Reimagining Prayer As Just A Secular Positive Thought Process
How my family turned prayer into “sending good vibes” your way
Let’s talk about prayer
To talk about prayer, I think you have to first get some context on the belief system that’s attached to it. I mean if we’re gonna talk about praying, then there has to be a god of some kind somewhere, right? A higher power?
And conversely, if you don’t pray to a god in the traditional sense of praying, does that mean that you just don’t believe in a higher power?
Or maybe some of us pray, in a reimagined, personally-fitting way.
Belief systems are grown over time, molded and shaped by the people, experiences, and environment that surrounds you.
My belief system is no different.
How I got to be Episcopal
When I was a kid I remember asking my mom one day why we were Episcopalian, and interestingly enough it had nothing to do with beliefs, but rather geography.
You’d kinda think religious beliefs were a thing of importance, something held steadfastly and true, but as it turns out, there are other reasons you are who you are.
My mom’s side of the family were from New York, having immigrated from England, and a century ago or so, lifestyles were obviously different. Your neighborhood was where you sought out everything from groceries, to clothes, to churches. You needed your watch repaired? You went to the corner jeweler. People didn’t do the suburban sprawl, passing by one grocery store to get to another. Choices weren’t prevalent, and transportation wasn’t what it is today.
The Episcopal church was the closest church for my great grandparents, so that’s where they went, and that’s what they became. Episcopalian.
That very fact traveled down the pipeline a couple generations, until our now-generation bathes in the knowledge that we have knowledge to bathe in, endless denominational and non-denominational choices for the taking.
We even have the choice to not make a choice. And we have the choice to convert to whatever it is we want to convert to for the sake of a new spouse or personal beliefs. Church proximity has little to do with it now.
My grandparents and parents married in that Episcopal church, and therefore everyone had Episcopal blood. That’s how it works, don’t you know. So that’s how I came to be Episcopalian. Had my great grandparents lived in a New York row house a block away from the Lutheran church, then I’m sure I would’ve been Lutheran.
My childhood church life was nothing memorable
Still shoring up the context here…
My childhood church life was nothing meaningful or memorable. I remember getting nothing from Sunday school or the church service, bored and merely going through the motions of those around me.
We had benches to flip down and kneel on during certain parts of the service to say some prayer or another, words that meant nothing to an 8-year old. Mechanical prayer spilled from our mouths to conform with those around us. How could that mean anything?
The thees and thous and adult-gibberish was lost on me. The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost (ghost?!) concept was never grasped, too esoteric for one so small.
My dad eventually quit going, and my mom being the best mom she knew how still felt compelled to take my sister and me to church on her own. At some point that ended, though I can’t remember when, and while I felt no guilt or loss from not going, I’m sure my mother felt a little angst at letting her children’s spiritual growth be cast by the wayside. She was all about doing the right thing.
Our family beliefs
Funnily enough my parents met at a church picnic, though clearly that wasn’t an indicator of commitment to anything church-y for the long haul.
We didn’t really say any blessings at the dinner table unless it were a special occasion, as though that warranted a good time to speak to God. It was as if we were meeting the minimal requirement of being a good person who could call themselves Christian.
I remember perhaps a few bedtime prayers, but nothing that stuck with me. Reciting the Lord’s Prayer by rote doesn’t make for anything especially meaningful.
I just didn’t get church. I didn’t get prayers or Jesus or God. Our family never said I love Jesus or Jesus loves you. Neither He nor his Father was a part of our vocabulary.
That was a language we just didn’t speak.
Spirituality as a young adult
In college my Catholic roommate was in church every week, being a good girl saving her virginity for her future husband. I, on the other hand, found myself in the basement of the library where they kept the 200s of the Dewey Decimal coded stacks. There I perused books on atheism and agnosticism, exploring options other than what I had known. Unsure of what I believed, if anything. I deemed it harmless curiosity.
