Posted on by sofiaseekerofgod

Praying like an Adult

Where did we get the idea that God is a divine vending machine? We put in a prayer and get what we want from God. I have heard this sentiment thousands of times, including from myself.

We think if the Vending Machine God doesn’t give us what we want then we choose not to believe in the God we created for ourselves. However that God doesn’t sound like a transcendent, omnipotent, omniscient being. That god is more like an over-indulgent parent with poor boundaries.

But we are praying for important things, like health, healing and peace in the world. Somehow wiping out suffering has never been a constant of human experience and that shows no sign of stopping. Sadly.

If our childish prayers aren’t about getting what we want it is about what God needs us to do, another self-important idea. I remember praying fervently as a child (and by fervently I mean eyes squeezed shut tight enough to produce a headache and perfectly pointed prayer hands to be sure the prayer reaches heaven) and said, “God I’ll do anything you need me to do but please don’t make go to Africa because I am scared of snakes and I saw the food those missionaries ate. I’ll starve to death so I can’t help you anymore.”

As I’ve grown over the years my prayers have turned less transactional and more intimate. It is usually not about getting things or doing things but about being aware of the presence of God and sharing my ideas, feelings, concerns and observations.

Prayers may be something like, “I wonder what You had in mind with that situation?” Or “ What are Your thoughts about this?”

My most frequent prayer is “………” which translated means “I don’t have words for this, I have feelings I cannot fully understand. You and I are together in this.”

Paradoxically, praying like an adult can bring us full circle back to a pre-verbal place wherein we can just be with God, sometimes still asking for things. And like any child with a wise parent sometimes getting what we want and sometimes not, but always getting a relationship.

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Posted on by sofiaseekerofgod

The God We Cannot See

Some people will talk about their relationship with God as if God were a scolding, remote, impossible to please parent. God requires something that they can’t quite figure out but if they don’t they will not receive God’s goodness. These same folks will speak lovingly and enthusiastically about a lover, baseball, football, a rock star, movie star or some other unattainable person that evokes magical feelings in them. I hear tender attentiveness to the cherished object. I hear people experiencing something larger than themselves (even if they are agnostic). How often to people talk with this level of love and passion about God? How many people feel this adoration for God? I don’t know the answer to these questions but I am guessing it’s not enough.

People are made to worship and tend to be good worshippers of something. It begins when we are infants and totally dependent on our parents for life. They are all powerful and we are powerless. We are wired from birth to depend on someone far more powerful than we are. We we begin our journey in this world idealizing another. Even the agnostic Sigmund Freud realized this when in 1914 he wrote in A Schoolboy Psychology that our first template for God is our parents. When we are infants and toddlers we think of our parents as God, then soon after parents are not quite God but God-like. By about age five they are God’s assistants, maybe having a special hotline to God. When we are old enough to see our parents’ flaws we look for something to be the recipient of our need to to worship.

I know I projected God onto a human in those early years. Around age five, as a pee wee theologian, I believed that God worked as a clerk at our local supermarket. (That was before the movie “Oh God” came out but apparently someone else had the same idea about God’s involvement in the grocery business.) This man seemed so kind and gentle but I got suspicious when he said, “Hi Joe. How are you?” to my Dad, who somehow was in tight with God. This was a strange question for a God who already knew how we all were, my dad included. Also, I wondered why was God wearing glasses since he’s perfect. I concluded that it was a clever disguise to avoid exposing His undercover operation because even at age five I knew that God made us search hard for Him.

While all of us begin life thinking of God as a concrete person we can see, we are meant to use this only as a beginning place to know God as real. We are meant to emotionally and spiritually outgrow this need we have to make God something we can see, hear and hug. But unless we deliberately work at spiritual maturity, we do not grow. God seems disengaged and uncaring. Then we tend to project the passion meant for God onto a person, thing or experience on earth and miss the mysterious joy of relationship with an invisible God whose fingerprints are everywhere.