Religious traditions typically include personal and often group prayer as a component to their beliefs. This gives rise to the question that as a believer and practitioner of a particular religion, how do you pray and who do you pray to?
As Catholics we were brought up to believe in and encouraged to recite certain formulaic prayers, primary among these were the Our Father, ostensibly prescribed by Jesus himself. The Hail Mary was second in popularity and the prayer to the doxology: “Glory be to the father, the son and the Holy(Ghost)….. ” came up a distant third in the hierarchy of formulaic prayers. (At some point in our lives the “Holy Ghost” became the “Holy Spirit”, maybe so our generation of children wouldn’t confuse the third person of the Trinity with a popular cartoon character of the time.)
Some of the shorter prayers had tag lines to them that advised us how many days would be cut off our sentences to purgatory for each time that we recited them. Superstition or meaningful religious exercise… it depends. 
So, today, how do we pray and who do we pray to? Jesus seems to be the popular recipient of most of our entreaties for help and expressions of gratitude… the two most common purposes of prayer. His “Blessed Mother” seems to be a close second. We were taught that you could only pray to god, but you could ask others to intercede with “Him” on your behalf. 
All prayer is a function of our imagination. In our minds we conceive the recipient of our prayers in much the same way as we picture the person on the other end of a telephone conversation. So what are we visualizing in our imaginations when we pray? Is it “Fundamental Jesus” the Caucasian fellow in the robe and long flowing blondish hair and beard, a man of strength, character and compassion, the concept seemingly favored by medieval artists that we pray to?
Or, do we pray to a deity unknown and unknowable by us. Like students of anatomy trying to describe and identify the species of a small animal by groping for and feeling a pile of bones in an opaque bag, do we grope and stumble in our own dark bag of life, trying to ascertain the nature of our god, the object of our prayer, through the clues of revelation contained in scripture?  
How do we intuit and conceptualize this object of our prayer, the person place or thing to which or whom we direct our prayer?
On a personal level prayer to me is an awareness and either a sense of gratitude or a call for help to a presence of which I am acutely aware, a presence that I constantly experience but about which I’m clueless to describe. 
In my childhood I created pictures of the objects of my prayer who, not surprisingly, resembled the plaster statues present in churches and religious stores of the time. To me this was like having Jesus or Mary on the other end of a telephone conversation where only one party speaks and the other party listens. Admittedly though, some of those “conversations” would result in an insight on my behalf that could be characterized as “the answer to my prayers.”
I admit that in conceptualizing the object of my prayers, I pretty much disregarded the image of Christ inspired or represented by the ubiquitous “Infant of Prague.” I guess I preferred a stronger older looking deity than someone younger than I. 
We do tend to create a personal relationship with this entity we call “God” and turn to it when we’re in need. When the sick child recovers we deem it the result of divine intervention but when he or she doesn’t recover and dies we can’t fit this scenario into our otherwise believable paradigm of prayer and response. We rationalize that god must have had a reason to allow (or cause?) the bad stuff to happen. 
For me the awareness of a spirit or force or essence to my life is a constant presence. Though I have long surrendered my plaster cast images of my god, I frequently turn to this awareness, acknowledge it’s presence and express gratitude for the many “blessings” I’ve received presumably through, from or because of it. In times of pain, disappointment or hurt I don’t look at its presence as a betrayal, but only with a benign sense of acceptance, aware that in the greater, maybe “cosmic” scheme of existence, things don’t always go our way. 
My prayer then is one of both gratitude and acceptance to a god unknown by me, a god beyond human understanding, but nonetheless the driving and defining force of our existence. 

We all have a longing for the divine…
an innate craving to make sense of our own existence and mortality.

Our longing is a search for our god… for a reason that we must die… this search for our god is really a search for ourselves… a search within rather than a search without?

Who are we? Why do we exist? To what purpose if any are we alive? And, ultimately, why must we die?

