I was thinking about prayer the other day. Thinking about it, but not really doing it. Prayer ain’t so easy when you’re getting up in your middle years (when you HOPE they’re your middle years). When you were a kid, you prayed because you were told to do so (well, you did it for a while, anyway). When you went to church as an adult, you did it as a group thing. And maybe you kept the habit of mentally reciting a formula prayer like the “Our Father” when you get up or go to bed or when you’re in a scary or demanding situation. But it’s usually pretty hard to really get excited about prayer. It ain’t like sex or food or money. It’s generally a rough slog, if you still practice it at all.

But I’d like to think that there’s something fundamental (maybe even “archetypal”) behind the common idea of prayer, i.e. the situation where one or more human beings uses their communication devices (speech, singing, thinking, maybe other ways) in a one-way manner toward an imagined superior force or presence. I’d like to think that prayer is more than wishful thinking. Something felt down deep, something beyond reason or passion.

If that’s the case, then maybe true prayer is more of a feeling than a set of words or thoughts. Prayer is ultimately an issue of faith, and faith likewise is much more than simple intellectual assent to the theory of a divine being. It’s even more than the wishful group thinking that seems to power most religious feelings. When you think about it, most people’s faith is rooted in the experience of being part of a group that asserts a commonly expressed belief. A group phenomenon, in other words. And that’s a good thing. But would it last if an individual were separated from the group? I truly believe that people who go out of their way to convert others to their particular kind of religious practice are very insecure about their own faith (despite their alleged concerns about the salvation of others). They need a group to support their belief in the almighty, and the bigger the group the more comfortably they can believe. To know that others disagree with their particular form of prayer, or with the whole idea of the divine, really rattles their cage.

But what I’d like to know is whether “natural prayer” is possible, i.e. something beyond “now I lay me down to sleep” and petitions to feel better and requests for answers to various problems in life. Something even beyond “hey thanks, things are going great” (a rare form of prayer for most). Or in my case, prayers of confusion. Most of my own prayers these days are questions about why things are they way they are, such a crazy mix of goodness and badness and randomness (think of the lyrics to Jackson Browne’s “Doctor My Eyes”). I’d like to think that deep down inside, somehow I’m still keeping some kind of faith despite all the things that make us lose faith. Perhaps the idea of natural prayer is summed up in a line from one of those modern liturgical hymns by David Haas. To wit: “we ache to find the song of a God, one to whom we can belong …” Perhaps prayer is more in the ache, and less in the song itself.

Well, some big religious writer said that the desire to pray is prayer in itself. So, maybe the fact that I’d like to pray, that I’m still looking for something that gets thru to the psyche like sex or booze or food but has truly lasting value, something that is more than a quick fix, means that I’m still in the prayer zone. Hey, I hope so anyway.

Otherwise … rest in peace, Captain Kangaroo. Maybe I didn’t like the corny violin intro to your show, but hey, that was just CBS for you … always the “Tiffany” network. Otherwise, Mr. Kesham provided good, reliable entertainment for a kid. And hey, back in the land of the living, it’s nice to hear that the Mars rover may be fixable. After Beagle 2 and all the other space ventures that fell prey to “loss of signal”, it’s nice to hear that we may bring one back. My prayers are with you. And with the Captain too.