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A Prayer for the New Year

“To pray for particular favors is to dictate to Divine Wisdom, and savors of presumption; and to intercede for other individuals or for nations, is to presume that their happiness depends upon our choice, and that the prosperity of communities hangs upon our interest.” – William Paley

windy_lake_2I’ve been thinking a bit about prayer recently. It’s always confused me, frankly. What is it for?

Let me explain. Suppose you believe in an omnipotent, omniscient God; and suppose you want something from this God — say, a new car, or (if you’re less materialistic) strength, or a sign, or serenity, or more time, or even just general blessings. But isn’t it the case that God already knows what you want? And if he knows what you want, and you still don’t have it, doesn’t that mean God probably doesn’t want you to have it? In other words: why do you think praying will change God’s mind?

Or suppose you want deliverance from something — from stress, from unemployment, from a disease, whatever it is. Again: why do you think praying will change God’s mind?

Or maybe you’re not praying for yourself, but for a friend, a relative, a stranger. Suppose someone you love is terribly sick, and you pray to God that He will save them. But God is all-powerful, isn’t He? Isn’t He the cause of the disease, really? Couldn’t He have already cured them, if He wanted? If God has decided someone should suffer, why should He care what you think? Aren’t you really saying, “Please, God! Don’t hurt my loved one any more!”? And doesn’t that imply that God is less merciful and forgiving than you are?…

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Filed Under: Religion and Magic

In Which Links are Forged and Pods are Cast

My attention has been away from this blog for a while, so I thought it might be interesting to collect some links to what I’ve been working on. Over at Faith, Fern, and Compass, for example, I’ve contributed a couple of articles that might be of interest to you:

The Sea in the Skull

Theologians and scientists agree: ritual is good for the human soul. But I don’t like ritual much. It’s probably my Zen upbringing. If ritual is poetry in the realm of acts, then perhaps my poetic-action aesthetic is too used to the haiku or koan: short, unrehearsed, improvised, intentionally subversive. But one thing I do like about ritual is the creation of a sacred space. This is about how I create a sacred space without ritual.

The Land’s Religion: Hold Her In Your Heart

Those of us of European descent who don’t live in Europe — who live, in fact, in landscapes conquered or annexed by our ancestors — do not have a simple relationship with the earth we live on… We are like a branch grafted onto the wrong tree, an organ transplanted into another body. We’re aliens in our own homes. But we cannot go back where we came from; we’d be aliens there, too. There is nowhere in the world that we really belong. So what should our relationship be?

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Story, History, and Meaning

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In the episode of Faith, Fern and Compass we posted this week, Alison and I talked a bit about stories, and what their purpose might be. Is storytelling something with evolutionary origins? If so, what? And why? It’s a completely open question, but … [Continue reading]

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On the Meaning of Life

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“In our life there is a single color, as on an artist's palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.” - Marc Chagall “The meaning of life is that it stops.” - Franz Kafka “Life is without meaning. You … [Continue reading]

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Sodden Spring

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Seattle, they say, is a rather wet city. But the last few days were sunny and warm, so I guess I was lulled into thinking (wishing? hoping?) that perhaps the worst of the showers were over. Late yesterday, in the golden late evening, Alison in a … [Continue reading]

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The Toxic Society

I stumbled on an old, ignored piece of news the other day, which struck me powerfully. Apparently crime rates in the United States continue to plummet, despite the ongoing recession. While I had assumed that the drop in crime rate was related to our … [Continue reading]

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Wilderness Among Us

Alison and I have been spending a lot of time in Seattle's parks this spring, and it got me thinking about the word park. It's an old Proto-Germanic word, originally parruk, a type of enclosure for animals, such as a sheep pen. By the mid 13th … [Continue reading]

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Genesis: the Story of Why We’re Different

In the summer of 2011 I was fortunate enough to go to the Wild Goose Festival, a gathering of speakers and artists active in the "emergent Christianity" movement, and there Alison and I met up with Carl McColman, who introduced us to Mike Morell. … [Continue reading]

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Gaus: Freedom, Morality, and the State

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Ok, here's another book I desperately want to have (and while I'm wishing, it sure would be great to have the time to read it as well): The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bounded World by Gerald Gaus. It's … [Continue reading]

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Self-Help Love-Hate

I'd like to read some Montaigne -- partly because it's like 18th-century self-help, and partly in spite of it. I have a love-hate relationship with the idea of self-help. On the one hand, it's a genre full of charlatans, fly-by-night money-back … [Continue reading]

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Moon

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The moon was full this morning in Virgo -- an earth sign ruled by the messenger god Mercury. What better time to bring the moon to earth? And by coincidence (?), just as the Earth was placed directly between the sun and moon, the sun reached out with … [Continue reading]

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The Upper Airs: Layers of Landscapes in Meditation

In meditation I almost always return to an inner landscape which I've described in a lot of detail elsewhere, but starting about a year ago I discovered I had access to another world, one that felt like it was directly above the old one -- as if it … [Continue reading]

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Sound

This afternoon, shortly before four o'clock, the sun, which had been low and sickly most of the day, began to seriously consider setting, her flames licking the clouds and igniting them all along the horizon above the Olympic mountains, and tracing … [Continue reading]

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A Wedding on the Edge

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Ocean, a poem Mary Oliver I am in love with Ocean lifting her thousands of white hats in the chop of the storm, or lying smooth and blue, the loveliest bed in the world. In the personal life, there is always grief more than enough, a … [Continue reading]

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Storm and Throng

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Last night a whopper of a storm raged through Pittsburgh, with thunder in hordes and lightning thronging. For hours it bellowed and shouted, grumbled and threatened, like an old man sitting on the porch, banging his stick and raging against the … [Continue reading]

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