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.