May 20, 2006

Prayer

I don’t remember that we prayed much in my family in my earlier years. When I was about seven, my mom caught her finger in the door once and muttered much to my surprise a four-letter word I had only recently learned. I was shocked. She was embarrassed, said something like when one gets older, one sometimes says things like this. It was not a prayer in any usual sense, but it was an oath, and that comes close, I suppose.

In the more formal prayers, like the collects in the several offices and for the Sundays, for example, we always seem to address God — usually implying his fatherhood (or her motherhood, if you prefer, as I increasingly for some reason do in that it seems only fair to change for a few centuries) — and then we add some one of her attributes or characteristics rather as if she didn’t already know that or maybe had forgot it and needed reminding. I think of this week’s Fifth Sunday of Easter collect that begins “Almighty God… ” and then qualifies or elaborates with “whom truly to know is everlasting life… ”

I wonder what that means, this knowing and living being so truly enmeshed, and as if that is what everlasting life really is, a super long trek into theology. Truly to know God is, I suppose, also truly to be known by God, a perfected kind of anthropology, perhaps. And that would certainly seem to have an everlasting and engaging aura about it.

That prayer seems sometimes pretentious bothers me, for it reminds me that prayer may unavoidably be more selfish than seems felicitous. My mother, with her finger smarting from the door, surely used a different liturgy, but it comforts me to think she had the same God in mind.

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