A friend of mine, a theologian who spent his working life in India, was greatly impressed by the vivacity and diversity of religious life in the sub-continent. He studied the sacred works of all the major religions present there and found, once the trappings of ceremony and the gaudy accretions of popular belief were put to one side, a remarkable congruity of core belief.
The first five words of the Nicene Creed are; I believe in one God. When I was a small boy I somehow gained the impression that only Christians believed this but Jewish school fellows soon disabused me of that notion and later on I realised that what I had thought of as an exclusive club actually had three members because Muslims also believed in a single, all powerful deity.
Still, I thought, a club with only three members is not too bad and we three can still look down with pity upon those poor benighted souls whose belief systems include pantheons of gods and goddesses whose behaviour, as exemplified by that of the denizens of old Olympus, is often less than edifying.
But later on in life I looked into the several books written by my theological friend and saw there that the characters who provide the external appearance of polytheistic religions are merely aspects of a much deeper reality in which there is only one supreme Absolute. Jolted by this into further reading , I soon realised that the notion of a Supreme Creator is a common characteristic of almost all organised religions as well as of many individuals who profess a faith in God. Another common characteristic of those who believe in the existence of a Creator is a notion that it is desirable and possible to communicate with that being, hence the notion of prayer.
According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, asking God for something; relief from sickness, success in business, a happy death, a bountiful crop and so on is probably the most common form of prayer while the next most frequently used type is the praise prayer .
As a child I was urged by my spiritual mentors to pray; to tell God what I was thinking, to offer praises to God, to tell Him that I was sorry for having offended Him and to ask Him for things; mercy principally but also alleviation from sickness and pain for me and for others, always remembering though that God might not do as I asked because, in the long run, He knew what was best for me and for everyone else.
In my own case, when no relief came from my chronic asthma, for instance, I was adjured to 'offer my pain up to God as a sacrifice.' Naturally, as an aspirant son of Holy Mother Church I complied but by my tenth year I had begun to wonder whether it wasn't a bit odd; talking to someone who never answered, not even enigmatically. I'd read about the Oracle at Delphi by this time and thought that even a cryptic answer would have been better than nothing.
Now, as a young person, I could see the point of supplicatory prayers; I wanted something and thought that He might give it to me but praising seemed somehow unedifying. After all, God knew all about Himself and hardly needed me to remind him that he was great, good, loving etc. In any event, as I have argued elsewhere in this blog, God is beyond the ultimate event horizon and is consequently unknowable and the attributes that we ascribe to God are a reflection of our wishes rather than of His reality.
In the Don Camillo stories by Giovanni Guareschi, the eponymous priest talks directly to God via the figure of Christ on the cross over the altar of the parish church. And God, in the figure of Christ, not only replies but initiates conversations, particularly when He wants to make a point to the saintly but worldly Don Camillo. Their talk is natural and easy, Don Camillo does not bow and scrape although he does show a proper respect and reverence for his Lord. I have often wanted to be able to talk with God in that way, especially when I have been very worried about something, a seriously ill child, for instance but to no avail; God has never had anything to say to me. I have no way of knowing whether anyone else has ever received a conversational answer from God but I'd lay very long odds on its never having happened.
I am now in something of a bind. I am sure that praise of God is an absurd activity and pretty sure that petitions to God are never answered. And yet and yet, I have never been able to quite rid myself of the notion that my nowadays conversational asides to the God whom I cannot affect might, in some unknowable, celestial sense of the word, be being heard.
Whistling in the dark, perhaps?
