Prayer and meditation: the semantics of ideology.
Meditation is secular praying
Praying is religious meditation
The semantics of prayer and meditation create a special kind of cognitive dissonance. The discrepancy between the two terms often relies on the ideology of the person judging it. The religious folks tend to scoff at meditation in the same way the atheists dismiss prayer.
But essentially, they are the same concept, it is just a matter of intention or direction. Meditation has the intention of no intention and prayer is directed at God. Ironically, the act of creating no intention is exactly what creates the space to experience God.
The prayer meditation debate is a matter of defining what God is. God is a loaded term. This distinguishes the idea that God and religion are mutually exclusive concepts. If you can understand God and religion as two separate ideas, then you can understand what binds meditation and prayer.
It would be ridiculous to say that we don’t pray, everyone prays, it is just a hijacked term. It has a religious connotation to it. The only difference between hope and pray is the word “God” and the intention towards an idol.
“I believe in God, only I spell it nature”
That quote is how I code the force that drives the birds to flock together, the schools of fish to converge and the things I can observe and can’t explain. But God is also that force that I surrender to when I am lost. When I am adrift, it means my breathing is off and I am believing the flood of negative thoughts that loop in my mind on repeat.
I am always directing my intention with gratitude to whatever is the source of my outstanding luck. That is what God is to me. The question becomes is it even possible to have your own idea of God for something that is supposed to be universal, like truth or love?
My plans for the future, my well wishes for people to heal, my hope that my loved ones will live healthy and fulfilled lives, that is all a matter of faith and prayer. There is no other way to frame without losing the essence of what I am trying to accomplish when I focus my intentions.
Loving-kindness meditation, the act of wishing the absolute best outcomes for someone is essentially a prayer. There is no distinction aside from the words used. It’s a tightrope act but with the right words, you can bypass a person’s bias and describe a deliberate act that checks all the boxes for logic and faith.
I remember my nanny would wait for us in front of the big bay window on the top floor of their house in Ozone Park. When I would run up to see her she would have a rosary in her hand. She would sit in front of the window praying for everything and everyone in her life for hours and hours. This was a daily practice for her. I would ask her why she did that because as a child I had no idea what that meant.
My sweet old nanny fondling plastic beads, mumbling to herself as she peered out at the world from the top of her home, this didn’t compute to me as a child. “I am praying for everyone and I am praying for you.” I prayed for Ninja turtles and Pizza and my prayers were always answered. I have the absurd luck of being born in a time and into a family that allowed such luxuries instead of the historical struggle to merely survive. This is something I am constantly, ridiculously grateful for.
She spent most of her time in a deep state of prayer. That was the loving energy I felt when I would see her and my great grandfather when I would run up the stairs. Ascending those stairs every Sunday was my visit to heaven. In her intentions, she created an environment of pure love. She would bless the air with her intentions that came from her deep work in prayer. It was a meditative act of prayer.
It begs the question if all the blessings in my life were due to her diligent practice of daily prayer. It may seem like an absurd way to explain the unexplainable, but it brings me great peace knowing of her intent, but also, she was not the only one who prayed for me. I could never discount my mother’s own endless prayers, sweat, and tears.
But it wasn’t just the act of prayer, my nanny lived her life in that space. She was the embodiment of unconditional love and patience, like the saints she would call upon daily.
My aversion to religion has decreased significantly in the past 5 years or so. I used to be completely disgusted by it, but now I understand it as an anchor in people’s lives. Religion has the potential to veer people in the right direction and align them with the process that creates meaning and brings peace to their lives and this world.
Meditation is essential for well-being, which means so is prayer. You can do violence to these acts by adding an ideological razor to them, which has the tendency to take away the splendor and insult the practitioner.
This is exactly the divide between the Gnostics and the early Christians. The idea that we can go without structure leaves too many rudderless in the oceans of uncertainty, but the devotion to dogma stitches our eyes shut and covers our ears to the atrocities of the insidious contamination of bureaucrats and tyrants.
But we will save that for next week.