We also pray that you look down upon us now with mercy and with love, just as you did upon our forefathers many years ago.

Just as you led us from Kobol and found the Twelve Worlds, so now we hope and pray that you will lead us to a new home, where we may begin life anew.

Turning back to yesterday's brutal subway attack, the White House has issued a statement, saying the President is monitoring events in New York City and his thoughts and prayers go out to the families affected by this great tragedy.

Say a prayer, then we're there At the drawbridge of a castle

Thirty years have passed, and I still feel guilty about that prayer, for the next day, I learned that that missile landed on my brother's friend's home and killed him and his father, but did not kill his mother or his sister.

The difference is my father prayed before a racial conflict and my mother prayed after.

The lesson in this is that when it comes to race relations, sometimes, we've got to know how to pray, think through, process, prepare.

A typical solution could be looking at the future with the eyes of the past, so relying on all the time series of past events and hoping that this is enough to predict the future.

As a child studying these eternal masterpieces, Bach's music would intermingle with the singing voices of Muslim prayers from the neighboring Arab village of the northern Kibbutz in Israel where I grew up.

So we brought her home, and I prayed that the oil wouldn't wash up on her beach before she died.

(Laughter) So three of those penguins -- Peter, Pamela and Percy -- wore satellite tags, and the researchers crossed their fingers and hoped that by the time they got back home, the oil would be cleaned up from their islands.

The girl with no freckles, the sweet potato boy, the basketball father and darkroom mother and they lit their candles and said their prayers, and the corners of the photographs curled.

Now, for the next 11 years, all I know is that this woman, this birth woman, should have her eyes scratched out for not signing the adoption papers. She was an evil woman too selfish to sign, so I spent those 11 years kneeling and praying.

And when his ashes were interred, his mother said, "I pray here for forgiveness for having been twice robbed: once of the child I wanted, and once of the son I loved."

JK: I haven't spent much time with you, but I know that you still love me, and you probably still pray for me and think about me.

They are the places where we are born, grow up, are educated, work, marry, pray, play, get old, and in time, die.

I would wish, and pray, and hope, and do whatever I could so I would wake up in the morning and be different, and I wouldn't have to deal with these struggles.

Maybe I am finally fixed, maybe I just don't care, maybe God finally listened to my prayers.

And sometimes that was just paused, as all I could do was hold hands with them and just join them in silent crying and prayer.

And we wished each other well, and the most important thing that day was that he was not going to leave with that embarrassment, that experience of embarrassment.

For that entire time, the world only exists as an abstraction, as he is taught the values of society, including this notion that their prayers alone maintain the cosmic balance.

I was just building up a context that they could understand and hoping that our prayers would be answered and I would never have to tell them that that knight, who had fought so bravely, was done fighting and could rest now, forever.

And he marveled at, quote, "How people take it for granted they have the right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level."

They do and I emerge grateful but absolutely mortified, and hope that they didn't notice that I left the bathroom without washing my hands.

Their main purpose is to control and punish people internally, to dictate the spaces that women may go, their clothing, family relations, beliefs, even the minute detail of how one prays.

But now I wanted to work in a very low-tech way, so something that would mean at the same time a lump of cotton, a cloud and Durer's praying hands -- although this looks a lot more like Mickey Mouse's praying hands.

"The Luttrell Psalter, " a book of psalms and prayers commissioned by Sir Geoffrey Luttrell, shows a young woman having her hair done, while a young man catches a bird in a net.

The books were created by individuals or teams for uses as wide-ranging as private prayer aids, service books in churches, textbooks, and protective talismans to take into battle.

And the peculiar thing is that I recently wrote this book, this memoir called "Eat, Pray, Love" which, decidedly unlike any of my previous books, went out in the world for some reason, and became this big, mega-sensation, international bestseller thing.

Of dreaming there's a goal ahead; of hoping when our dreams are dead; of praying when our hopes have fled; yet losing, not afraid to fall, if, bravely, we have given all.

And if someone happened to be missing, we would have to, we say, "Fix a plate" for that person, put it in the oven, then we could say grace, and we could eat.

And for this entire time, they are inculturated into the values of their society, values that maintain the proposition that their prayers and their prayers alone maintain the cosmic -- or we might say the ecological -- balance.

There was Philip II, who was divine because he was always praying, and there was Elizabeth, who was divine, but not quite divine because she thought she was divine, but the blood of being mortal flowed in her.

(Laughter) (Clears his throat) (Laughter) "Dear Sir, good day, compliments of the day, and my best wishes to you and family.

At my understanding that my grandson was responsible for the murder of this human being, I went to the prayer closet, like I was taught by my old folks, and began to pray and meditate.

At this stage, my grandmother, who had been watching the course of my life with increasing anxiety, started to include in her daily prayers that I urgently get married so that I could settle down once and for all.