Praying to Whom?

Some of you might not know this about me but I had a very religious practice growing up. I was raised Catholic and went to church on Sundays. While I did receive my First Communion, my parents responded to my request to explore my options when it came time for Confirmations. I am rarely one to just go through the motions to check boxes, I am a Cancer moon after all - I have to feel my way around and into a full Yes.

Fast forward to high school with a foundation of church, Sunday Schools and pancake breakfasts at my church, I was part of an organization called Young Life. I imagine a handful of you know it and dipped your toe in it in high school, if offered. Now while I feel my way around to a yes, once I am a full yes, it is 0 to 100.

My high school years would be my most religious years. I would not say my most spiritual as I do beleive those words have different meanings - but I definitely followed the rules, prayed and often and once I grew older in the organization, I signed the no drinking, no sex, no cussing contracts and led the younger generation to G-O-D. When we have coffee, I gotta tell you a few funny anecdotes about Jesus - he was a major cock block.

Anyways.

While my college years provided a literal new personality every year of school, religion slowly left the playing field. Yet there was always prayer. 

Prayer has shown up in many ways in my life. Be it to the God I once knew in my younger years saying thank you and apologizing for arguing with my sister again. Be it in the silence of my car with the windows rolled up at age 16 seeking guidance and support when again I had lost my way - both on the actual road and the roads of the teenage years of life. Again in moments of panic in college or with my Grandmother when I came home to her home on random weekends to do laundry, eat real food, hang on to her every word as I adored her beyond the depths of adoration (hell, I might pray to her now) and go to church with her and Grandpa on Saturday evenings. It shows up again standing next to the ocean in the vast beauty of Mother Pacific in all her waves and again in yoga because it is all I really knew. Prayer shows up with the teachers I have selected to guide me and the friends I choose to spend my time, one of them being very interested in divinity school and thus the articles he send me keep me in spiritual inquiry.

Whom do I pray to now?

I don’t believe in God as I was taught in my youth - the almighty white man with a white beard on a cloud. None of that really works for me and hasn’t for years on years.

I enjoy when Glennon and Lindsay Ruthie and Ted Lasso call God a ‘she’. I like how it stops me in my tracks and makes me think. But then some days, that does not work for me either.

Perhaps God is a ‘they’.

I wonder if there is actually more than one, so gods. And then no longer capitalized? I was also raised going to a school in the basement of a Greek Orthodox school with chapel every Thursday surrounded by saints, so much incense and learning in Greek Mythology class about the ancient Greek myths with Zeus, Athena, Artemis, Poseidon, Cupid et al.

What about angels? I definitely believe in angels. Like a deep knowing here and that has been unwavering. I’ve been held by them many times.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I can send up some questions her way.

And in my later life, nature has become so intertwined in my existence. I think about the trees, the incredible fungi beneath and above the service, the constellations above, the raw connection of human energy. I don’t believe god is up anymore yet all around.

Not sure on my thoughts on heaven. I’m hopeful. But then again reincarnation seems really neat and almost necessary. 

So when I pray these days, my practice is a form of devotion. I light a candle in a quiet space. I close my eyes with my hands on my heart and I often time forget to say thank you and get right into the requests. And most of my requests are other people - my dear friend navigating a surgery for her mama, another friend dealing with loss and grief of two close friends, a mama seeking answers for her delivery of her 4th child after a devastating loss of her 3rd, my own parents grieving the loss of their own mothers this year, my sisters and their beautiful lives, my children every single day they go to school and for the bus driver who drives my eldest, for the health of my husband at all times because I really like this life with him, for the Earth and her restoration and the beautiful minds that we can tap to continue to think beyond the box we read on the news, for hands reaching across divided aisles to agree to disagree and still have respect, to name a few and then i’ll add myself in for guidance on my path, creativity in new forms, friendships that light up my life….

Can you hear me, Ruth?

Mother pine outside my home, was that wind nod a yes?

Gram, can you put in a good word with the forces that be?

I keep praying. To whom, I’m not sure.

And that’s okay.