Prayer is a form of objectifying God. The person praying is only translating his God into words. And if he or she prays aloud, then the object produced is in the form of sound. Thinking about God is not by itself prayer, it is only thinking about God. The thoughts become prayer only when it is addressed to another entity besides one’s self. In which case, the prayer becomes the object. The target of the object also becomes objectified. It becomes a presence, even if this presence is as inchoate as spirit or only as representationally concrete as an image, a statue. One talks to this spirit on the premise that He is there, like another person. Prayer is always a negation of loneliness inside the aloneness of one’s own mind.
And so the person praying is not much different from a sculptor carving into a piece of wood those things that another person would put into a prayer. A piece of sculpture may spiritually contain for the sculptor a specific aspiration, a wish for intercession, an expression of gratitude and adoration. This latter thing being what is traditionally at the core of prayer as it is now mostly understood.
One cannot help relating prayer to the oldest human traditions. It is certainly related to the feudal past when we were led by monarchs. The wordings of most traditional prayers speak of this in no uncertain terms. They paint for us a picture of God as King who either endows the greatest graces and blessings or metes out the worst punishments. The king is always distant and all powerful. He has a gruesome opposite, the devil, who should of course be ugly and evil. The king protects us from this opposite. And He does this especially by our prayers.
This idea of prayer is an orthodoxy that has lasted for many ages. It will probably stay there for ages still. But it is inevitable that it will also change and evolve over time in tune with our own changing conceptions of God. The idea of God as king, is probably hard to contain in the minds of the young who have lived all their lives without any concrete representation of earthly kings. For the young, the only representation of kings they will find will be those they are exposed to through television and the computer. And one is right to wonder if this fact contributes to the distancing of God from the minds of most of the young. When the children pray, do they really talk to God or are they only mouthing incantations? Are their prayers real and addressed to a real God?
There is a reason those who pray should think seriously about prayer and God as objects. What constitutes the object? The object exists on its own. It is separate from the one who views it. Anything that issues from the mind is object. And part of its constitution as an object is that it can be viewed from a distance. Thus, if the praying person says, “Dear God”, he or she can look at those words and try to understand where they are coming from, what they are constructed of, and most especially what they actually mean.
“Dear” is an unmistakable expression of love and respect. “God” is the more problematic. It can mean different things for different people. Most of those who came before us probably did not have much of a problem thinking of God as an all-powerful king ever ready to punish us for our sins. But for most of us, that conception may have become by now less real. The last time we were led by kings, we were only a distant colony of the Spanish Crown. We have liberated ourselves from this since the turn of the previous century. When we think “king” do we really know what king means?
And it is pointless to try and see a representation of God in our existing earthly leaders. We can hardly look at presidents, congressmen, governors, mayors, judges and think “God”. It is clearly a travesty. We would be better of to think of “God” as father or mother. That at least would be the safer road. But what about God as “friend”?
A friend is still a friend even if he or she is more or less powerful than we ourselves. And friend is a concept that has outlasted and will most likely outlast the concept, king. Friend is the more democratic and human concept. God is more powerful but we are also in a sense equal. The more powerful entity insures this by endowing us with the gift of free will.
Our own children will most likely find that the more familiar concept. There might be a lesson here to be learned by Ang Tigbuhat who is a maker of sculpture and words. He would do well to ask himself: How does God appear to him? When he prays, are his prayers real and addressed to a real presence? How does this presence appear to him? King or friend?
“Dear Friend, let us spend the next few moments talking.”