I’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?…

I’m not saying God is evil (although the problem of why evil exists is very serious). I’m just saying that I doubt prayer works like that. God, omnipotent or not, existent or not, isn’t Santa Claus. If He’s all-knowing and all-powerful, then He already knows what you want, He’s already got the universe set up the way He wants it, and your prayers can’t change anything. (Statistical studies bear this out, by and large.)

What Prayer is Really For

The word pray has a pretty straightforward origin. It comes from Proto Indo European prek, “ask, request, entreat”, which was the root of the noun prex “prayer, request, entreaty” in Latin, converted back to a verb as precari “ask earnestly, beg”, and then came into French as preiere, and English as prayer. Phonosemantically it carries the sense of broadening, widening, opening, moving out from a point.

As simple as these facts are, though, perhaps they can give us a clue to what prayer is really for — what it’s really doing.

Because prayer isn’t useless. Prayer, of one form or another, is a staple of almost every religious tradition, regardless of how many gods and spirits there are, and regardless of how powerful they are or whether they already know your desires before you pray a word. Prayer is for something. What?

An Invitation

Consider this. If you ask for something, if you entreat or beg, you are displaying your vulnerability; and by doing so, you’re emotionally breaking down barriers between yourself and Spirit. You’re inviting Spirit to reach into your life and intervene — to change your life, to change your circumstances, to change your self.

Perhaps it’s the invitation that’s really what’s important here. After all, if you truly have free will, then no god or spirit can just mess around with your life without your permission. They might mess around with your circumstances — showering you with good luck or misfortune — but they can’t mess around with you. That’s what free will means.

But if you say a prayer — if you ask for intercession — you’re explicitly setting aside your free will (for a while). You’re saying, “You know what? I can’t do this by myself. Could you take the wheel a bit?”

A prayer isn’t so much supplication as it is permission: permission given by you to the Powers that Be to give you a hand, if they would be so kind. And it is understood that you will take control again when you are ready, no questions asked.

A Recognition of Union

In many of the more mystical religious traditions, my own included, there is no sharp line between the self and the spirit. Prayer, in this view, is a way of breaking a barrier that is itself already an illusion, allowing the truth of interconnection to be seen. The breaking of the illusion allows the way to be seen clearly, and allows the suffering to pass. And so the prayer works: the serenity and the strength is granted; the sign is given.

What if you’re praying for someone else, though? You can’t set aside someone else’s free will. A good question! In my view, praying for other people has no effect unless you break down the spiritual and emotional barriers between yourself and them. If you pray from your deepest heart, where you and they are One, then you can effectively give Spirit permission to intercede on their behalf.

Because we really are all one. And we join together both on the edges and in the center. We merge on the edge where our thoughts march in parallel — if we have similar ideas, similar ways of thinking, similar hobbies and interests. And we merge in the center where our hearts beat to the same rhythms, are quickened by the same images and sounds, are moved by the same pities and yearnings. In these places where we are One, we can intercede for each other, and we can speak for each other.

On that note, dear readers, I offer a prayer for us both.

A Prayer for the New Year

May you spread out, so that you may return to the source.
May you be generous, so that you may gain the world.
May you strike a decisive blow, and then stop.
May your victories bring you no pride.
May you overcome your enemies, but not dominate them:
for the strong always weaken with time.

May you know others, so that you may be intelligent;
know yourself, so that you may be truly wise;
know you have enough, so that you may be truly wealthy;
persist, so that you will reach your goal.

May you embrace death, so that you will not perish, but have life everlasting.
May you be soft and pliable, so that you can overcome the hard and inflexible.
May you know the light in the darkness,
know the advance in the retreat,
know the ease in the rough path,
know the fullness in the emptiness,
know the purity in the tarnished,
know the sufficiency of true virtue.

May you taste the purity of the polluted,
feel the softness of the thorns,
see the light of the darkness,
hear the mightiest words of the silence.

May you find the Way in the Unnamed,
and be nourished and fulfilled.

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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?

Fun Podcast Episodes

I also want to point you toward some of our recent podcast episodes; we’ve had such a blast making these. (Note that some of these episodes are only available to pro members).

Space, Place, and Sacred Paradox

The first of a sort of two-parter, in which we talk about what it means for a space to be ‘sacred’ if the whole world is holy. We draw parallels with art and the philosophy of aesthetics, and talk about “framing” the spiritual aspects of the ordinary world. What does it mean to say that “everything is sacred”? How does our relationship change when we transform space into place?

Shrines of the Living Land

In this second part, we explore space, place and sacred paradox by looking at the religious symbolism and themes of Chinese landscape painting. Taoist themes of immortality, wise innocence, active non-action and the harmony of the natural world are expressed in the wild mountainous landscapes of artists through the centuries.

