If you see prayer as the practice of getting into a resonant reciprocally-caring relationship with a system that you’re part of, then you can reasonably pray to all sorts of things.
How?
You can pray to your bedroom, or your apartment or house. Feel how nice it is to have this space, and how your ability to relax into it (however much you can) serves your sanity. Then consider… how can you take care of it in some small or big way right now? What needs doing? What’s been neglected? What act of care brought you so much joy last time that you get excited imagining doing it again? What do you need, and can you make it happen?
You can pray to your friend group. Feel the gladness you have for these relationships and connections. Who needs your help, or listening ear? Who have you fallen out of touch with, such that you wouldn’t even know if you could do something for them? Who would like to meet each other, that you could introduce? What event could you throw that would bring people together and create laughter or relief or satisfaction?
You can pray to your neighborhood, or your dorm. As with the friend group, but perhaps with more emphasis not just on the individuals but on the whole system that includes place and rhythms and people you aren’t close to but who nonetheless share it with you.
You can pray to your body. Feel appreciation for how it works, for how many things are happening without you having to attend to them at all—breath, cellular respiration, blood pumping, neurons firing, muscles making sounds come out of your mouth, eyes saccading to read and take everything in. How can you love your body better? How can you shift into a slightly more comfortable position? Are you thirsty or tired? Would it feel good to have music on, or more quiet? Are there choices you could make that will benefit your health over the coming years? Not because you have to or because it’s “good to” in some abstract sense, but because you care about your body and want to take care of it so it can care for you. (Don’t @ me about mind-body dualism here, I get it. I am the body.)
You can pray to your family—your spouse and kids, or your whole ancestral line going back generations, or your family extending out generations into the future. Feel the appreciation you have for them doing what they do, to make the family system work. How can you love your family even deeper? How can you create more slack, today? What virtues can you cultivate, that would make a difference now or over the coming decades? Forgiveness? Patience? Persistence? Reliability? Playfulness? Love?
If you’re single, you can still pray to your family: you imagine, 3-4 years out, you and your spouse are celebrating your wedding anniversary, and you have a kid or one on the way or you’re starting to talk about it. You may not have met them yet (or you may have met them but not realized they’re your life partner yet) but you already have some sense of what that family system would be like. And you can attend to your sense of it, and feel the ways in which your vision of it has already helped you steer, and ask it for guidance on how to steer better. This is a system that you are in some sense already part of, and you can pray about how to bring it into being.
You can pray to the company you work for, or the business you run. Feel the opportunity that you have to participate in the problem-solving flows of human society, and that you get paid a livelihood by your employer or your customers… appreciation for the fact that the system works enough to keep things flowing. Then consider… how can you take care of it? What really needs doing, by you? What would solve the problems the company has? Those might be external problems (customer churn, marketing shortcomings) or systems problems (bugs in the code, broken furniture) or problems that other employees have that diminish the overall sense of delight and ease and satisfaction of working at the company. Or some confusion or disagreement you could help resolve. What changes could you make to how things are set up, that would unleash more flow and effectiveness for you as you continue working here? And maybe the answer is just “keep doing all of the things you usually do each day. Even if so, it might feel very different to do those things from a clarity borne of open listening, rather than from autopilot.
You can pray to a social movement, or a mission. Feel the way in which it matters to you, and how the cause is meaningful to you to get to participate in, and how it calls to you. And again, ask it what it needs, from you in particular. How can your gifts serve this? Maybe it’s a very clear and direct move, or maybe it’s something loose that just shifts the overall situation slightly. Maybe you’re being called to develop new skills that nobody around you seems to have enough of, or to find someone to join your cause who already has the skills to fill that role. If you were fully devoted solely to serving this cause… obviously you’d still need to eat and take care of yourself, but it might have an answer for what else to do? (Note: this one is maybe more dangerous than the others to do in isolation.)
Suppose that you take this piece of writing to heart, and try it a lot, and the stance of prayer feels great, and you try it on more and more things, and when you’re at home you pray to your family, and when you’re at work you pray to your company, and so on.
But then you realize that the company seems to be set up in such a way that it’s asking you to do some unethical thing, that goes against some sense of deeper mission or responsibility that you have. And you imagine following the sense of deeper mission, but then that might cost you your job, and when you pray to your family, you feel the importance of you having a stable source of income.
Who or what do you pray to about this? You know you’re going to get different answers depending on your choice, so the mere act of choosing what to pray to is itself presupposing something of the answer. As Jean-Paul Sartre put it:
If you seek counsel – from a priest, for example you have selected that priest; and at bottom you already knew, more or less, what he would advise. In other words, to choose an adviser is nevertheless to commit oneself by that choice.
[…]
If a voice speaks to me, it is still I myself who must decide whether the voice is or is not that of an angel. If I regard a certain course of action as good, it is only I who choose to say that it is good and not bad. There is nothing to show that I am Abraham: nevertheless I also am obliged at every instant to perform actions which are examples.
It seems to me that one potential role for having a vast omni-caring God to pray to is that it creates a context that can hold all of these conflicts. Nothing is out of scope, and everything is included and ordered and contextualized.
It’s not that God has one pre-written answer for how it’s all supposed to work—that wouldn’t involve prayer at all, that would just be an algorithm. It’s still going to involve a kind of judgment call, a being-with of the entire complexity of the situation, an answer that materializes mysteriously into the silence rather than being merely the final output of a legible computation.
But unlike these lower level specific systems you can pray to, a vast omni-caring God can offer you a resonant mutually-caring relationship to which you can pray about these conflicts without presupposing the answer.
My heuristic for praying for guidance is that if I’ve really brought everything into the space, then the answer will feel obvious and right when it arises. If it feels wrong, or “but wait!” or “oh no!” then that’s a sign that my prayer has failed to include some crucial consideration that might make a difference for the answer. Which means I need to find more courage, honesty, clarity., whether via praying, journalling, researching,.
However, the answer might still feel like a big ask, a burden, a terrifying call to greatness or humility, or something like that. It will just feel, also, right.
That doesn’t mean it’s infallible. But it’s likely the best you can do, right now, from here.
How do you find this God? Do the Christians have the answer? The Muslims? The Jews? Necessarily, as I see it: no, they do not. They have approximations of something very relevant, which is one reason why I chose the capital G word associated with such groups, but they muddle the vast holder-of-everything with a parochial framework that treats certain things as fixed and pre-written.
An ex-Mormon friend of mine said that he had prayed daily for God to reveal to him that the Book of Mormon was true, and he asked for guidance from those around him for how to do so. They taught him how to tell the difference between a false answer to a prayer, that comes from the deceiver, and a true answer that comes from God. It’s not just that it aligns with the doctrine—the answer feels different to receive. And one day the answer came, with the full simple unposturing ring of truth: none of this is real.
Oh. What then? They taught him to pray so well he prayed his way out of the narrow faith they were stuck in.
A win for prayer.
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