Prayer and interconnectedness

Today I found a rather long-ish excerpt of a book by Thich Nhat Hanh called The Energy of Prayer. This book had not come to my attention before and I'm eager to read it. You can click through and read the whole excerpt if you like. Or here's a shorter sample:

The prayer of a spiritual practitioner is very deep. The spiritual practitioner understands that our health, our success, and even our relationships with our loved ones, are not the most important things. The most important matter for a practitioner is to be able to break through the veil of the material plane in order to enter the ultimate dimension and see the interconnection between us and all other phenomena in the world around us.
...
If there is a change in the individual consciousness, then a change in the collective consciousness will also take place. When there is a change in the collective consciousness, then the situation of the individual can change; the situation of our loved one who is the object of our prayer can change.

I've long believed that prayer "works" because of our interconnectedness.