The Nature of Placemaking

We check out the many amazing ways that people all over the world are embracing “green space” through architecture, infrastructure and landscaping, inviting the natural world back into our homes and businesses as a vital part of our efforts to live sustainably. In our Pro Extension, we ponder the implications of granting legal rights to rivers and forests; plus, we examine the “religious” aspect of the debate over hydro-fracking.

Natural Wonders

We explore the infinitely awe-inspiring natural world with a reading of Alison’s article, “The Seven Wonders of the Natural World in Your Own Backyard.” Then I sit down for a fascinating, wide-ranging interview with Brian McLaren, an influential pastor, speaker and author who understands nature’s spiritual dimension and its essential role in the future of Christianity, humanity, and the world. Finally, for our Pro extension, I read Alison’s bedtime story about King Arthur’s search for the mightiest huntsman who ever lived — the Tale of Mabon.

And that’s not even counting the two Spiritual Ecology episodes (One and Two) where we did an in-depth review of Archdruid John Michael Greer’s new book. Good stuff!

By the way, the interview with Brian McLaren was so much fun — he’s an incredibly nice person and extremely easy to talk to! Full disclosure: we were able to get some time with him because he’s great friends with my aunt Melanie, who was a member of his congregation for years. And speaking of Melanie (who was a National Director of the Sierra Club), she sat for an interview with us as well, where she talked about green spirituality and the changing face of environmentalism. (She’s retired from all that now, and has started an awesome blog about writing and the spiritual life.)

Ravelling Skeins

Remember my novel, Mere America? It’s only partly finished, and quite frankly I’ve hit a solid writer’s block on it. (The first part, First Nations is still available for 99 cents as an ebook, and continues to sell reasonably well considering I haven’t promoted it at all! Check it out — I will finish it eventually, and the first part largely stands alone.) I have the next few sections roughly sketched out, and I even wrote about 90% of the second part (“The Withered Hand”), but after thinking about it I realized most of what I’d written would have to be thrown away. I’ve decided to set it aside while I work on other projects for a while.

So what am I working on? Well, I’ve been wanting to write something steampunk for some time; and I’ve had a young-adult sci-fi novel sitting there — finished, but deeply flawed, waiting for its revisions… and there was a bright spark when those ideas came together. I sat down and got to work, and characters and situations just poured out. So…

So yes, I’m working on a young adult steampunk novel! The working title is The Athenium Chronicles, Book I: Leviathan. In which Amy Milton, an orphaned girl with strange powers she cannot control, is abducted to the Athenium: a remote, secret school, where she must succeed — or be driven mad.

Fun for the whole family! (Steampunk often flirts with the edge of horror, and this will be no exception — though honestly my stomach for horror isn’t particularly strong, so I’ll be handling it with a very light, humorous touch.) Over on my writing blog, A Skein of Words, I’ll be posting more about this as I work on it. It’s going to be a blast!

Uncommon Beauty

Finally: Alison and I visited the Oregon coast last month, and it was just stunning. Here’s a taste, and a link to a collection of Alison’s pictures over on her blog. Enjoy.

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After the podcast, I went back and looked a little deeper into the etymologies of history and story. There is an unfortunate urban legend that history literally means, and comes from, the words “his story”, and while there is a faint glimmer of truth in that — and of course the deeper, more abstract truth, that what we call “history” is too often the story of what dead white guys were doing — the fact is that history and story have more to do with wizard than anything else. These are all the same word, at root; they ultimately arise from a term meaning one who is wise.

With wizard it’s most obvious: the Proto Indo European weid, meaning “to see” or “to know” descended into Proto Germanic as wisaz and Old English as wis. In Middle English it was combined with the suffix -ard, indicating one who is or does (as in coward, drunkard), and made to mean one who is wise — perhaps even too wise.

But in Greek, this same Proto Indo European root weid became his (“wise”), and was combined with tor (“one who is or does”) to mean, basically, wizard; and the term histor was often used to mean “old man, wise man, judge”. A historia, then, would be a tale told by such a wizard. It was borrowed directly into Latin, and thence into French, becoming estorie.

It was then borrowed twice by English — once to become history, and once to become story. For a long time these two words were just two versions of the same term, like want to and wanna, but eventually story (the less formal version) took on connotations of ficticiousness and frivolity and went its own way.

Spiritually both history and story share connotations of a fertile, abundant path through grounded, earthy territory, rounding up with powerful motion that ends in an expression of fortitude and stamina. The hi- at the beginning of history adds a depth of rootedness, of something arising from a hearth and home. It is this rootedness that gives history its peculiar power to give guidance, bind communities, and infuse our lives with meaning.

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