Thursday, January 07, 2010

More on prayer, petitionary and otherwise

As far as I can remember, I've only really attempted three kinds of petitionary prayer on my own since childhood:

1. The "please help me find my keys" prayer that mostly just calms me down enough to remember where they were

2. The "I am desperate to fall asleep after hours of insomnia so I'm going to lie here with my eyes closed and ask God to bless literally everyone I can think of" prayer where I try to list every person I've ever known until sleep comes.

Neither of those remotely qualify as turning to God without turning away from self and unless there is some dark consequence to me finding my keys, they don't seem to apply to the question I asked last night about one's responsibilities when asking God for something*.

3. Sometimes, when I'm passing a scene of an accident or something, I find myself thinking "Please let that person be OK" but that's almost a reflex, not a thought out and considered sort of prayer, so I don't know that it counts. Yet for all I know, a serial killer is in that ambulance, so I can't say that it's entirely divorced from these issues.

I've also been known to pray a "Hey, if there's anyone out here who can hear this, thank you so much for what just happened, I am so very grateful for all the wonderful gifts in my life," though I don't do that one often enough. I sometimes attempt more contemplative sorts of prayers, though I worry that my short attention span will be a problem. If there is a God of the prayer-listening variety, I hope God is understanding about prayers than begin meditative and wander off into earthly concerns and just plain thinking over things.

CC

*The concept of "blessing" is, I think, sufficiently diffuse and open to God's interpretation that I don't think any harm can come of it, should it be answered.

6 comments:

fausto said...

Neither of those remotely qualify as turning to God without turning away from self

Then your idea of what God is and how God responds is surprisingly narrow.

Yet for all I know, a serial killer is in that ambulance

That should make a difference? You're a Universalist.

Chalicechick said...

I don't see why, Fausto. If I'm praying entirely to get something, I don't see how I've turned away from self, even if I'm appearing to turn to God.

As for the serial killer in the ambulance, what I think about the eventual destination of his soul isn't relevant to the question of whether I hope he recovers.

CC

PG said...

"If there is a God of the prayer-listening variety, I hope God is understanding about prayers than begin meditative and wander off into earthly concerns and just plain thinking over things."

The deity I came up with in high school on the premise of a god in my own image is the Absent-Minded Goddess, and She totally gets what you're saying. (I got too overwhelmed by the Problem of Evil to continue thinking I believed in any of the traditional kinds of God, but the Absent-Minded Goddess fits just fine because shit happens when Her attention is elsewhere, and shit generally gets corrected in the long run because She remembers She left the earth on.)

LinguistFriend said...

I think that even Thomas Hardy (as in "Hap") would have liked the idea of the Absent-Minded Goddess.

Desmond Ravenstone said...

When I consider prayer in the context of divine omniscience, the only one that makes sense to me is the one uttered by Dom Deluis' character in the movie "The Twelve Chairs":

_Oh Thou Who Knows All! You know..._

Seriously, though. One thing I learned from many a Quaker is the idea of nonverbal prayer -- of simply opening oneself to the Divine, to whatever possibilities are out there, or within each of us.

kimc said...

I think in Process Theology, it goes the other way -- God prays to us to do something. I mean, that's an odd way to put it, but in process theology, God's powers are spiritual and we are God's hands in the world; so isn't that the equivalent of God praying to us to bring, oh, say, Peace on Earth?