Prayer is something which has always been a sort of frustration, mystery, and fascination to me. I know I'm probably going to step on more than a few toes with this, but I'd like to briefly chat about prayer.
Think about it, prayer is one of the few religious rituals which virtually all parts of humanity participate in at some point or another. We may pray to different things, in different places, and with different ideals, but, at one point or another, we all pray. Whether we call it prayer is another thing. Calling it "sending vibes" or "thinking of you" is, in my view, virtually the same thing. But this brings us back to the question: what the heck is prayer?
My best answer? I'm not entirely sure. Call it speaking to the Infinite. Call it centring your energies. Call it listening for the still and small voice of the universe. Actually, I think you could call it all of these things and be more than a little correct.
What I can tell you prayer is NOT is that it's not "dial a blessing" nor an opportunity to bend the ear of God to your own desires. Sadly, this seems to be what a large part of society, regardless of religious ideology, has reduced prayer to.
"God if you could just....."
"God could you please...."
"God I need...."
(And I think it fair to say you can substitute your own divinity or universal understanding in for God if you'd like...we all seem to do the same song and dance, no matter who or what we pray to.)
It is as though God has become the ultimate vending machine of blessings for our world. Pop in two prayers and a couple of good deeds and God will give you a miraculous healing or at least get you out of a traffic stop!
Right. Has anyone really thought about this? Here we are, a finite creation, trying to tell the Infinite, in whatever way we look at it, that we're actually more correct about how things should occur than it is. Roll that one around in your head for a while, if you would.......
Seems a bit off-kilter, doesn't it?
Still, though, it's hard not to want to ask the Infinite for favours, isn't it? The sick child. The homeless veteran. The jobless mother. Nobody likes to see them suffer. And, when we do try and be of aid to them -which is another post entirely- there's only so much we can do. So, of course, we reach out to that which is beyond us. I'm not saying this is wrong, per-se. What I am saying is that, maybe we ask for the wrong things.
I'll try and paraphrase St. Augustine of Hippo and say that maybe we shouldn't ask for actions and should instead ask for Spirit. Prayer, to Augustine and a slew of other theologians -from many different traditions and faiths over the centuries- was an opportunity not to get something from the divine, but to be made more like it.
So instead of asking for God to make it all better when we totally mess things up, perhaps we should ask God to help us grow into responsibility so that we don't have to be in such situations to start with.
Instead of asking God to heal our friend or loved one, perhaps we should pray that God would use us as a channel of grace and peace for that person and their friends as they walk through hard times.
Instead of asking God to help that bum get a job, maybe we could ask God to soften our hearts and minds so that we might learn to help them with our resources; educational, spiritual, AND financial.
In sum, maybe we can all try to re-learn prayer as an art which is less about getting and more about becoming.
Just a thought.....
