked me to pray for them, say because they were going to undergo an operation, and I accidentally forgot to do so on the appointed time of the operation, I could still pray for a good outcome for my friend even days later. Because God, in His infinite greatness, would have known in advance that I was going to forget to pray then but that I would do so some days later, and He would take my prayer from the future to the moment when it was needed. A bit mind bogling but pretty logical if you stopped to think about it....and very true too.
Perhaps we really are in an Eternal Present after all!
