In establishing a covenant through Moses, the “children of Israel” were given the Ten Commandments which then formed the basis of law for a social grouping that would accrue to the benefit of the people. In return, the people, through their congregation, subsequently owed their allegiance to God who would judge their individual adherence to the laws provided. The basic tenets of Islam also surmise injunctions with the provision of a mechanism through which each person’s obeisance of the law is rendered. Thus, we see the foundation of a religious trust infrastructure and a basic policy infrastructure. It is within this environment that prayer has true meaning. The laws of the policy infrastructure establish the manner in which members of the social system are allowed to interact with each other and the base covenant relationship provides a framework of trust within which the individuals can interact with the deity. Certainly, within the foundation elements of the United States government we can identify all of these same characteristics, albeit with the primary purveyor of trust, the Constitution, being purposely distanced from deity through the establishment of freedom of religion. However, we will later consider this positioning within an encompassing higher ecosystem.

Well, by this point, we’ve immersed ourselves a bit in the specific theologies of Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Hopefully, this still very cursory view is moderately accurate with respect to a layman’s understanding of the basis of these religious structures. However, the real intent of this discussion is to reinforce the idea that prayer forms a structured interaction mechanism among the members of a covenant relationship; further among people and their god or, in associated forms, as with a call to the President for clemency, among people and their government or other trust infrastructure. What is interesting about this is that the covenant in question then defines an infrastructure of rules within which interactions occur; interactions which include their own specific rules. Thus, many rules, considerations and consequences flow from this infrastructure as opposed to solely from the specific interaction in question. This, then, becomes a recursive mechanism through which hierarchical trust and policy infrastructures can themselves interact.

Prayer seems to serve at least two common functions. At its most basic, prayer constitutes a ritual process that reinforces the trust infrastructure of the social system. Beyond this basic construct, the act of prayer also forms an individual or collective, highly structured interaction mechanism that encompasses interactions with a deity. While the mechanism reaches a level of almost formal specification with more recent religions, this extended facility may have evolved from forms of animism in which various spirits (minor deities) were ascribed to most of the common objects encountered by people in their everyday lives. Within such a context, virtually any interaction involved some association with such a deity and hence was related to prayer. This perhaps belies the observation that modern prayer, at least in some religions, often seems to adopt a near-conversational style.

As we said, trust and policy infrastructures are organized recursively, which means that there are trust and policy infrastructures that are included in and subordinate to other trust and policy infrastructures. When we use the term trust infrastructure in singular and without qualification, we mean in general the top trust infrastructure of the social ecosystem as well as subordinate trust infrastructures within that ecosystem; and similarly with the term policy infrastructure. We say that a trust infrastructure governs a policy infrastructure to formally express that policy infrastructures are subsumed by trust infrastructures.

We then consider prayer to be an interaction of persons within a group that involves the trust infrastructure of the social ecosystem within which that group exists. This description encompasses religions such as Buddhism that do not involve deities. Prayer follows the rules of the social ecosystem’s trust and policy infrastructures to create an interaction involving both the

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