The Power of the Brief Burst

Christ cursed a fig tree, and in a matter of hours, says the Gospel of Mark (11:20), it was "dried up from the roots." The Rev. Franklin Loehr and his Religious Research Foundation in Los Angeles do not claim such dramatic results, but they are off to a flying start, as reported in a new book (Doubleday; $3.50) titled The Power of Prayer on Plants.

Presbyterian Loehr, 45, was trained as a chemist at Illinois' Monmouth College before he turned to the ministry and "religious research." When he heard six years ago that Duke University's famed extrasensory perceptionist, Dr. Joseph B. Rhine, was testing the effect of prayer on plants, Loehr and his associates bought two sealed jars of water, prayed hard over one, ignored the other, and used them to water two equal sets of seeds, planted under identical conditions. Two weeks later the prayed-over water had produced seven seedlings, the ordinary water only three. "It looked as though we had something here," writes Researcher Loehr. He began to set up more elaborate experiments.

A ten-inch, circular cake pan filled with earth was spun, and divided by a piece of lath. On each side of the barrier 23 kernels of corn were planted, and the pan was spun again to select the side to which "positive prayer" should be addressed. For eight days, prayer for growth was given to that side, prayer against growth to the other. Result: "Sixteen sturdy little seedlings greeted us on the positive side. On the negative side there was but one." Against that stubborn seedling the experimenters directed "several brief 'bursts' of negation--strong mental commands to grow no more . . . and it grew no more. The top of it darkened and withered and it remained in the stunted, non-growing condition. No more seedlings appeared on the negated side, though we held the experiment open for 20 days before digging, photographing and measuring each seed. Later one of the mathematicians on Dr. Rhine's staff at Duke University did a quick computation of the probability factor of this experiment. It came out over 2,000,000 to one."

Like Dr. Rhine in his work on extrasensory perception, Researcher Loehr found that some people are better at it than others. One woman scored slightly lower than average in praying her seedlings up, but when she tried "negative prayer," the seedlings showed hardly any life at all. "She was rather shaken by the experience," writes Loehr, "but I am keeping her name and address on file. The time may come when those with effective prayer-negation power will be sought again for their healing help." How does one go about praying negatively? One experimenter resorted to calling her seedlings Communists. "To her that is an epithet of disdain, scorn and active dislike. Those poor seeds seemed to twist and writhe under the negative power showered on them."

After more than 700 experiments conducted by about 150 people on 27,000-odd seeds and seedlings, concludes Experimenter Loehr, "our research has shown . . . that prayer can make a difference in the speed of seed germination and in the rate and vigor of plant growth. This in turn demonstrates two things: 1) that prayer is fact, and 2) that scientific laboratory research can be done in basic religious fields."

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