We know that these are questions without answers, no matter how strong our religious beliefs, beliefs based on hope and faith with a lack of certitude, beliefs that rely on stories handed down over thousands of years, bedrock stories that may themselves have been anthropomorphic in origin.

The three major religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are all based on these stories.

This search for the divine, frequently accompanied by a longing for certitude, has manifested itself in some bizarre ways over time through ritual beliefs and practices.

Beyond ritual though, throughout history various religious groups have acted violently towards nonbelievers, infidels, either within the group or collectively against other groups of nonbelievers.

Wars have been fought, crusades undertaken and individuals tortured and killed because of a clash in religious beliefs.

Though this longing for the divine has on occasion mutated (or metastasized) into an exercise of hatred and evil, this seems an aberration and the longing remains inherent in each of us as we spend our lives seeking this awareness, this closeness to the essence of what it is that makes us human…  “the divine purpose” for our existence.

If there is a divine power, whether by definition or through faith, it would seem that, beyond existing as a mere biological organism, my life depends on that power and continually seeks to unite with it on my journey through time and space.

It is a longing for something that I realize is beyond my attainment, but is nonetheless a quest that sustains me on that life journey.

Today is good Friday… today we remember the murder of Jesus Christ at the hands of the Roman empire. Like many charismatic leaders before and after him, Christ who is viewed as a threat to the governing power is put to death out of the complex relationship between the conquered and the conqueror. Jesus was a socio-religious leader with a large following of the indigenous population, a following that presented a potential threat to the existing power structure among the population as well, to a lesser degree, to the governing Romans. This threat grew out of an internicene religious conflict between the power structure of the indigenous population and the followers of Jesus.

In the face of various revolutionary movements at the time,the Roman governor sought  to quell any disturbance that could constitute a threat to his power. By killing Jesus he both mollified the existing indigenous power structure and secondly eliminated the head of a potential threat to Roman power.  At the time, murdering Jesus was a political act that grew less out of a religious motivation and more out of political expediency.

We don’t celebrate the death of Jesus today, rather we remember it because of its religious significance as the first step in a sequence of actions which are the basis for the current religious beliefs of millions of people.

There were two plastic seats at the end of aisle 12, about ten feet from the end of the aisle and positioned against a large table currently with a cookie display on it. I was resting…  sitting on one of them and in my mind’s eye I could see the electric cart with my 94-year-old father turning the corner with a vengeance searching a new aisle for treasures or treats to buy.

Food shopping had been his weekly pleasure when I would take him to the Burlington Market Basket grocery store, his only venture outside of the small house where he  spent his days

“Hey Dad!” I said in my own mind, and I could almost see as my father looked up, smiled and waved to me, then put his head down as he resolutely resumed his mission.

He’d been dead now for over 11 months, yet it seemed like just yesterday when we had cruised these aisles together with me usually in tow, pushing my own shopping cart and ready to reach for something on a shelf above my father’s head, something he wanted, but something out of his reach.

“Hold on Dad… let me get that for you.”

“Thanks Don… no put it back… too much salt…”

And off he’d go, turning the throttle grip on the handle on the super market cart whose large basket in front was filling with food and merchandise…  canned vegetables, yogurt… the jelly donuts on occasion, if they were on sale, a quart of Brigham’s ice cream to be softened in the microwave and drunk, all manner of food, both for nutrition as well as comfort.

“I need paper towels… can you put them in your cart… there’s no room here?”

We’d usually go our separate ways at the outset, with my dad driving the electric cart like the lead aircraft in a fighter squadron while I did my own family shopping, frequently checking back on my father as we made our rounds separately but together

We always met up though at the frozen food aisle, one of the last aisles in the store where I’d take a succession of frozen meals out of the freezer case for perusal  by my dad, most of which were rejected because of their high sodium content.

The jelly donuts we’d often share, after the car had been packed and the electric cart returned to the store, were our reward, the capstone on another fruitful shopping trip. And, as I prepared to get up from one of the plastic seats at the end of Aisle 12, I could almost taste the sweetness of those donuts and savor the memory of my father.

