All my life, I have struggled with the notion of prayer. Prayer, unaccompanied by ritual or ceremony, is just, well, thinking at God. From childhood, this baffled me. How does it work? How is thinking at God not just plain thinking?
I was attracted to Orthodox Judaism as a child, I think, because there’s so much stuff to do. Doing is what’s lacking in the notion of prayer.
I still don’t get it, to tell you the truth. There are definitely people who just pray, or who pray with so little ritual that they might as well just pray, and they get a satisfying religious experience from it.
At the funeral mass on Monday, I watched the priest perform the transubstantiation, and I totally got how magical that was. And then he said “let us pray,” and I thought, well here we are. This is where I was in synagogue as a girl. Pray? How am I to do that?
One of the things a religious experience is supposed to do is get us out of our heads. I mean, for those of us who are in our heads. So praying in the head, that’s not going to work. Ritual is how we allow prayer to not just be more head stuff.
For the Catholics at the mass, the ritual had prepped them to be ready for the moment of prayer. (a) I wasn’t there with them, wasn’t connected to that ritual, and (b) it was never enough for me. Sitting there in the seats watching the ritual happen, reading from the prayer book, sitting, standing, sitting. I never saw how that could school my mind so that I could pray.
Plus, you know, they encourage you to pray at other times. When I was nine and my grandfather was dying, someone said I could pray for him, which I did. By thinking at God. Which never felt like anything except thinking.
People’s minds are not all alike, of course. Some people say, ‘Why do all that ritual stuff? Why make it so complicated when in truth, it’s all in your mind?’ For some people, that’s fine. Not many, I think. Most of us need some doing to move ourselves into a receptive spiritual state.
The doing part can be the physical behaviors (bowing the head, davening*, the Osiris position**), preparatory steps (casting a circle, lighting a candle), and more. Another sort of “doing” is the act of setting aside; of reserving certain things only for prayer, so that locations (church, an altar), objects (an athame, an idol, a meditation mat), or articles of clothing (a ritual robe, a prayer shawl), are triggers for a proper state of mind. The act of moving in the direction of the set aside objects (donning the robe, going to the location) or using them, or gazing at them, or touching them, is part of the doing.
Meditation helps prepare and train the mind for prayer, but of course, meditation, too, is a kind of ritual.
It’s the body-mind connection. Head alone isn’t enough. Doing plus thinking, with intention, that’s how prayer can truly happen.
(By the way, in looking for a definition of daven, I found this great article that sort of says the same thing, except in a Jewish context.)
*To daven in Yiddish is literally to pray, but in common usage it means the rocking up and down that Orthodox Jews do during prayer.
**Traditional in Wicca, sometimes called the God position.
I dunno. I ‘think’ at a lot of stuff. And sometimes the ‘thinking’ makes it happen, but I get more effective results by action as well.
For instance…I REALLY wanted a specific type of car. A friend of mine got one, and I thought, “Wow, that’s really cool. I’d like a car like this.” So I did some road trips with her and actually had to run some errands at her request, in her car. Then a mutual friend got a car that was a little older, and the same kind of stuff happened….save for I was driving two cars that were the same model. About four months into this, my husband comes home with a car of the same model, something he found that was suitable for us at the time. Go figure.
So was it just ‘thinking it’ that made it happen? Was it driving around in the car, the action, which added to that ‘thinking’ part? What was it? doing the prayer….
Either way….I am kind of in the same boat. Save for I figured that ‘prayer’ was the more mainstream, acceptable idea of meditation and used that time (as a child then and as an adult now) to use creative visualization to aid me in later practice.
Interesting thoughts. I don’t know if your thinking was prayer, since you were just thinking you wanted the car, you weren’t actually asking for it. “Creative visualization” might be the best way to describe it.
Only, here’s a thing. Did you think the car into being, or did you get a wave of precognition; knowing you were getting the car in the future, did you suddenly become aware of the car and start to anticipate liking it?
Or, is it a deeper synchronicity, neither past causing future nor future reverberating into past, but another kind of connection?
Visiting from BoK.
