Prayer, etc.

15 February 2011

Today my Jehovah’s Witnesses dropped off a large basket of fruit “for me and my lovely wife.” When they visited last Saturday and I told them about my partner’s cancer, they asked what they could do — just as everyone, mostly, does.

I said prayer is always welcome and then went on to say that I didn’t believe in petitionary prayer. They snapped a Bible open to a countering quotation from Philippians. These people know their Bibles inside and out. I admire the breadth of their study and their diligence though I don’t agree with them. My partner’s father — a retired minister — says that people who study the Bible all the time become like a book rather than a person — legalistic and somehow less fully human.

My Witnesses when faced with our situation simply acted — the word made flesh. That is in the book as well and to my mind is the bottom line of it all. I suppose the JW’s suspect they won’t be able to get me onboard though I always try to give them something real, a piece of my sincere if misguided thinking about God and the Bible and all that. But in the meantime as we chat a little bit every few Saturdays we will continue to love one another, respect one another and walk alone knowing our roads are more similar than not.

Why don’t I believe in petitionary prayer? W.H. Auden says it far better than I could. He felt that its only use was that in the act of expressing our desires, those desires are revealed to us. And when they are revealed “we often discover that they are really wishes that two and two should make three or five as when St. Augustine realized that he was praying, ‘Lord make me chaste but not yet.’”

Auden felt that true prayer is to “pay attention, or shall we say, to listen to someone or something other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention — be it on a landscape, or a poem or a geometrical problem or an idol or the True God — that he completely forgets his own ego and desires in listening to what the other has to say, he is praying...”

I like that very much both for its transcendence and for its humanity. At the same time I have to admit that while that is my main mode of prayer I do occasionally ask for something from the Universe or the Universal. Desperate times call for desperate measures.