I have a small “zendo” in my backyard that serves as a little “practice building.” That means yoga practice, meditation practice, various spiritual practices, and musical practice. It now has a piano in it, and the tuner stopped by the other day to evaluate it. Now, this is a wonderful guy: positive, friendly, helpful, skillful, just a gem. He is also, I think, a very serious Christian, one of the ones who practices what he preaches, which I admire. He looked around at all my thangkas and incense and offering bowls, which may very well have seemed like a pit of graven images to him; but if so, he didn’t let on. On the contrary, he said it was nice, and he complimented my meditation set-up: futon folded in half like a couch against the wall, meditation zabutons and cushions set on top. I told him that this room had been a great thing for my head, and called it my “mental health room.” I said it was a great place to meditate and contemplate. He said yes, a person sure needs that; either that or prayer, with so much going on these days.It was the “or” that stopped my brain for a moment. He was being completely sincere and positive; it was clear that there was nothing negative intended at all. But what I do in there sure as hell feels like prayer to me. I said “Yes, well, I certainly do a lot of prayer in here as well.” And that’s true, although it may not match his definition. We laughed, and that was that.
However, it really got my wheels turning.
What is prayer anyhow? How could something that seems to straightforward to one person be an issue so fraught with complexity to someone else? I think I am a relatively sane person in the 21st century, but I admit that in one moment I can feel an urge to “pray” about something, in the next moment doubt the efficacy or even the sanity of prayer, and in the next moment consider requesting my Tibetan monk teachers to pray for my sick friends. A few minutes later I find myself wondering why on earth I feel as though some people’s prayers would have more “juice” than someone else’s (you’ll remember my Calvinist Brain Devil from other blogposts), even though on a purely intuitive and emotional level I find myself comforted by asking for prayers from other humans who seem to have more of that spiritual “juice” (the Calvinist Brain Devil has a Catholic roommate.) Either way, this train of thought doesn’t go in a straight line.
I have several friends right now who are seriously ill in one way or another. My first instinct is to pray for them, which I have been doing, and to ask others to do so, but wow! Prayer is really a Hot Button item for me, as I am discovering.
I was probably 6 or 7 when I figured out that the thing I call “praying to Jesus for a bike” doesn’t work. Oh, yes, I’ve seen the film “The Secret,” and even though I don't buy a number of things put forth in that film, I am open to the fact that maintaining a positive visualization might help something manifest in your life. (I must state, though, that the Calvinist Devil and all of his Catholic, Buddhist and Pagan roommates think that doing this for purely material objects or for money is a misuse of the above-mentioned Juice, unless you’re going to do some Good with that money.) But praying to an entity that exists separately from yourself – a God that is somehow “Other” -- I struggle with that.
I also figured out when I was about 6 or 7 that praying for other things – like “please don’t let Grandpa die” – doesn’t always work either. I say “not always,” because sometimes when you pray for a sick person, they actually do get well, and that starts the whole spiral of befuddlement again, at least in my brain. One could address that issue by invoking the idea that healing takes many forms, and that one might pray for someone’s “ultimate healing” or “ultimate good;” but that doesn’t always occur to a 7-year-old.
So even as a little child, lying there late at night trying to figure out what the hell the grownups meant by “going to sleep and never waking up,” and what that would feel like, I decided that there was something wrong with the whole picture. By the time I was around 12, I remember thinking that my Protestant elders’ explanation that “God works in mysterious ways” would possibly be more accurately expressed as “We are ignorant and don’t understand God.” And, I decided that the first thing we clearly didn’t understand was what or whom we were praying to. God was clearly not a greybearded Guy In the Sky who spent leisurely eons figuring out new ways to confound us, nor was he the strangely androgenous figure with the kindly face and the blue drapey head-scarf that I prayed to as a tiny kid, and whom I was visualizing whenever people said “God.” (Obviously, either some elderly Italian’s fervent prayers for the grandchild born of my parents’ shocking Catholic-Protestant union took root in the infant’s cerebral cortex and grew a beautiful Beata Vergine Maria, or I spent a previous life up in the hills of Umbria praying to a statue of Mary.)
