October 15, 2002

Andy over at the monkey-ridden World Wide Rant has had a loss of faith. Or, rather, his faith shrivelled up, sloughed off and drifted into the corner with the dust and cat dander.

I don't blame him. This notion of a God who operates in history, and affects the course of human events, is one of the more harmful ideas to survive the cauldron of the ancient Near East. From it springs the ethos of the Chosen People, the violence of Jihad and Crusade, and a few dozen other unpleasant mass human behaviors. Such instances of Monkey Mind are the flip side of prayer: for some folks, believing that God listens to you means that it makes sense to listen to God, and if your God tells you to shave off all your body hair, hop aboard a jetliner with a box cutter, and fly that sucker into a tall building, then you'll do it.

I don't believe in God, either, but I still pray. That's not quite the paradox that it seems to be, because God is just a word. A construct, best illustrated by the monotheistic myths, their polytheistic counterparts, and all of the other legends, creeds, and spooky beliefs produced by cultures the world over for untold millennia. All of them, it seems to me, are attempts by ambulatory packages of proteins and amino acids to explain the wrenching, terrifying, inexplicable experience of being aware of being. Rocks and doors and canisters of frozen orange juice don't get to indulge themselves in such fashion, and even if they did, we'd never know about it because they don't have the means of passing their knowledge of the Divine Inanimate on to others. That's the crucial bit, particularly for the text-based religions. Their idea of God survives independent of any one person's musing, and accretes onto itself thousands of years' worth of human culture and experience.

But that crusty verbiage isn't what I pray to, if I can be said to pray to any "thing" at all. Like Andy, I don't think it makes much sense to beseech the God-word to help you out of a jam: either you'll get out of it or you won't, and it's highly doubtful that the mighty being who toasted the top of Mount Sinai is going to change his plans just for you. Well, shoot: I was going to have Sally get broiled in jet-fuel this morning, but she's praying so nicely that I think I'll clear the smoke a bit, let her find her way to the remaining stairwell and get out just in time. But not that guy Andy. He is so dead. Peace out!

So what's the point of prayer, then?

It depends on what your sense of place in the universe is. For my part, I'm pretty amazed that my consciousness springs from a repeated pattern of atoms arranged into a twisty coil of of a molecule that directs the processes of protein synthesis. To me, that's miraculous. I think about the organization there, and the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Which doesn't mean that I'm praying to a watchmaker, mind you. But it means that I acknowledge the order of things. I try to be aware of it. Sometimes, I can tell when I'm working against it: I call that sensation "swimming upstream." Often, I can make choices and take actions in my life which relieve that sensation. Other times, I can't, or won't. A bit of praying helps me to figure out what needs doing, or, sometimes, what I should stop doing. And even if I get nothing out of it, I've acknowledged the order of things. That, to me, seems like a good thing to do.

So, what's prayer for?

Several things. It's not a kneel-by-the-bedside-and-primly-fold-the-hands thing that I do. It's an on-the-fly, intuitive, groove-with-the-great-river sort of thing: If it's OK, if it's the way things are supposed to unfold, I'd really like to be able to find my bike in the midst of this choking cloud of dust, and ride out of downtown on it, and find my girlfriend, and make it home to my apartment before they decide to nuke us or crash another plane onto my head. I consider that an effective prayer because, as it turns it, it was OK, and exactly the way things were supposed to unfold. The prayer kept me focused, kept me from dropping and losing the keys to my bike locks, kept me from turning the wrong way in the suddenly black morning and crashing into wreckage or some such thing. Very cool.

So yeah, I talk to God. Sometimes, God talks back, which is a different order of experience and one I won't go into right now, because it's freaky and probably means that I need a neurologist pretty damn quick. But I don't make the mistake of thinking that God's 'plan' is anything that I would like, or want, or need, or understand, or could possibly have any influence over. God's not hanging out in the sky keeping track of the sparrows and bodies as they fall. God's not hanging out anywhere, really. Which can be sad, and lonely, and small. But sometimes, like on a windy day five years ago when I heard a voice ask me Are you ready? and I answered Yes...I think, it's joyful, and expansive, and infinite.