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.
