We are told that prayer involves raising the mind and heart to God.
And this can seem entirely impossible. If you make the attempt you are immediately assailed with questions. Do I actually believe in God? Do I have any sense of God? What sort of God do I believe in and why? Is God a person? Is God a being, or beyond all categories of being and nonbeing? Am I talking to myself? Am I deceiving myself? Am I wasting my time? Should I stop now?
Trying to pray can seem like trying to climb a sheer cliff with no footholds.
A Buddhist teacher once said: there is no God, and he is always with you.
I think this is more than an empty paradox. It’s a pretty safe bet that your concept of God (your “God”) won’t accord with reality: but the denial of “God” does not necessarily equate to the denial of God.
So perhaps one approach is to turn your back on God, or on whatever you think of as being God.
You can sit quietly for a bit, watching your thoughts and feelings and memories come and go, without judgment, without either pushing them away or keeping hold of them.
When you are with a crowd of strangers - perhaps in a church service, perhaps in a dentist’s waiting room or a bus queue - you can choose to be consciously aware of being with these people. You can ask yourself, what is it like for you, being among these people? And what is it like for them, being here?
Or you can picture yourself as travelling on a journey towards your own death, and then picture everyone else around you - and everyone else in the world - as making the same journey.
What happens if you try this sort of exercise? Perhaps nothing at all: perhaps boredom, or a wandering mind. But possibly, something you might call prayer.
And does this sort of prayer make any difference to you, or to the world?
That’s a tricky question. You would be surprised how many people pray without having a clear answer to it.
Prayer doesn’t have to be seen as a way of trying to order or manipulate the world. Instead, it can be a way of being in the world.
