On Prayer

 What is Prayer?

What good is Prayer?

What is prayer when the most consistent and dependable attribute of God is silence?

What is prayer when the most consistent and dependable attribute of God is invisibility?

What is prayer if, no matter how despairingly I cry out, the invisibility and silence stay the same?

What is prayer when the odds of it coming true are the same as without prayer?

What is prayer when the prayer of a righteous person feels like it means nothing? Or does the “fervent prayer of a righteous person availeth much?” James 5:16

What is prayer if my belief in God has disintegrated into the nothingness or impossibility?

What is prayer beside talking to myself?

It seems to me that whether or not my faith in God is ever restored, prayer just keeps on. I keep right on talking to myself as if there is someone else listening. It seems to me to be a basic human trait... talking to myself and/or an imaginary friend.

So maybe prayer is self talk. But what good is it? What does it do? Is it hopeful dreaming? Does it presume an imaginary friend? It sure isn’t Santa Claus showering on us the many things we desire. What is prayer doing? Who is it talking to? Who is listening? Anybody home? One thing we know for sure is that we are listening to our own prayers. Maybe that is what we need most, a voice within reminding us what we have forgotten. We know that we cannot guarantee answered prayers or even acknowledged prayers. Words fall in the void between the cracks sometimes lost forever unless I remember my own words that I cast in the nothingness, the no-thing-ness never to retrieve. Other than my possible acknowledgement of my own voice, there is no other response besides silence and invisibility.

I still find myself talking to myself as if I was praying. I ask myself, who am I talking to? But never is there an answer. Never. Unless it is me. Sometimes I end up answering myself because I so desperately need interaction, a two way conversation, instead of me jabbering away. But on I go, talking and talking, knowing full well that after 62 years, I will get nothing but silence and invisibility. That is proof in and of itself. And ultimately, the best thing for me during those times is silence, quieting the voices in my head.

Often I run out of people to relate to that are even a little bit close to where I am within. Then I listened to an interview with Elie Wiesel on Speaking of Faith. I’m not sure if I found any real definition of prayer but did get a bit of clarification of ways that prayer and faith might, just might, be woven into this life of groundlessness where people tell themselves a story that says they have a big buddy in the sky and that all authority is above the clouds and yet there is nothing to show for that story; nothing but silence and invisibility. But somehow, some of these words from an auschwitz survivor resonate deep within. I guess we all have to work with what we have. After 50 years of telling myself a story contrary to reality, I’m just amazed to hear someone tell a story of heartbreak and despair as I stand in wonder of the hope it gives. Maybe I am not alone. Maybe hope is not a gift from above but a gift we give each other. Or even a gift we give to ourselves. It seems to me that there are ways that we can give ourselves hope, reason to go on, a positive outlook, etc. based on our self-talk. For me, I used to think of myself as totally depraved like my religion taught. Well, after many years that seemed to be working directly against who I am and who I want to be. As I began to see the basic goodness deep within me, I could stop berating myself with self-talk and start looking for and identifying that basic goodness. Now that is a way that “prayer” does a lot of good as self-talk. Self fulfilling prophecy works the same way but in the reverse. If we hear how bad we are enough times, whether from ourselves or from others, we begin to believe it. And it is a very powerful sort of belief that affects everything we do.

Prayer as Becoming Still and Settled

"Deep down, we know that when we step back, breathe, allow our agitation to settle, and simply start paying attention, we often see new possibilities in situations that once seem intractable... only in this contemplative state are we able to touch the truth..." (Parker Palmer, The Politics of the Brokenhearted)

Prayer as a Testament to Despair and Suffering

“Elie Wiesel stands in the modern imagination as a towering moral figure. He’s known for his work on behalf of the Jewish people and also other peoples across the world who face suffering and persecution. At the same time, Wiesel is often cited as an intellectual symbol of reasonable religious despair. In his memoir, Night, which has recently landed on best-seller lists five decades after its publication, Elie Wiesel declared that he lost his faith forever at Auschwitz. Let's explore what that declaration meant and how it has evolved in Elie Wiesel’s life and his perspective on the world.” 

