I don’t pray, generally speaking. I have never understood what praying is, or what it means to pray, or why anyone would pray. I’ve always thought about prayer as a general concept but not as a literal act. When somebody says, “I’ll add you to my prayers” or “I’m praying for you”, I never pictured that they were literally sitting on their knees, with their hands together, perhaps in front of an alter of some sort, or maybe sitting by the bed, uttering prayers out loud or silently, and going through a list of people and things they were praying for. I had seen scenes like that in movies, but I always assumed it was an antiquated custom that people did not literally do anymore. I’m sure I have passively agreed to add someone to my prayers, or to send prayers to someone, at various moments when asked to do so, but never in those moments did I consider I would actually pray. I don’t think I was being deceitful, I just assumed prayer was a metaphorical idea that was not associated with a literal, physical act.
In recovery, people pray a lot, and people talk about prayer a lot. People talk about “getting on their knees” to pray, and they mean literally getting on their knees. The twelve steps have prayers associated with them (the third step prayer, the seventh step prayer, and so forth). These prayers, originally written in the 1930s, oddly employ Elizabethan language as if to signal they are older, perhaps, to somehow add to their legitimacy. I can’t say words like “thou wilt” or “thy will” with a straight face unless I’m reading Shakespeare. There are other versions of the twelve step prayers that use more contemporary language, but then I get caught up in thinking that prayer should be something sacred, or something from an ancient text that nobody really knows the origins of. It shouldn’t be something that somebody just made up. Should it? And then I think it’s silly for me to get caught up in the language of a specific prayer when I don’t think I’ve really accepted the fundamental concept of prayer to begin with.
When I met the woman I would end up marrying, she introduced me to the idea of saying grace before a meal. I thought it was weird at first, and it made me uncomfortable, but I humored her because I was falling in love. We have been holding hands and saying a little something every night before dinner for years. I don’t think of it as prayer, really, because we don’t say anything about God. It’s more just an opportunity to mark the beginning of a meal, to pause a moment before eating, and to express gratitude. It introduces a formality to the eating ritual that I find appealing. In my family, people start eating as soon as they sit down or as soon as the food is placed on the table, even before everyone else has been seated. It is so informal, perhaps, that I find it a bit uncouth. The before meal pause is like adding a touch of refinement. But is it prayer?
Given all my ambivalence about prayer, it feels kind of strange to admit that I’ve been doing something that might be considered praying recently. I don’t get on my knees, or bring my hands together, or say anything out loud. But I find that there are words I can repeat in my head, sort of like a mantra, that remind me not to get annoyed about silly things, to accept things as they are, to stop trying to control everything, or just to relax and be nice to people. Of all the prayers I have heard people use or read about in recovery, there is only one so far that feels meaningful to me and that I have adopted into my life. That is the serenity prayer. In particular, there is one aspect of it that I find helpful: “accept the things I can not change”. I might shorten this just to “acceptance is the answer” or even just “acceptance”. Saying this, like a mantra, over and over again in my head has helped me realize how often I don’t accept things.
There are many moments when I find myself silently cursing someone in my head, or when I suddenly feel a surge of irritation, or when I feel a sense of rage boiling up inside me (all of these can be triggered by relatively innocuous things - a mess in the kitchen, something I hear on the newscast, imagining and argument that I haven’t even had yet). In these moments, if I catch myself and start saying the serenity prayer in my head (or some shortened version of it), it allows me to remind myself that I’m being silly. The act of repeating something about acceptance in my head does something that calms me down and reminds me of what I know to be true - I don’t want to be an angry jerk.
In our daughter's school, when the children become upset the teacher reminds them to take three deep breaths, and to repeat this action until they feel more calm. It feels to me like I’m doing the same thing with the serenity prayer, I’m just adding an intellectual level to it by articulating the idea of acceptance. Though I think just paying attention to my breath would probably accomplish the same thing. This thought makes me wonder, again, what is prayer? The dictionary describes it as a solemn request for help, or an expression of thanks, addressed to God. Indeed, the serenity prayer (if you say the whole thing) opens with the words “God, grant me…” But when I repeat it in my head, is it solemn? If I’m not addressing it to God, is it prayer? If I don’t have a general concept of God that I subscribe to, can I really address anything to God?
I want to think that if I’m reminding myself to accept the situation and calm down, I am doing just that. I don’t think that God is actually calming me down, or granting me something that enables me to calm down. But then it dawns on me - it doesn’t really matter if I’m reminding myself to calm down and doing it of my own accord, or if I’m asking God to calm me down and attributing my newfound calmness to them. The result is the same either way - I’m calm! This, I think, is the essence of faith to me right now - to stop trying to intellectualize, rationalize, and explain things, and to just accept what is happening. Faith is saying, “When I’m upset I say the serenity prayer and it calms me down” and leaving it at that. Faith is accepting that many of my friends in AA have experienced dramatic positive change in their lives since they started getting on their knees every morning and saying a 12 step prayer (verbatim, addressed to God and everything). Faith is letting people attribute unexpected positive occurrences in their lives to God rather than trying to find other explanations.
Like many things in recovery, perhaps prayer is about giving up control, or acknowledging that I’m not in control nearly as much as I think I am. In the past, my primary means of escaping the desire to be in control was to drink - the act of becoming intoxicated relieved me of the burden of all the things I couldn’t accept and gave me the illusion of serenity. Prayer, then, could perhaps replace alcohol in that way. It seems a bit too Ned Flandersish to think of saying, “I need a prayer” instead of “I need a drink” at the end of a long day, but perhaps that is a way of thinking about prayer that could take away the mystery and let me just get on with it.
With all due respect to your point of view, I see prayer as talking with my God and loving heavenly father. I hardly ever pray out loud or with any particular body posture. No need. God knows all of our thoughts before we know them. So prayer is about our need for growth. Growing closer to God.