On Prayer

“The truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell, and broke
into pieces. Everybody took a piece of it, and they looked at it and
thought they had the truth.”
-- Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

Some of the Pharisees asked Jesus, “When will the kingdom of God come?”
Jesus answered, “God’s kingdom is coming, but not in a way that you will be able to see with your eyes. People will not say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or, ‘There it is!’ because God’s kingdom is within you.”
— Luke 17:20-21

Before we jump into prayer, first let me first say that while I believe in a Creative Principle and Natural Truth, I don’t believe in “God” in the popular sense of the word’s usage. And it’s in that personal context, of someone who may not believe in your God or any popular or traditional concept of God, that I want to talk about prayer.

So when I write “God” here, it is only for readability’s sake and should not be interpreted to represent whatever notion of God you carry with you. It is my own understanding of what humanity has come to call God, which again, to me is much less a divine being and more of a creative principle or natural truth, closer to the Dao than to Zeus, Buddha, or Jesus or other anthropomorphized understandings of God.

Second, and this basically piggybacks on the first, is that I see Science and Religion as complementary rather than competitive. Because my understanding and relationship to God does not depend on the interpretation of other humans, I read religious texts almost the same as I read science textbooks: with an understanding that there is Truth in the words, but that perhaps it is incomplete, not fully understood or interpreted correctly, etc.

It is within this personal context that I want to discuss the concept of prayer. And forgive me in advance, but this may feel a bit Socratic because in my mind it is simply a series of logical steps by which I arrive at my understanding of God and thus prayer.

So let’s start at the beginning, with applying scrutiny to what we've been told to believe: Science, which is basically just a word to describe the employment of Reason to discover Truth, has repeatedly and violently disrupted traditional religious teachings of God’s truth. Now, because Man is made in the image of God and thus God endowed Man with Reason by which to survive after being cast out of Eden, it seems illogical to believe that God would make a mistake and that human Reason is somehow a tool of the Devil, as has been so oft repeated ad memorium.1 As such, let’s continue our inquiry with three assumptions: 1) God doesn’t make mistakes 2) Reason is man’s most valuable tool for deciphering God’s intent and was given to man by God 3) Science is based in Reason and thus was given to man by God as a means to understand his intent. Thus, Science and God cannot be in conflict or God would be in conflict with himself, and because God doesn’t make mistakes this is impossible.

Yet, we have been taught, er…more like inundated with news, gossip, cultural detritus and the like claiming that Science and God are in conflict. This is untrue. Science is in conflict with people whose livelihood depends on an understanding of God that is in conflict with Science. Important distinction.

So let’s move forward with an understanding that Science and God are more than copacetic and in fact deeply intertwined.

Now, Science has repeatedly demonstrated that antiquated notions of God are, if not impossible, highly unlikely. We’ve been to space. No man-God up in the sky. We’ve taken photos from millions of lightyears away. Still no God. We’ve come to learn that the universe appears to be rapidly expanding - perhaps God is on the frontier creating new worlds with new Adams and Eves and Edens? Perhaps. But wouldn’t that conflict with the notion that humans are uniquely special, which is fundamental to so much of our awful behavior over the years? Food for thought.

These conflicts in understanding should not result in us throwing God away entirely. The opposite, in fact. They should enrich and complicate our understanding of God, and they should undermine and clarify the mistaken teachings of our past. Alas, if only progress were so straightforward.

In any case, to summarize, we have found that God, in all likelihood, does not exist in any traditional, observable sense. And that brings us to the concept of prayer. If God does not exist in an observable sense, then what function does prayer serve at all, if any?

The answer to this question is perhaps the most ignored piece of religious teaching, across every religion, in human history: when you pray, you are praying to yourself.1

That’s not to say you are praying to an omniscient, omnipotent almost certainly old white man living in a cloud somewhere in your body or mind. It’s saying that God is within you, and in fact is part of you, and that you are appealing to the better part of yourself for succor, guidance, strength, hope, or whatever it is you might need or want in that moment.

This simple reframing of our understanding of God, prayer, and the relationship between both and Science and progress is not only extremely powerful, but has been repeated over and over and over again throughout history by our greatest teachers. Jesus said it in Luke. Lao Tzu and Siddhartha both say it countless times in their teachings. I am less familiar with Islam, but I am extremely confident Muhammad will have said something similar once I get to reading the Qu’ran.

Moreover, if we expand our understanding of God beyond the scope of traditional religious instruction, poets, painters, authors, sculptors and nearly every other type of artist in human history has expressed this concept in their work.

So then what is prayer? Prayer can take many forms. Meditation can be prayer. Writing can be prayer. Taking a walk can be prayer. Changing your toddler’s diaper can be prayer. And just the opposite too: anything can be said to be prayer when it is not. I can get on my knees and beg God for mercy, deliverance, success, vengeance, anything, but just the act of getting on my knees and acting like I am praying does not make it prayer.2

Prayer is simply dedicated attention. When you are out on a walk and you notice all of the noises, smells, the weight of your body being drawn into the earth by some unknowable force, you are praying. When you wipe the shit from your inconstant, senile parent’s asshole with gentle loving empathetic kindness and gratefulness for when they did the same for you so many years ago, that is prayer. Prayer is less about what you are doing and more about how you do it.3

Now, many people will read and reject this conception of prayer. It is not enough. And to those who reject it, I ask you: what makes you feel you are not enough?

I would argue that you have been conditioned to believe you are not. You have been taught that you need someone or something else. That the complexity, difficulty, unfairness and injustices of life are too much for you to confront on your own and thus you need help, ideally from the divine. Go to church every Sunday and it will come, they said, and you listened. Not a single of the great teachers shares this teaching, yet you still listened. Why?

The harsh reality is that God is not coming to save you. It is impossible for God to save someone who does not want to save themselves first. As Jesus told the Pharisees, the Kingdom of God is not coming in a way you will be able to point to and say "Here it is!", because it is already here waiting for you to discover it within yourself. No one else can do it for you. So get to work.

Footnotes

  1. I personally find it hilarious that this exact argument was employed by the Pharisees and others who questioned the nature of Christ’s healings - they claimed it was the work of the devil! Which is basically the same concept as saying that because, for instance, the discovery of pennicilin or another breakthrough technology with implications to alter humanity’s status quo understanding of God and thus those who proclaim to understand his will or teachings, is the work of the devil even though it has alleviated suffering on Earth immeasurably. It just don’t make no sense without an alternative explanation for why someone might claim it as the devil’s work. ↩ ↩2

  2. David Foster Wallace emphasizes this point extremely well in This Is Water: "Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship-be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles-is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things-if they are where you tap real meaning in life-then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already-it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power-you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart-you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on." ↩

  3. One of my personal favorite forms of prayer is watching sports. When I watch sports, it is less about winning and losing (don’t get me wrong, winning is better) and more about marveling at the level of human achievement and the intensity of human desire that the players exhibit. Sports, for me, are a way to attend to the miracle that is the fusion of the mind, body, and spirit toward a simple, dedicated task. They are an easy to understand abstraction of what we as humans try and generally fail to accomplish in the infinitely more complex game of life. ↩