So, young though I was and still unable to really articulate it, I figured that either 1) God doesn’t exist, or 2) “God” must actually be some kind of numinous collective energy that pervades everything. If you accept #2, then ironically #1 is also true; God doesn’t exist if your notion of God involves any kind of omnipotent creator-being separate from your own being. (So much for most of Earth’s great faith traditions.) I also decided that if we are all part of this numinous collective energy, then there is no reason why there could not be some aspect of our singular or collective being that “continued” after our bodies died, although my notions of what this “aspect of being” might be have changed back and forth over the years. For awhile, this helped with the whole praying problem: If “God” was some kind of pervasive energy, then the energy of one’s prayers could potentially have an effect on that collective energy, although it might not necessarily be the direct effect you’re going for. It also solved the conundrum of the bike. While you could conceivably hold a positive thought in your brain that might help certain circumstances manifest, the notion of “pervasive energy” going over to Target and getting you a bike is sort of like the joke a four-year-old friend of mine once told me, which began “So Coffee walks into a Bar.”
On the other hand, let’s stay with that bike for a minute, because this is where another aspect of this whole prayer notion gets stuck and spins its wheels in my brain, and brings us back to my tuner friend and that perplexing “Secret” movie. What, indeed, IS the difference between “praying” and “visualizing?” If you’re holding a positive thought in your mind with the notion that this positive energy will somehow have an effect, are you visualizing or are you praying? The conventional way we’re taught to “pray” implies a recipient. If there is no guy in the sky, who is the recipient of my prayer that my friend’s virulent pneumonia will abate? If I try to quiet my mind and visualize my friend with pink healthy lungs taking big long oxygen-soaked breaths, is that not “praying?” It sure as hell feels like praying to me. Do I need Jesus or Medicine Buddha to also visualize my friend with pink healthy lungs taking big long oxygen-soaked breaths in order for it to have a positive effect, or is it simply that the force generated by the collective experience of Jesus and Medicine Buddha makes the energy of the visualization stronger, and lights up more juncture-points in “Indra’s Net,” or the collective being of the universe? Might it not be the collective belief-force of 20 generations of Italians that causes my keys to show up if I ask Saint Anthony to help me locate them? Surely, if more people generate positive energy in a particular direction, more overall positive energy is generated; and surely this is why, when we are having problems or when someone we know is ill, we say to others “please pray for my friend.” And no, it doesn’t matter if one person is better at generating this energy than someone else. I remember making a request of my Tibetan spiritual teachers to please pray for a sick friend; they of course agreed that they would do a special healing practice at a particular given time, and then said to me “And you must do it too.”
Perhaps our understanding of prayer is just as messed up as our understanding of karma. I wish I had a dollar for every time I heard this argument: If you pray for someone and they don’t get better, it’s “karma.” It’s very easy to imagine how that can become a vortex of delusion. You can keep praying and not question the efficacy of that practice, because if it doesn’t work it ain’t because prayers don’t work, it’s because of that bastard Karma. Then you can go one step farther: why pray? The person will get well or they won’t; it’s their karma. Oh, but excuse me – what if it’s their karma that I pray for them? We can see where this argument is going, and that is what my dearly beloved calls “disappearing up your own butt.”
The bottom line: We don’t get it. I don’t think we understand prayer and I don’t think we understand Karma, and I think that we secretly fear that they are mutually exclusive, when in fact they exist perfectly together in a non-linear way. The collective universal “web” is too large and intricate to be viewed all at once – and we are, as usual, stuck like glue to the notion of Results. We want prayer to work in an obvious way, and we want good people to be rewarded and bad people to be blown away and we want it NOW. But we can’t have that, and we never will. We have to sit in the middle of the mess, and continue to visualize our friends’ pink healthy lungs full of oxygen, or cancer-free cervix, or safely-removed brain tumor; to ask our friends and spiritual guides to do so as well, if that’s what feels right to us; and continue to create positive energy even if we don’t know where those ripples of “karma” will go, or whether there will be any humanly-perceptible “results.” And if that’s not praying, I don’t know what is.
Postscript: halfway through the writing of this blogpost, yesterday, I received a message that one friend is now cancer-free. Deo gracias, quisquis Deus est.
