Thoughts and Prayers
I’m going to write a whole little series on prayer. The poetry of prayer. The power of praying. I want to talk about the insulting way the word is thrown about in times of sorrow. I’m going to tell you how I pray. I’ll tell you what it’s like, what exactly I do, why. I’ll tell you what prayer does to me.
The important thing to know - a thing you already know but is worth saying again and again - is that prayer does nothing to change the world. I don’t think prayer changes God’s mind. I don’t even know that I believe in God. I doubt any of that matters to God though. It can’t; not if he’s God. He can’t both be compassionate and cruel. That is a human characteristic, not a divine one. It’s also an attribute of dictators. If god is thirsty for flattery, we’re screwed.
I do think prayer works. It has nothing to do with miracles unless we redefine miracles to be a thing happening in our mind. Prayer is personal transfiguration. Conversion. Transformation. Whatever.
Prayer shakes you down.
My Vedic chant teacher says prayer is the only act of free will. I don’t like the idea. It makes me uncomfortable. But I have a suspicion she’s onto something.
When I was in kindergarten, I wore dresses. My mother couldn’t get me to wear anything but. Somewhere in that first year of socialization, I put on pants. I turned on myself and wouldn’t be caught dead in a dress until my late teens. When I did start to wear dresses again, they were prom dresses worn with combat boots or camisoles paired with leather skirts. I wore garish lipstick and had a shaved head. My gender, or my body, became something I needed to both hide and render unattractive.
Something similar happened with prayer.
My parents tell a story about me standing up with all the other kids and putting my hand on my heart to recite the pledge of allegiance. I said Amen at the end. Every single time. The story suggests this was cute. There is also something in the story about how I wasn’t the only one; it happened once in a while in a small midwestern town where lots of kids were raised in church.
I think it’s more interesting than cute. That I conflated church and state so glibly is fascinating. The story hints things about innocence and indoctrination. “Now I lay me down to sleep” and “I pledge allegiance to the flag” were things I associated with performative recitation; I mean listen to them drum those dactyls. I didn’t understand what I was saying, but I took it all very seriously. Hand to heart: I thought of myself as a good kid. I wanted to be a good kid.
Then I stopped believing in God. I stopped believing in myself.
I think of myself as an atheist. I tend to think I’ve always been one. I’ve never liked prayer, I say. I mumble. I snark. I shoot fire out of my eyes. I remember a woman from my town touching my shoulder on the sidewalk. I remember the bright sun and how I squinted. Dandelions. She had silver permed hair and she smelled of rose soap. She said she’d pray for me. I was probably wearing a cut up prom dress. I was spending lots of time on psyche wards. How dare you, I thought, and I recoiled.
Generally, this is how it is. I bristle the moment people identify as spiritual. I resent references to religion or God. Because I don’t hang out in spiritual communities (yoga spaces are negligible in this context), the topic of God only ever comes up over a dinner table or a conversation about America. Or police or oceans or literature. I resent the change of subject. I resent the deflection. It feels strangely invasive. Get my soul out of your fucking mouth.
I suspect that little old lady meant well. I suspect she didn’t know what else to say. Years later, after lots of scrubbing and cutting and rending my own scabby heart place, I appreciate that she both wanted to say something and knew her limitations. She meant well, as they say.
The thing about my atheism is, though, that I became one. Somewhere in the shift to courderoys and jeans I changed my mind about God. Something which had been taken for granted was rejected. Maybe I no longer thought of myself as a good kid. Maybe I no longer wanted to be a good kid. Both possibilities are interesting. They are different but hard to tell apart. Why would a six year old girl not think of herself as a good child? Why didn’t I want to be good, in the way of small midwestern American towns of the 1980’s? Are these causes or consequences of no longer believing something about reality?
I’ve had an odd sensation of time slippage recently. Past the dulling or ruined schedules of pandemic; I have felt disoriented by a return of my childhood. All this talk about Russia, and the price of gas, and a generation saying no future feels awfully like the 1980s. I’m not the only one who has noted this. Disney Plus is currently featuring a biopic called Pistol. I haven’t seen it. The disneyfication of punk rock does something to my head. I wince a little. Stranger Things dusts off all things 80’s and launches 30 year old songs to first place on the pop charts.
Meanwhile, stateside, mass shootings leave everybody stunned. The January 6 hearings are in the news. Reality is cock-eyed. Human rights are under attack. American democracy is has been assaulted and insulted. We are bewildered. Flailing. We are terrified and outraged and feel useless. We wouldn’t know where to start.
Despair, I keep thinking. The word for this is despair. Despair combines urgency and helplessness. A repressed futility. We all seem to be gripped and drowned by the terrible pressure to do something and the crisis of believing nothing we do could make a difference. Mental health depends on believing our efforts will do something, and so we are all unwell.
And as we suffer with this, more or less fall through our days, blanch our eyeballs with more death, governors and senators and mayors tell us that they are praying. They are praying for the dead children. Praying for families in grief. Praying for the country. They pray for change but never acknowledge change is quite literally their job.