Fast forward to my post-college life. My spiritual life began to evolve in my mid-20s when I met the man who was to be my first husband. He was Presbyterian, and after our long shifts of bartending until the wee hours of the morning we still managed to get up and go to church Sunday mornings. It became an important part of our routine, even though the charisma-less minister provided nothing but boring sermons, but I suppose we thought it would make us better people by merely being in attendance.
Our engagement was jaded with issues, mainly arising from my fiance’s drinking, dooming ourselves from the start. However, Marian, my boss, turned mama-hen, turned spiritual mentor in our time of crisis, lifted us up in prayer, took us under her religious wing, and guided us back to the light.
That’s a lot of Christian-y stuff in that last sentence. Is it blasphemy to say Marian was our savior? It was her that came to our rescue and brought us to a healthier place in our relationship with God in our lives. That’s when I can say I began a life that included some semblance of spirituality.
For the first time in my life, I remember asking God for help in prayer.
Yes, it was out of a quiet desperation, but also as a believer in the power of something more than myself that could maybe actually do something.
Thinking we’d found the straight path, with God in our lives, we worked through our issues, and moved forth with a new foundation on which to build upon.
Marriage and prayer
We faithfully went to our Presbyterian church, and when we moved we found a new one. We had many church friends, couples just like us just starting their families, and enjoyed a church social life of suppers and various gatherings. While our gatherings did contain pre-meal blessings, there was scant more to reveal we were anything more than flawed, Sunday church-goers.
You would think that religion and spirituality could save you from yourself, and I suppose it does, sometimes.
In spite of our modest church life, in spite of our supposed new foundation, my husband managed to drink his way through the years to title of Alcoholic, and as I watched him journey through life on his way to alcoholism, many a time I found myself on my knees, praying.
I think you get down on your knees and pray when you’re desperate. You somehow feel like on your knees, hands clasped, will somehow show God how much pain you’re in, and show Him how much help you really need.
As we fumbled our way through almost 13 years of marriage, my parents supported us from the sidelines, but they weren’t “praying” for us. Praying is not what they did.
I’m not sure if they believed in anything you pray to or not. Instead of praying for us we were “in their thoughts.” That was their encouragement gifted to you. Here, you will receive from us, the power of positive thinking.
And, if you think about it, that’s not a huge stretch from what prayer is really.
Spirituality as a parent
My husband and I had a couple kids, moved again, and found ourselves attending a Presbyterian church for awhile before re-shopping that thought, instead settling on a nearby Methodist church that seemed more a fit.
As a mom of toddlers, I felt the parental need to give my kids a spiritual foundation. Afterall in my casual Christianness, I was a pray-er now, so I believed in God (at the very least), and wanted my kids to have that in their lives too.
I taught them to pray in their beds at night. I took them to church, let the church teach my children about living in a whale for 3 days, let the church teach them songs about Jesus loving them, this I know.
I didn’t believe all the fabled Bible stories. My logical mind couldn’t really fathom why we continued with these nonsensical stories, but as a family we were cemented in the idea of church and the goodness it supposedly created in everybody.
Reimagining Prayer
So the context has been laid down. And now you know what leads me to this point.
I’m several decades past the beginnings of my young adult spiritual awakening. Rebirth? Nah. I never considered myself a born-again Christian. Those are awkward words I have no business saying.
Spirituality is about all I can buy into.
Prayer has always been very personal to me. So personal that it feels uncomfortable to tell someone I’m praying for them…cause I’m not gonna lie, I’m probably not, if you mean the traditional sense of prayer.
When people feel hopeless, standing on the outside of a situation, wanting to help in some way, they say, “I’m praying for you!” I can’t do that. It feels insincere, words thrown about haphazardly.
I think about people throughout my day, during my drive to work, while I’m out on a walk. I’m just thinking. I think a lot. Those closest to me are in my thoughts, and that feels sufficient and prayerful to me.
