I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention.
Mary Oliver
* * *
Twenty-five years ago something went awry with my vision while I was reading (of all things!) Hopeful Realism, by the liberal theologian Doug Ottati, during a conference at Princeton Seminary. Words squiggled on the page.
I covered my right eye. Everything looked fine through my left eye. I covered my left eye. Everything looked blurry. Rapid blinking didn’t help. Nor did eyedrops.
A scratch on the cornea, I surmised.
My optometrist took one look and referred me to an ophthalmologist in Winchester. He took one look and said, “Histoplasmosis. Blood is seeping on your retina. Not uncommon. But the bleeding won’t stop. It must be cauterized.
When?
Now. It will only take a second.
What will that do?
It will make you blind in the right eye.
For how long?
Permanently.
Permanently blind?
Yes.
And you will do it right now before I go home?
Yes.
And I will be blind in that eye for the rest of my life?
Yes.
Sorry, but I’d like to ponder this a bit. I’d like to tell my family and congregation. I’d like to ask for prayers.
Go ahead, he said. But it won’t make a difference.
On Sunday I told my congregation. One after another each took my hand and said, I’ll be praying for you.
On Monday I returned to Winchester. I sat in a chair, head braced, eyes wide open.
Flash. Zap. Lights out.
I still have peripheral vision. But otherwise I’m legally blind in my right eye. I see things differently now.
I can’t thread a needle, but I can do most everything else I’ve ever done. I can read, drive, bike, play racquetball, split wood, type, walk, chew gum, and think.
I think about prayer.
No, prayer didn’t make a difference. I didn’t expect it to. I know prayer is no substitute for intelligence, ingenuity, and work.
There’s no empirical evidence to prove prayer works. I know that. You know that.
And yet we still pray.
Even when we know better or don’t mean to, we pray.
And the more we pray the more we see it’s not so much about speaking, asking, and getting as it is about listening, accepting, and belonging.
It’s about paying attention to wild geese and all our other kindred in the family of things.
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See Paula’s “Cone of Silk & Spools-Lonaconing, MD” on the home page. Posted Jan. 22, 2023
I resonate with that – listening, accepting, belonging… and paying attention. Those are the key to prayer for me… more the what I do after I pray. I still ask; but what I ask for has changed over the years – because I have learned to listen, I accept (eventually), and have come to know I belong.
In the 70’s, as a young single mother, struggling to find my way forward, I found this gem: “ Search in reading, ask in prayer, find in meditation, hold in love”…& that’s when paying attention is the gift that keeps on giving! Thank you once again for the deep dive… & I hear the birds!
Quakers of the “unprogrammed” persuasion, pray by listening. God already knows what we would say.
thank you for that comment. Prayer by listening. We go so noisily through our lives when we would be better served to really listen. I also like the other comment that linked prayer to meditation and health. Listen to others and to your world.
You are courageous, as most people I know believe in the “power” of prayer. Sure enough — no modern scientific evidence that prayer produces conscious desired outcomes. On the other hand, prayer, like meditation, reduces stress and anxiety and induces quieter, calmer states of being. And we do know that stress is a contributor to illness, from the benign to the terminal. I revere Oliver’s poetry and her extraordinary ability “to pay attention.” Meditation/prayer as attention by conscious choice results in a calmer, more peaceful life as we all move forward to face death one day. Serenity: Isn’t it one beautiful face born of love and gratitude! And maybe the best partner when it is our time to suffer pain and loss. Two eyes, two nostrils, two lungs, two breasts, two arms, legs, and feet for most — we came with our own spare parts. And we didn’t even pray for those miracles! I wish that we didn’t name pain and suffering an inadequate or failed showing of “prayerful faith.” This is evidence of hard people not paying attention. The logs in the eyes that blind seeing people! I’m grateful that yours was blood, and that you had a spare.
And acknowledging all those amazing positive things (coincidences?) that happen after prayer.
Well, I think prayer does work in many situations. I see it as sending/connecting energy. It is similar to healing energy work such as Reiki, which I have performed. Very intuitive, but real nonetheless. My late husband was able to use Reiki to help heal several people from cancer, for example. And I have intuitively recognized a malady that I hadn’t been told about.
Empirical evidence is all very well, but as a certain bard said, “There is more in heaven and earth …”
I have been spending some time with the Iliad and Odyssey recently. Back then, the Gods were fully engaged in the affairs of humankind. They were akin to chess masters in their worldly manipulations, while retaining all too human traits – good and bad. The lives of mere mortals turned on adequate sacrifices, intonations, and favors of the Gods.
In our time, the practice of regular prayer, like sacrificing of olden days, maintains our relationship with our heavenly hosts, be they Gods or saints, along with family, friends, and pets who await us on the other side.
Old Testament prayer seems focused on sacrifice and beseeching a wrathful God. New Testament prayer is new and improved in its focus on shorter length, being private between you and God, with an assumption of a focus on sincerity and righteous motives on the part of individuals and congregations.
There are also the “when I find myself in times of trouble,” break-the-glass prayers, which Paul McCartney made famous in his song capturing the vision of his mother in a dream. Her advice, “Let it be.”
This would seem to support the notion of prayer rooted in “listening, accepting, and belonging.” Of course, where you direct your prayer is another matter.
“I heard Allah and Buddha were singing at the Savior’s feast.
And up in the sky, an Arabian Rabbi
Fed Quaker oats to a priest.
Pretty good, not bad, they can’t complain.
‘Cause actually all them gods are just about the same.”
John Prine
I believe prayer is communication with the Divine, the sacred, the holy. We get all kinds of hung up on the nature of the Divine. Terribly foolish of us since the Divine reveals Herself in many millions of ways. I accept the Bible’s definition. As Woody Guthrie said, only one definition of God in the Bible. God is love. Prayer & fellowship & love saved me from alcohol. Prayer works for me.
I am so appreciative – always – of the thoughts you provoke me to study “inside myself” and then share with others. The previous comments also … thank you all. We are on this path to share and, as our friend and author wrote: “it is about listening, accepting, and belonging.”
Prayer seems to reflect that human need for deepest yearnings, cosmic connection, positive energy, and paying attention. As spiritual writer Ted Loder has affirmed, “Prayer is paying attention, attention to anything”. In fact, he says the following which resonates with me: “For at last I believe life itself is prayer, and the prayers we say shape the lives we live, just as the lives we live shape the prayers we say”.
Back when I was a churchgoer I really liked prayers of all kinds. Harold Kushner said in a book, this is a bad paraphrase, Leibowitz goes to Temple to talk to God. I go to Temple to talk to Leibowitz. The social parts of worship are huge. If (when) we don’t worship any more, how will we replicate the spoken out loud messages we need to send to God or the universe and to each other?
You said, “I know prayer is no substitute for intelligence, ingenuity, and work.” But isn’t intelligence, ingenuity and work (toward an outcome) a form of prayer?