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 ...

Three umpires met for a drink. The first was a rookie, the second was in the middle of his career, and the third had been calling games for forty years. They chewed the fat for awhile, telling stories about their favorite moments behind the plate. After awhile the topic shifted to calling balls and strikes. The first umpire, confident in the accuracy of his eye, said, "There's balls and there's strikes, and I call them like they is." The second umpire, knowing from experience that his perception was occasionally off, said, "You're partly right, there's balls and there's strikes, but I call 'em like I see 'em." The third umpire chuckled, sipped his whiskey, and said, "You're both wrong. There's balls and there's strikes, but they ain't nothin' until I call 'em." I first heard this story 25 years ago, as part of a lecture series at the University of Manchester by Schubert M. Ogden. The title of ...