I grew up praying. Before meals. Before bed. The blessing of food, the recitation of sins, the asking of forgiveness and the wish list of needs. I stopped believing in the necessity of the necessity of divine forgiveness, and indeed the divine story as taught by Adventism in general, but even though I don't pray much anymore, I'm not sure I've given up entirely on the concept of praying.
I think of prayer the way I think of meditation at the moment. A potentially useful spiritual practice, the utility of which is possibly independent of a particular religious belief system. Meditation, to me, is practicing self-awareness and mindfulness as direct and specific practice in getting your thoughts and feelings under control. Is your mind always racing? Not sure what's going on with you right now? Spending some time sitting with yourself and practicing re-focusing your attention on sitting and breathing will probably help with that!
Prayer, has a similar utility to me, in that it focuses and channels hopes/hopes/dreams/fears/frustrations in a way that acknowledges their importance and potentially their immediate intractability and also lets you get on with your life after doing so. In practice it serves to vent some feelings but also focuses attention back to intent and needs in a way that may help to propel you forward in you life. Prayer can bring clarity and relief.
So does it matter who you pray too? Maybe. Maybe not! For some people the important part of prayer may be that someone out there hears you and cares about your problems. Maybe it's just important to believe someone out there hears you and cares about your problems? Maybe the prayer itself is cathartic, regardless of who's listening. Maybe that's why group therapy felt like such a religious experience at times.
I have a small statue to Bastet in my house for the cats. I burn incense and pray to Bastet for my remaining cat. And for my dearly departed tabby both before and after he was gone. Was Bastet listening? Did she guide my friend to the field of reeds? I don't know, but I felt better.
I have tried praying to Mercury, although I'm not sure Mercury heard me. I once prayed to Hypnos to help me get re-synced to the day/night cycle and had a semi-miraculous 48 hours where I suddenly WAS re-synced. But I didn't keep praying and old habits quickly re-asserted themselves. Maybe the gods are dead and prayer is just a good habit that focuses your attention on improving your life and sets the foundation for other habits? Maybe Mercury winged me safely to my destination. Maybe Hypnos gave me a taste of normalcy because I asked him to.
I am forced to acknowledge that I hope there is something kind out there that hears us when we pray, if only because I'm so desperate for a larger context that will wake up a society content to sleep walk off a cliff. This is an emotional bias I know myself to have. Partly just because the existence of an outside power that gives a shit is a comforting thought, however unlikely my rational mind might find it. So maybe I just pray in the hope that someday something answers. Because that would be interesting. My quiet desire to be abducted by benevolent aliens and relocated to a society where people aren't fucking insane probably comes from the same place.
Maybe whatever god I pray to is just a collection of ideas and principles that are important to me, and praying to and worshiping that unified concept of That Which is Good is how I center my values and define who I want to be in the world. Maybe prayer is good because it helps productively process emotional responses to life and we are the kind of creatures that need to regularly process our emotions in a healthy way. Maybe prayer is good in and of itself once it's liberated from the fundamentalist baggage of guilt and shame. Maybe that kind of prayer can liberate me too.