Prayer to me has always indicated that you calm your attachment to your individual physically located essence.
You then expand your awareness.
In other words you go from a point of consciousness to an encompassing and instantaneous awareness that everything/everybody is one big soup trying every possible combination of interaction.
When you have the conscious internalization that consciousness begets interaction soup, you can at any instant be in wonderment of whatever you are aware of in the physical world.
At the most fundamental level everything is amazing.
Which, to me, sounds like meditation. That is, a conscious altering of your state of consciousness? And how do you do this? Almost always, there is some ritual behavior that allows and encourages the mind to take this journey. A posture, a location, lighting a candle–physical things that boost the mind so that it’s not just thinking.
synchronicity. hmmm…..
Thinking of behaviors, I don’t think I did anything different…save for the fact that I had driven both cars several times and really enjoyed it (I was very used to driving cars, but technically these were SUVs that were higher up, which I could appreciate being a vertically challenged person).
When I moved out here to the Middle of Nowhere, Texas, I ran across an individuall that smelled like ‘one of us’. I don’t know if that makes sense, but serious-minded people who are more ‘pagan’ than others have something different about them. I don’t know if it’s picking up a ‘vibe’ with a third sense, their interaction, or what, but I can generally tell a person who is more susceptible to a broader way of thinking than most. So I do what I do….I talk about some of the things I’m interested in and the way I think the universe works…and he listens, coming out of that societally enforced mental eggshell.
About three months into hanging out with him, we both have a dream within at day of one another. The symbolism has to do with snakes. When I next see him, I speak to him of my dream and he comes close to laying an egg – it’s an experience that he’s never had before (synchronicity) and it shakes him to the core. After a week, he’s okay, but he comes to start considering some of the things I have to say a bit more seriously.
Which poses a few questions: Is ritual behaviour something that is inherent, or just inherent in those who have more of an open mind to spirituality? If not, is it a learned behaviour that becomes an unconscious part of the self? Do we then willingly and unwittingly move in these ritualistic behaviours to bring about change in our lives? What psychological and sociological applications can we parallel to these ideas (microcosm/macrocosm)?
Curiouser and curiouser……gives me food for thought. Maybe even sends me reeling.
#4 Deborah,
At some point when you can just enjoy being here, all it takes is what feels like an internal smile at the pure and complete joy of having consciousness. This is my normal mental state. No kidding. I just feel this way all the time.
As far as a ritual behaviour inducing this, it feels to me that I first acknowledge that I am glad and thankful that I am here [easy way to bring this feeling is to see beauty in your environment]. Then there is a instantaneous shifting of my intellectual internal visualization of the world. Compartmentalization disappears.
Lovely.
I always found prayer, in the sense of my days of Catholicism as more of a thinking at, pleading with and a hope against hope that the impossible would happen. It almost never did. That wasn’t God’s fault, but perhaps just the way the events were suppose to play themselves out.
That said, I find that that my connection with the Divine is most palpable during ritual and/or meditation. This translates for me into the classic shift of energy within myself and sacred space, that I never seemed to experience with simple prayer.
At times, simply thinking will result in the manifestation of something I need, sometimes not. Again, I don’t question it, but just accept that, whatever it is, now may not yet be the time. It’s all good.
Ritual behavior seems to be inherent. There has been some evidence of ritual behavior among chimpanzees; it seems to be a genuine inborn need.
I find that for me, prayer is more two way conversation than one, or at least the opening up to the possibility of a conversation. It also depends on in which relationship to divinity I am in: I-I, I-thou, or part of the All. I think most people conceive of prayer as communicating in a I-thou relationship, and when I do that, I get to a state of consciousness where I feel I can reach divinity and then just talk in my head. Sometimes I get an answer, but mostly I am just yearning.
For changing state, I use breathing and meditation techniques, or singing or drumming.
*I think the word you may be looking for instead of davenning is shuckling.
“Ritual behavior seems to be inherent. There has been some evidence of ritual behavior among chimpanzees; it seems to be a genuine inborn need.”
This is probably why there is so much discontentment in spiritual paths in modern times…