January 10, 2015

Paul Snyder is an attorney and a 1966 graduate of Notre Dame. Married, he is the father of three and the grandfather of seven children.

After all my musing about the ephemeral and ethereal nature of the phenomenon we call “God,” I’m sitting at the Notte Dame grotto, a place that was once significant to my spiritual life some fifty years ago. The spark of spirituality for this form of worship, long buried, still lives within me, though it’s expression, more muted more nuanced and less dogmatic is based less on a one way conversation with a human image of a god/man but more of an openness to the essence of this place an essence that evokes feelings of spirituality; feelings both of hope and of gratitude.

This place is evocative, though not in the sense that it once was. My own maturity process, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually gives me a different perspective to engage that part of my nature which earlier I would have called “prayer.”

There is a certain purity of place that penetrates the skepticism and cynicism through which I frequently tend to view organized religion.

It’s not 1966 and my prayer is more of an openness to that which is within me, god within, rather than the recitation of a series of formulaic prayers directed to a person (Jesus, Mary and an assortment of saints represented by plaster statues) asking them to invoke their spiritual powers on my behalf.

To quote or to paraphrase Father Adrian Van Kaam and others:  “Faith is a journey to be lived rather than a mystery to be solved.”

As I venture on that journey, I have returned to this place that was once a wellspring of support for my life of faith. As I now return here, I continue to find peace, solace and substance for my faith though in a much different way.

We go through life experiencing various levels of cognitive/spiritual awareness from the humdrum repetition of our daily activities to the so-called “ah-ha” moment when some profound insight breaks upon us in a wave of awareness, understanding or the deeper insight of sharp pain, physical or emotional.

So, we operate at these different levels of awareness ranging from the surface level to a deeper level through to an occasional profound level of understanding cognitively spiritually and emotionally. The depth of this understanding varies from person to person as well as within each of us as we move from situation to situation throughout our adult lives.

Our “faith” and our understanding Of our relationship with our “god entity” is a product of this cognitive awareness.  Does our image of God and our faith come at a surface level straight from the Baltimore Catechism and remain at that simplistic point over our lifetimes while at the same time our cognitive awareness in other fields continues to grow commensurate with our level of maturity?  Should the understanding of our faith expand at that same exponential level of our human development or remain static and stuck at the level of a child?

There is a difference between a simple and childlike faith and a simplistic faith. A simple faith is one unadorned by obtuse semantic constructs while a simplistic one is unadorned by any intellectual or spiritual discernment.

As our faith develops we naturally look to others for guidance and example. These would be our spiritual leaders and mentors. These men and women may or may not be involved with the institutional practice or the business of religion.

Usually spiritual leaders are not self-proclaimed but rather recognized as such by those around them.

The spiritual mentors I have encountered in my life have universally been men and women of great humility who would feel uncomfortable if you referred to them as paragons of spirituality.

There are others engaged in the practice or business of religion who wear their self anointed title of spiritual master and who proclaim their faith at a very simplistic level for all those who would follow them. Their God sits on his celestial throne in majesty and looks out over his universe as a shepherd looks over his flock of sheep and only the Good Shepherd understands the mystery of existence so we must listen to him totally and without question.

That faith, operatingt at a simplistic level of awareness, gains no spiritual insight from the profound events of life that affect us, especially the pain of death and the joy of birth, events that shape and mold our faith well beyond the surface level of a simplistic undiscerned belief.

Simple faith is not the blind acceptance of sheep following their master through life, but rather one that is engaged fully and is blissfully absorbed by the wonders of creation, a creation that unfolds for us each day of our lives.

Our cognitive and spiritual awareness grows and becomes all-encompassing as we fully embrace our roles in this ever unfolding act of creation seeking the God within us rather than a celestial magician or puppet-master.

Each of us is, by virtue of our birth, both a philosopher and theologian because as a result of that birth we all face certain death.

The understanding of immortality we seek could be a Chimera always out of our grasp or could, on the other hand, be found in the richness of the present moment, alive for us as we journey through life, and affirmed at that journey’s end as we look back on the sum of those wonderful moments.

