Learning to Pray

I don't know how to pray, but I do it anyway.

I must admit that most of my prayers feel like a gamble at Russian roulette: something as important as a life can be at stake and yet, despite earnest and hopeful intentions, I still find myself dreading the outcome. To pray requires the kind of desperation only found in games of chance. It is an act of last resorts, admitting that my own means and ways of seeking resolution have failed and that the sparing or taking of life is now at the mercy of something I can't see that happens to have a record of unpredictably dispensing both pleasure and pain.

It constantly makes me wonder if the Christian platitudes that God "makes all things work for the good of those he loves" are really simply wishful thinking that struggles to give the random outcomes of life - illnesses, failed ambitions, unexpected rewards - some sort of meaning and sense. Could we simply be at the mercy of quantum dice, and is the image of an omnipotent and omniscient God any more beneficial than the narrative we weave for ourselves? Perhaps God is even malevolent or capricious like the Greek deities, teasing us with guilt and pleasure for the sheer sake of taking entertainment in our obsequious praises and the incredible lengths gone through to win favor.

I think it really comes down to the question of whether or not you trust God. Do you trust that he is good? It does not take much to interpret the events of your life in a way that paints a benevolent portrait of God, much in the way Pip fantasized about his benefactor in Great Expectations. Do you trust him to be hostile? Again, it does not take a large stretch in the imagination to see God as one who consistently tortures his creation. Do you trust him to be completely unreliable? This is perhaps the easiest delusion of them all.

To me, God simply defends himself by giving me a situation that definitively demonstrates my own pathetic inability to control my small life, piercing me with the image of the suffering Emmanuel, and leaving me with the pregnant silence of a personal decision. It is as if he says, "If you will take me, you must take me as I AM. You must trust me as I AM and learn to know and respect and love me as I AM. I have done no less for you."

And so I pray out of desperation and longing and fear because God is, by nature, someone who is invisible, largely unknowable, and immensely dangerous. But I must learn to pray out of trust and love and compassion because that is - generally and vaguely speaking - exactly who he says he is. I suppose there is little choice but to take him at his word.

Our father, who art in heaven,
Hallowed be your name
Your kingdom come, your will be done
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give me this day my daily bread
And forgive my transgressions,
As I have forgiven my transgressors
And lead me not into temptation
But deliver me from evil.
For yours is the kingdom and the glory
And the power forever,
Amen.