TR

By Tom Robotham

Prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and theft. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

The day after the massacre in San Bernadino, California, The New York Daily News ran a front-page headline reading, “God Isn’t Fixing This.” In the margins around the headline were screenshots of Tweets from four Republican presidential candidates, each one saying the same thing. “Our thoughts and prayers are with the families and their victims.”

The headline struck some people as unfair. “What’s wrong with praying for the victims and their families?” read one typical comment on Facebook.

That’s a reasonable question. But as the editors of The Daily News pointed out, Republicans are doing nothing to tackle the problem of gun violence in this country. Moreover, the paper noted, they are blocking every Democratic initiative designed to do so—thus reducing their promises of prayer to “meaningless platitudes.”

Then again, isn’t this always the case? It’s not just Republicans, after all, who call for prayer after some high-profile tragedy. Politicians on the other side of the aisle do it just as frequently, as do newscasters.

My problem with this is twofold.

First, these public promises of prayer are utterly arbitrary, whether they come after a mass shooting, a devastating earthquake, a plane crash, or the deaths of soldiers in combat—as if human suffering is an occasional thing, rather than a daily fact of existence for millions of people here and around the globe.

To warrant prayers, moreover, it seems that people must meet a set of criteria. First, it helps if they’re American. Thus, during the invasion of Iraq, our “thoughts and prayers” were with our “men and women in uniform,” but not so much with the countless Iraqis who lost their lives. Second, it helps if you get your picture on CNN. And third, you must be deemed an “innocent” victim. You certainly won’t hear too many politicians saying their prayers are with Mexicans fleeing from poverty and violence. After all, they’re trying to enter our country illegally. Nor have I ever heard a public figure saying his or her thoughts and prayers are with the millions of people we incarcerate every year.

Many people, it seems, are either not our problem—or simply not deserving of our prayers. If there is a God, I wonder what it makes of all this.

Let me give you a sense of where I’m coming from. When I was a child, I prayed a lot. As I’ve noted in this space before, I derived my sense of God from my weekly attendance at a lovely old Episcopal church in my hometown of Staten Island, New York. Unlike many of my friends—who went to Catholic schools and churches and were subjected to the abuse of sadistic nuns—I always had the sense from my own priest and congregation that God was unconditionally loving—an old, white-haired man in the sky, but more like a kindly grandfather than the capricious tyrant of the Old Testament.

And so, at night, in the sometimes-foreboding darkness, I leaned on my elbows and prayed to “Him.” I’d pray for my family and friends. But some of my prayers were also selfish. As I approached adolescence, the Vietnam War raged on, and in moments of quiet reflection I often feared that I would not live to see adulthood. But not all of my prayers stemmed from specific worries. I was a highly sensitive child, and I remember one night in particular when I was 8 or 9 years old, having a vague but intense feeling that I was about to die. I had no physical symptoms. The fear was purely of a psychological nature. I felt that my soul was about to leave my body—and at that moment, I pleaded with God, “Please don’t take me yet.”

The older I got, however, the more I began to question this concept of prayer. Why would God answer my prayers, I wondered, and not the prayers of others? I’d known two neighborhood boys who had died in adolescence—one of leukemia, and the other of a brain tumor. I’m sure that their families prayed fervently for them. So what happened? God couldn’t hear them? Or He simply said, “Nah—sorry”?

Don’t get me wrong. I still understand the impulse to pray. We are, after all, so vulnerable and relatively powerless in these fragile bodies of ours, faced with the indifferent forces of nature and the ruthlessness of many of our fellow human beings. And for this reason, I haven’t rejected the idea of prayer altogether. I’ve just come to see it in a different way.

First, while I still regard myself as a spiritual person and believe very strongly that there is more going on in this world and universe than meets the eye, I do not (most of the time) believe in a God that intervenes in individual human affairs. Nor do I believe in an anthropomorphized God. Indeed, it strikes not only as childish to do so, but at odds with the Bible. The Commandment against making “graven” images, for example, is often tied to the prior Commandment, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” But in the context of the Hebrew tradition, it seems to me also to carry the implication that God cannot be comprehended, never mind represented. Thus, to think of God as a “father” who doles out favors to those who pray most fervently strikes me as both belittling and presumptuous.

Prayer, then, for me—when I do it—is nothing more than a kind of meditation: An opportunity—or attempt, at least—to get in touch with my deepest fears and desires so that I may better understand them. That said, I agree with Emerson that pleading for some specific outcome—healing or even comfort for the afflicted—actually undermines spirituality because it supposes a dualism rather than unity.

In that statement lies the great problem with commonplace prayer in our culture. We say, in essence, “please heal MY child; please comfort the families of our fellow Americans who were killed.” To make matters worse, public prayers are often far more absurd and trivial than this. Indeed, the practice of teams praying before football games is not just trivial—it is offensive, or should be, to anyone who takes prayer seriously. Whenever I think of this I’m reminded of Jimmy Fallon’s great skit, Tebowie, wherein he rewrites Bowie’s “Space Oddity” to poke fun at Tim Tebow’s pretentiousness habit of public prayer. The big moment comes when Fallon sings, “This is Jesus Christ to Tim Tebow, please leave me alone/ Don’t you know that I have better things to do.”

All of these practices, it seems to me, accentuate our sense of separation—the sense that we must “look out for Number 1” to paraphrase the title of a popular 1980s self-help book. Or, to the extent that we are looking out for the group, we must do so with an us-versus-them mentality. Hence the offensive phrase, God Bless America, which carries the implication that Americans are more deserving of God’s grace than people of other lands, let alone people of other religions.

Is this not the source of virtually all of our societal challenges today, and the proposed solutions to them? The answer to gun violence? Easy. Arm yourself and kill “them” before they can kill you. The answer to ISIS? Easy. “Bomb the shit out of them,” as Donald Trump put it. The answer to Syrian refugees. “Not our problem.”

The one popular expression that would seem to transcend this is, “All Lives Matter.” Trouble is, it is most commonly uttered as code for, “Black people should stop complaining.” But in its pure form, the statement is true: All lives matter. How much better off this world would be if more people struggled on a daily basis to cultivate this mindset. Indeed, if we want a mantra for our prayers in these troubled times, I can think of no better one than that.