Midlife Meditation

As I wrote in June (see  "Coercing God" ), I have some problems with prayer. That entry was mostly about the ineffectiveness of the practice, the way in which it extorts favors from God, and in the process casts an unflattering light on the deity. If God is all-powerful and all-loving, then suffering should cease to exist. If, on the other hand, God is all-powerful but only alleviates the suffering of those who pray or are prayed for, then God is a mercurial despot unworthy of praise. Since suffering is all around us, we can infer that God cannot be both all-powerful and all-loving; that, in fact, if there is any God at all, this deity either has limited power or has a cruel personality. In the face of such logic, one has to ask: whither prayer? Sunday morning, the church where I have been playing the piano for three years (and for the next month, after which I'm letting go of that job, but that's a story for another blog post) had a lay-led service. The pastor ...

Just in case you were wondering, you need at least one hand free to take a webcam selfie. I have always had a difficult relationship with prayer. As a child, I had two prayers, at bedtime and at mealtime. They were short and sweet, so I'm putting them up here. You'll recognize the first one, though it was adjusted in a significant way by my parents. The second is a family blessing that came either from Germany or Sweden 150 years ago. Now I lay me down to sleep I prayer the Lord my soul to keep And in the morning when I wake, Make me good, for Jesus' sake. Dear Lord, come and be our guest. Bless this food which you have set before us. In Jesus' name, Amen. The original version of that first prayer should be familiar to many: the second two stanzas should read, "If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take." My parents probably altered it because 1) death is too scary, and definitely not something you want on children's m...