Saturday 6 July 2002

Pic of the day: "Lord Almighty, do I have to spell it out?"

Some thoughts on prayer

A pious friend visited me today. Later in the day I sat down to dictate an entry about e-books, when I was sidetracked by a question about prayer. The question was: Does prayer mean the same to all people, even within the same religion? The answer is clearly no. I can think of several different forms of prayer. But I think the main distinction would be between formal and free-form prayer.

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The most famous formal prayer in Christianity must be The Lord's Prayer, or "Paternoster" from the beginning of the Latin version. Actually, once you have learned it by heart it hardly matters whether it is in English or Latin: You know what it says, and it doesn't change from one time to the next. It is a short but thought-provoking prayer; but I will not go into the details of that today. What struck me was that to many people this may well be the only prayer they know. I understand that many people in Christian countries start to recite the Lord's prayer when they feel that their life is in mortal danger. (I guess other religions have other standard prayers, but I don't know if they have one that stands out like that.)

I know surprisingly little about Judaism, when I consider that it is the parent religion of my own Christianity. So at one time I set out to correct this by reading on the Net some introductory material about Judaism. I remember I was slightly taken aback by one of the descriptions of prayers: It seemed so ritual to me, even the body movements to accompany the words seemed to be fixed. Of course, this is largely true in Christian churches during services too. I grew up attending a Protestant church, where I followed my grandmother to Sunday service every third week or so. Most of the prayers were indeed written in the book, and people would stand up and sit down at specific points. I guess it is easier to overlook when you've grown up with it.

Later I joined (for lack of a better word) the Christian movement usually known as Smith's Friends. (In so far as you could join - there were no member lists, except in our hearts, back then.) This was originally a small group of mystics rather than an organized church, and there was no room for written prayers. They did have written songs, but that was pretty much it. You never knew the text of the day, or what songs would be sung, much less what anybody was going to pray for. This was quite refreshing. But even there, there was a similarity in style: The same tone of voice, the same intensity, the same form of address, the same small extra words... Clearly even here, prayer was a thing learned, in form if not in content.

I would at least in part comply with the standards when praying out loud. But to me, prayer has never really been different from talking to someone face-to-face. Of course, talking face-to-face wasn't always the same as it is today. When I was a child and lived as part of a family, there was a lot more emotion involved, including occasionally screaming and tears. So it could also be with prayer. Now there's not much emotion left in my life, and not in my prayer either. So the two still follow the same track, I guess.

You could say that on this free-form side, prayer borders on talking to your invisible friend. (Didn't we all have invisible friends when we were children?) On the other hand, I feel that formal prayer borders on magic spells. In fact, I cannot truly say where prayer ends and magic begins. Perhaps a sufficiently advanced prayer is indistinguishable from magic... Or perhaps magic, when insufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from prayer.

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The true difference between magic and prayer, I believe, is in the attitude. The heart of magic is to impose our will on the universe. The heart of prayer is to impress our wishes on God (or gods), who then hopefully will impose them on the universe...

Actually there is a form of prayer in which we try to impress God's will on ourselves. But I am not sure if this is very common, and perhaps it would be better to call it worship instead. I remember one of the late leaders of Smith's Friends tell the audience that "after you have finished praying, you should be silent for a while and listen for what God will speak to you". This made sense to me, and was hardly new: A conversation should not only be one-way, should it? But a magic spell is one way only.

Well, enough of that. I know this is not relevant to many of you, but then again there's always something new and something old in the Chaos Node!

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Any ridiculous errors in this text are caused by the speech recognition software! I am innocent! I wasn't even there! And besides, they asked for it!