This pisses me off. It pisses a lot of people off. It’s offensive. It signals a negation of responsibility, an unmovingness, a chosen powerlessness.
And yet, these days, I’m praying really hard.
The trajectory: as a very young child, I believed something of the world. I believed in myself. Then I didn’t believe any longer. Several decades of chaos. Later, a weird combination of spiritual things happened to me. Our Fathers and Hindu mantras. Benedictine monks and Quaker silences. Eastern Orthodox ikons, Buddhist bowing. Jewish funerals. I re-learned how to pray. I came to believe.
Now, here, I call out to the reckoning god. I am not good at this, but that’s almost the point. I make mistakes and offer them up. I get out of bed at four am in order to do it. I offer my sleep. I’m clumsy at that hour of the morning, crusty eyed, stupid. I’m ready enough, I tell him, rubbing at my eyes. I’m willing to be judged here and now. I am able to handle this. Go ahead, I tell him; ash me.
I belong to a generation of Americans for whom the American dream curdled. Our parents couldn’t promise that we’d be better off than they were. Education wasn’t a guarantee. Work might not be enough. The hypocrisy of the dream was always clear to us. To be unequivocally clear, it had always been clear to Black and Indigenous folks. The dream applies to whiteness, cisness, masculinity. The dream can be your dream to the exact measure of your passing and internalized oppression.
We are a caustic, apathetic, dis-believing bunch. I don’t have the stats to prove this, but I know it is our generation that stopped going to church (or whatever) en mass. Our generation was the first to know -really know - that the atmosphere is being poisoned and the oceans are dying; we came of age watching World Wildlife Conservation commercials and Unicef trying to do something in Somalia. We saw the lie of American morality in Latin America. And Africa. And Asia. We all went to school with a Korean adoptee. We watched George Bush bomb Iraq. We got used to the idea of collateral damage. Charities sprung up for immigrants. Hmong. Central American. Vietnamese. The Cosby show and the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air told us what we should hope for American Black folks, Martin was a saint and Malcolm was a terrorist. We were allowed to wander the neighborhood unsupervised all summer long, bicycles bicycles, but we were cautioned about the dangers of cities.
And we had the internet. We had MTV. We lived the lie of capitalism and we knew, in every conceivable way we knew, that hope is delusional. Being who we are, we never got involved in politics. We think ideals are flimsy and suspect. There’s a reason we couldn’t find any one but an old man for a president: none of us wanted to get involved. We didn’t believe - we couldn’t believe - that it’d make a difference.
Urgent helplessness is who we are.
Prayer is triage for despair. It destroys urgency. You can’t maintain urgency if you acknowledge higher powers. The second you accept you can’t do it all, overwhelm dissolves. And Or let’s say you put yourself in the position of needing help: the hardness of the world resurrects heroes, and angels, and saints. So humility is a huge part of prayer’s efficacy, but humility is not the end of prayer. Prayer also annihilates the sensations of powerlessness. I mean cattle prods it to death. I can’t both ask for help and then refuse it. Alright maybe I can. I can and I do, often. But if I do it often enough I sooner or later call myself out. Acknowledging there are things I can’t do leaves me with the inalienable fact that there are some things I can. Not everything; no. But this thing, yes.
I am being free and easy with childhood development and nueroscience here, but I’m willing to say that children believe in gods and power and love and fear. We all believed in ourselves, once upon a time, when we were children. I am not willing to say it is all culture’s fault, that this system is evil, our families ruined us; name me any culture throughout history and I can tell you the people it broke, the cost, the cruelty.
And it’s not like Gen X is alone in it’s sorrow. After George Floyd’s murder and the backlash of white supremacy, I found myself reading a lot about the French resistance during the Second World War. Talk about failing states and human faith. These days, I’ve been reading about the Civil War. We know, if we think about it, that there was no simpler time; what we don’t know is how to find hope.
Here is where I’ve found it. God is not, despite appearances, cruel. There is no good versus evil paradox on the celestial plane. God/consciousness/the humming of the universe and sap rising in trees is all love. Confounding love. Bewildering love. Devastating love.
Oddball, cantankerous, blasphemy riddled prayer worked for me. With one eye rolling it worked for me, and here is why: turns out you don’t have to believe or understand. All you have to do is do. In my history of prayer, I doubted and silenced. I snarked and whimpered. But, with prayer there was also enormous surrender, admission of powerlessness, acknowledgement of my failure, my shoddy character, my terror and my tendency to break shit. Along with my prayer life there were little flowers and styrofoam cups, winter and lakes, birds singing. There was action. Responsibility. Relationship.
Prayer doesn’t change the world, people do that. You cannot change God, let alone impress him. Prayer works because it renders you - by you I mean us - responsible. We are responsible for our humanity. Breathern. Suckers. Prey. Hope is that thing you are choking on.
Next up: how not to die when you are choking.