Isn’t prayer really requests, hopes, and wishes? All anyone wants is for things to just be better. It’s our deepest thoughts about all that goes unsaid. It’s our quiet place that holds thoughts about our marriage, our spouse, our children, our family, our friends, our health, our safety, our happiness. It’s a plea to the universe you may or may not call God, to be in thought with you. To consider what you’re considering. To make things all right with the world.
I think I’ve come full circle to what my parents discovered at some point in their lives. They did meet at the commonplace church picnic, but over time perhaps they did their own self-exploration of God and all that comes with that package deal. And maybe they too can’t concretely say what is and what isn’t, and therefore their beliefs are muddled within.
Afterall that’s just the truth of the matter. We can wonder and imagine, and have faith or not have faith in the unseeable, and maybe someday when our shells crumple up and take their last breaths we’ll discover what has been imagined to be all this time. But until then it’s just an endless conversation of unknowing.
I have no idea if my parents prayed in their lives, though I’m not sure how any parent gets through life without at least one or two whispered prayers in the darkness of night when they lay in bed at the end of the day. Like the saying, there’s no atheists in foxholes, I’m pretty certain even agnostic parents might utter a few words of query into the universe when things are dire.
Sending good vibes your way
So if I circle back to the beginning…if we’re gonna talk about praying then there has to be a higher power somewhere. Would it therefore mean that those of us who don’t pray in the traditional sense really don’t believe in God?
My mom, always the frequent, famous letter-writer in our family, is the ultimate caring mom and grandma, but even when the chips are down she never writes that she’s “praying” about it.
She writes, and I quote, “I’m sending good vibes your way.” She’s thinking about you. She hopes things for you. She is using “her ESP” (extrasensory perception), sending good vibes about your predicament (illness, divorce, money-woes, fill-in-the-blank) in hopes those good grandma vibes will float through the universe and enter into your head and heart, and fix whatever ails you. Because what good grandma vibes wouldn’t?
I think she has reimagined prayer as a positive thought process!
She’s not asking (at least not out loud) God to help you, but rather she is hoping, wishing, and requesting that the universe will take into consideration that we need something good to happen, and because she is thinking those things, that therefore in fact it will.
An encourager by nature, I think she’s made the Power of Positive Thinking her church, having reimagined prayer for herself. This she can wrap her head around. The church-God-Jesus package? Not so much.
One final prayer note
What I’ve noticed in my evolution of Christianity…hard to call it that…is the nothingness of all of it. The childhood confusion and meaninglessness turned into a brief ride of attempted belief on the Jesus train, followed by agnosticism dotted with faint spirituality. It’s a big fat nothingburger.
Funny how the Jesus followers of long ago, couldn’t agree on beliefs, so they split themselves up to create all these denominations. And now here we all are, shopping our religion, seeking a certain fit, a certain style, a certain substance we can relate to. It kind of has less to do with beliefs and seems more about how the product is packaged now.
As church reinvents itself and evolves to fit the current times, it doesn’t seem so crazy to personally reimagine prayer and our belief systems too.
I have a non-church-going friend who once told me she didn’t understand why anybody needed to pray more than once about anything. If God knows every hair on our head, and really knows and loves us, then he knows what we need, right? Why would we have to keep praying the same prayer, asking the same thing over and over? Once should suffice, right? If at all. Cause He should tele-God-pathically know everything!
She has a point.
Me? Well, just like my mother, I can’t say I’m praying for you. Don’t take it to mean any less than someone who might actually say they are praying for you. My thoughts and their prayers are one and the same in my book.
I am thinking about you.
Good vibes and ESP seem a little cheesy, but I’m not opposed to exploring spirituality as something more than the usual sense of the word.
I believe prayer can be reimagined, comparable to meditation, seeking balance and centeredness, finding solutions in solitude, and using positivity as our outlook on life.
But yes, I do talk to God once in a while.