musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

Would that we might also pray in the fullness of our joy


Prayer! I think I should be careful here: I have no enduring patience for obsequiousness in the face of eternity; I would not beseech a god, or gods, to treat me well. And yet… And yet perhaps there is some benefit to discussing a problem with a higher power -a different power anyway: laying it flat across my thoughts, so I do not have to analyse alone. I do not know what to call that however -not so far, at any rate.

But, do all things need a word? A name? Do thoughts require a handle so they can be opened? A window, so they can be seen to be responding from inside some other room? I wonder…

On one of my perambulations through the many apps on my phone, I came across an essay on Prayer.[i] Normally, I would have deleted it, but the accompanying picture intrigued me. It showed a man, possibly down on his luck, but cloaked in anonymity and by shadows in the pews of a church; he was praying. He was hoping, no doubt, for guidance, and possibly sharing something about himself in the sanctity and peace of a place he had perhaps come to trust.

It was a powerful photograph, and one which immediately captured my attention. Of course I couldn’t help but read things into it -some pictures reveal more about ourselves than we suspect, I think. And yet, I have to admit the attraction; maybe he was engaged in a form of problem-solving, a way of coming to terms with things; maybe that’s how some people do it.

Seen from the outside, however, prayer seems naïve: believing that by stating the problem, or naming the hope, there is something listening that is willing and able to respond. The harder part is recognizing whether or not an answer has been given, though. Or, perhaps even trickier: feeling optimistic about the supplication as you wait. Then again, how can you accept anything as an answer before you know whether or not it is going to work? And how do you know you’re actually receiving help -how do you decide whether it’s worthwhile to keep on praying? Is it like the person searching for their lost keys under the streetlight, because that’s the only place with enough light to see…?

But am I being too hard on it -prayer, I mean? Am I demonstrating the skepticism of a non-believer who would likely require a Damascene epiphany to awaken them, and even then, raise doubts as to its authenticity? Its reality? Or is it simply a rejection of any attempt to communicate with something beyond understanding -anything not like us at any rate? Can we blame it on a too narrow definition of sentience; or of needing reassurance that something is actually listening to our fears – listening and acting on them?

Are hopes and prayers merely a projection of unmet needs searching for someone –something– that cares enough to listen? Does it matter if I name the entity whom I address? Names again…

I mean wouldn’t it make more sense to address something, or somebody with similar values, similar needs -a living thing to whose identity we can relate, even if we seldom acknowledge it?

How about friends; wouldn’t they be more inclined to listen? To understand? After all, I can likely share more efficiently with demonstrably living things than with those whom I can only imagine inhabit an entirely different Magisterium. If names are sometimes necessary clarifications, I and all of those with whom I interact are part of Nature, the living world. That has a ring of truth to it. But of course, put like that, it seems banal. Uninspiring. Trite… It is a different genre of worship. Do you see why I object to names?

A word like God, transcends things because of its mystery. In fact, it’s very unknowable history I suspect is why we fear and worship what it has come to stand for. But have we decided to worship it mostly because we don’t understand it, and whatever it is seems  more powerful than us? More able to inflict harm for reasons which our ever-present guilt is unwilling to attribute to chance?  

Isn’t that why most early gods were Nature gods: thunder, lightning, the storm, the sea…? Who in our distant past ever suspected we might one day understand them? Best then, to propitiate rather than to risk angering them.

Maybe prayer, meditation, or confiding in friends are simply ways of reorganizing the clutter that clogs our minds; like washing the dirty dishes in the sink allows us to see the kitchen differently. Maybe the benefit is simply the feeling -the distraction– of being drawn outside of the cage inhabited by our minds.

It has been a while since I read him, but perhaps Martin Buber, the religious Jewish philosopher, had an even better manner of explaining it: the Eternal Thou. In a way, he included Nature as part of his god. As I remember it, he framed our interactions with the world as a binary: either ‘I – it’  where we see ourselves as distinct from what we have come to regard as ‘objects’ and treat them as tools; or we regard the world as ‘I -Thou’ and rather than objectifying it, embrace it as one might a treasured relationship that is shared between both of you.

His early 20th century book, ‘I and Thou’, was more than a Damascene epiphany for me, although not in the religious sense he likely intended. A passage in it (although I doubt if I’ve remembered it correctly) that has stuck with me all these years, was his contention that one of the most meaningful prayers was the wordless appreciation of the beauty of a sunset, or the trusting inquisitive eyes of a little child. That was what I took him to mean, anyway.

To me, it did not confine the ‘Thou’ to a god, but more to the feeling of a loving connection with Nature, with the world… with everything, I suppose. If that is prayer, then it is truly something special, whatever the source.

I think I can believe in that…

[i]https://aeon.co/essays/why-prayer-is-a-problem-solving-practice-that-works?

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