Why and how is prayer such a strong part of life? I haven’t found it yet but this seems to me to be the place to begin, from the bottom up, seeing life from below the surface. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a contemporary of the concentration camps, but didn’t make it into one because he was hanged by the Nazis before he got there, said this: “It remains an experience of incomparable value that we have for once learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed and reviled, in short, from the perspective of the suffering.” Anti-Nazi theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer is hanged

Elie Wiesel may be ringing true with me because he is describing prayer as a response to despair and suffering: “So when words bring you closer to the prisoner in his cell, to the patient who is dying on his bed alone, to the starving child, then it’s a prayer.”

Prayer as Remembrance 

Here’s an excerpt from Elie Wiesel’s Nobel lecture of December 11th, 1986, read by Rabbi Harold Schulweis.

RABBI HAROLD SCHULWEIS:

“And here we come back to memory. We must remember the suffering of my people, as we must remember that of the Ethiopians, the Cambodians, the boat people, Palestinians, the Mesquite Indians, the Argentinean desaparecidos — the list seems endless.

Let us remember Job who, having lost everything — his children, his friends, his possessions, and even his argument with God — still found the strength to begin again, to rebuild his life. Job was determined not to repudiate the creation, however imperfect, that God had entrusted to him. Job, our ancestor. Job, our contemporary. His ordeal concerns all humanity. Did he ever lose his faith? If so, he rediscovered it within his rebellion. He demonstrated that faith is essential to rebellion, and that hope is possible beyond despair. The source of his hope was memory, as it must be ours. Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair. I remember the killers, I remember the victims, even as I struggle to invent a thousand and one reasons to hope. Mankind must remember that peace is not God’s gift to His creatures, it is our gift to each other.”

Prayer Without Any Expectation

ELIE WIESEL:

“I no longer ask You for either happiness or paradise; all I ask of You is to listen and let me be aware and worthy of Your listening. I no longer ask You to resolve my questions, only to receive them and make them part of You. I no longer ask You for either rest or wisdom, I only ask You not to close me to gratitude, be it of the most trivial kind, or to surprise and friendship. Love? Love is not Yours to give.

“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.
Never shall I forget that smoke.
Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.
Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever.
Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.
Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.
Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself.
Never.”

― Elie Wiesel, Night

"As for my enemies, I do not ask You to punish them or even to enlighten them; I only ask You not to lend them Your mask and Your powers. If You must relinquish one or the other, give them Your powers, but not Your countenance.

"They are modest, my prayers, and humble. I ask You what I might ask a stranger met by chance at twilight in a barren land. I ask You, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to enable me to pronounce these words without betraying the child that transmitted them to me. God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, enable me to forgive You and enable the child I once was to forgive me too. I no longer ask You for the life of that child, nor even for his faith. I only implore You to listen to him and act in such a way that You and I can listen to him together.”

MS. TIPPETT:

I’m wanting to ask you if, in this journey from being a person who felt that his — or who would say that your faith was gone forever, were there any dramatic moments or turning points where you couldn’t make that statement anymore?

MR. WIESEL:

I couldn’t make it ten minutes later. At that moment, I made it. And because it was there, I had to make it. But as I said earlier, then I went back to prayer. Again, remember that — what is prayer? You take words, everyday words, and all of a sudden they became holy. Why? Because there is something that separates one word from another and then you try to fill the vacuum. With what? With whom? With what memory? With what aspiration? So when words bring you closer to the prisoner in his cell, to the patient who is dying on his bed alone, to the starving child, then it’s a prayer.

Elie Wiesel — The Tragedy of the Believer - The On Being Project

Mary Oliver

Praying
It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

— Mary Oliver, Thirst

So as I continue to contemplate, I realize that prayer is simply my heart's cry,  my deepest expression out of pain and suffering, out of love and compassion.

With or without words.

Theistic or nontheistic.

Prayer is not something from or to anything above.

Prayer is my gift to myself, a reminder that I'm listening and I care.

Prayer is our gift to each other, a reminder that someone is listening and someone cares.

Then I realized that this blog, Living with Open Hands, has been my continual expression of prayer, the outcry of my heart, for the past 15 years; most often for me but also hopefully for those that choose to listen.