We should leave behind our simplistic faith and move to a simple faith that grows out of the profound awareness of the wonders of creation around us this instant.

And finally, we should remember the importance of looking for spiritual leaders and mentors. We must seek them out; they should not be imposed upon us by an institutional clerical bureaucracy. We know them by their lives, not by their affiliation

13 years of living and growing a time of shared love and work shared hurt, shared pain and shared joy.

Shared fears, shared anticipation; we’ve lived in the present and looked to the future.

Fullness of life and fullness of possessions sometimes resulting in cluttered minds and cluttered spaces but always we have been reaching, grasping and growing.

Living our lives, we have not been content with watching them pass.

We have been blessed with beautiful and loving children who provide a focus or prism for our energies, breaking them into all the colors of the spectrum.

As families shatter around us we continue on, struggling to deal with our problems, committed to making our family survive through love and purpose.

It has not been like we thought it would be 13 years ago today, but in spite of the scars our relationship has a beauty and resiliency that is wonderful to live in.

I love you!

Don

This is something I wrote to Sheila on our 13th anniversary.

My little friend stands about 2 feet tall. We spend a lot of time together these days, he and I… Sometimes we go shopping together. He’s especially partial to zucchini. When we see the zucchini display he points and says “Ehh”;  sometimes he’ll stretch out of his seat in the supermarket to reach a sweet potato, pointing and calling it by name: “Ehh.” Come to think of it, he names most of the things he sees by pointing to them and calling them “Ehh.” The other day though I asked him if he wanted a cookie. I think he said “cookie “in response though it could’ve been “ookie.”  But, I know for sure that it wasn’t “Ehh.”  I was so excited that I called his mother to tell her.

On the way back to the car we saw a bunch of pigeons sitting on a roof. I said “Those are pigeons on that roof.” He said “roof”…  well it could’ve been “oof.”  Then, looking at the car he said “ar.”  “Ar” is close enough to “car” for me, but I didn’t call his mother though because by now this was becoming old stuff.

Later that day in another shopping cart in another grocery store my little friend saw a pumpkin faced helium balloon.  “Ehh! Ehh! Ehh!” he proclaimed emphatically, pointing up to the balloon. If he calls anything by name three times that means he really wants it. Anything named “Ehh, Ehh, Ehh” is not to be denied nor disregarded so I undid the “Ehh, Ehh, Ehh” from the other mylar balloons with strings and attached it to the handle of our shopping cart. With the “Ehh, Ehh, Ehh” trailing behind us we cruised the aisles looking for chocolate fudge bars.  My little friend wasn’t much interested when eventually we did find them. But, he really did enjoy reeling in the “Ehh, Ehh, Ehh” by its ribbon so he could bounce it off the brim of my baseball cap, marveling with laughter over his accomplishment.

Well…  it was a long day that passed too quickly and when I dutifully finished recounting the events of the day to his mother my little friend put the exclamation point on it all…  He said with great feeling: “Ehh!”

The zucchini was good that night and even if you went looking for them you probably wouldn’t be able to find the tiny teeth marks where my little friend had been gnawing on it.

Ehh!

We spend a good deal of time during our lives wondering about and looking for our God.  We read; we study; we pray and we engage in various liturgies.  I think that is a fair statement that encompasses all religious beliefs and traditions.  But no matter how much we read how hard we study,  how often we pray and how many different liturgies we attend, for many of us  this god is elusive and this elusive God can only be found in the stillness and quiet our own minds.

Our God does not live in the history books that we call scripture.  Our God is not to be found in the repetition of formulaic prayers.  And we don’t find our God by standing sitting or making appropriate gestures at different points during our various liturgies.

All of these things: study, prayer, liturgy… have a function in the search for our god, but they are only “table setters” aids, as it were, on our quest for the divine.

It is only in The stillness of our bodies and the quiet of our minds that we’re able to find our god, or better yet: where our god is able to find us.