Index > What is God? > The third day

I think there's a natural mental motion that bundles up a range of several different mental motions, which are gestured at in the bullet points from "Does God listen to prayers?". That mental motion is called "prayer". I'm not super familiar with it, but I have a little bit of experience with it, so I think I know enough to see that it's a thing and I'll say a bit about it.

In general, prayer is a kind of exhortatory mode of thinking. That is, you're exhorting (egging on, urging, pleading, pushing, compelling, exciting, energizing, pronouncing)--though it's not necessarily clear who you're exhorting, or what you're exhorting zer to do. It's a combination of wishing that something would be so; demanding of the world that it be this way; hoping that it be so; affirming, precariously (which is cognate with "prayer" and German "fragen" [to ask]), that it will be so... And if you'd permit the language, affirming that this is God's will; asking God how to make it so; asking God to make it so.

Examples:

• While there were Israeli hostages held in Gaza, Akheynu was impactful to hear sung. I screamed it from the hilltops. Who would hear it, except my friend and myself? Maybe another hiker would hear. Maybe the sky would hear? What do I mean? That doesn't mean anything, but it does. It means I have to scream at the sky. Some of your thoughts have to be written out for you to think them. That's how you think them. Is this a cheer, like for a sports team? But it's not collective effervescence, it's effervescence of one or two. And what does that even mean. It's a cry. "Sorrow" is cognate with German "Sorge" meaning [care, concern]. You cry into your pillow alone. It's not a proposition, it's a process, an exertion, a reprogramming. May it be that they're returned home to safety, delivered, redeemed from captivity. Quickly now. Is it a comic waste of energy? It's not like my brainwaves are transmitted through the sky halfway around the world. But how else are we not a circular firing squad?
• In writing the prayer for engaging in conflict, I felt a realignment. Not that I suddenly knew what to do in any specific situation, or even that I as immediately more prepared. Rather, I felt as though I'd written a signpost and stuck it in the ground, probably roughly in the right direction; and now all I have to do is follow it, to get to being more prepared to handle conflict. To follow it, I just have to recite it and meditate on it.
• The Litany of Tarski and the Litany of Gendlin have been influential in my thinking, since I read them as a teenager. It's not like I didn't know them in some sense--you can tell because, like many others, I immediately recognized them as good and true--but in another sense I did not know them. What I came to know was a prayer--an exhortation to myself.
• I pray for the world to not end--the sand, the sea, the rshrsh, the flash, the prayer. I'm investing my hope. I'm not investing my hope in being magically saved by an apo mekhanes theos. But investing my hope is a process, a task, a muscle to exercise. It's something that deconcentrates, and that warrants reconcentration. I do pray that the sand is not melted into sludge, that the seas and the waters do not boil off, that the prayer of man isn't choked. Which is to say, I do want that, and the wanting steps out more as I sing the words.
• I pray for peace. I scream Heyveynu Shalom Aleykhem (words), and I dance to Loh Yeesah Goy (1, 2, words). It's sad and joyful; it's a hope for peace and a warning to myself to not act against peace.