A bridge to the eternal burning heart of compassion. Not good enough for everyone?

On the Internet, there is a meme that shows up from time to time among my left-wing friends. It depicts a small child praying, and the text is something like: “Prayer – a way to feel good without actually doing anything.”

That is a pretty strange judgment about stepping up in front of the blazing, unbearably bright flame of Love and saying: “Here I am, send me.”

It is true that in its most crude form, prayer can be a bit like voting for a socialist government: You ask someone else to make everything alright, preferably without too much expense for yourself, hoping that you and your loved ones will benefit from someone else’s sacrifice.

But hopefully it doesn’t end there. Perhaps it did for you, but then you may not be typical. Or if you are, that may be a very sad thing indeed. If you read about prayer from people who are really into it, or the teachings of the saints, you will find that prayer evolves into something very different. It becomes a fire that slowly eats away at our selfishness in all its forms: Greed, pride, envy, anger, antipathy, laziness, excessive appetites of all kinds … all the stuff that keeps us from actually loving our “neighbors” in this world.

Devotion and virtue are not two paths – they are two feet walking the same path.

Humans being what we are, this is not a fast lane. Depending on how much time we spend in prayer, and how willing we are to agree to the necessary sacrifices, years and decades can sometimes pass. But normally after a while it should become obvious to people that you are no longer the selfish pig you used to be.

So what do you do instead? Think about it. In the time that could have been spent in prayer, what is so important that you can be proud of not praying?

I think you may be confusing prayer with magic. Magic seeks to impose our will on the universe. Prayer seeks to commune with God or Heaven. That’s a pretty big difference, unless we actually think we know better than God. Well, sometimes we really do think so, because we are desperate and we doubt that God really understands how we feel. But in general, in what we may call “higher” forms of prayer, there is a huge difference.

I don’t see mocking people who try to become good, and who are aware they aren’t there yet, being a better use of your time. But each of us shall make account for himself. Actually, nothing worries me more than that, and few things except that. Still, for the good of the many, we must say all the words that should be spoken, before they are lost forever.