The main question I am trying to think about now is how can “prayer” be incorporated into a free creative spirituality? A top of mind answer to my own question would be to think about my needs. Sometimes, I feel like I have a need to talk to “someone” invisible even if I know he or she isn’t there (like my dead friend, Rem). Sometimes, as if reminiscent to my prayers to Jehovah in the past, I feel like I want to pray to the universe as if it is a person.
But I am also interested in exploring forms of prayer that is more aligned to the non-theistic spirituality that I am slowly embracing. If there is no God or soul to talk to, how can prayer be done?
Prayer un-addressed to anyone
From Michael McGhee in Spirituality for the Godless:
What is crucial, and it is relatively neglected by accounts of secular humanism, is this kind of meditative ‘prayer’ (which is not addressed to anyone) and its analogues.
Prayer as listening
In his essay about Gary Whited’s book Having Listened and Leo Tolstoy, Andrew J. Brown proposes prayer as a way to listen, specifically to what the world around and within is saying.
Now, in order to discern “God’s will”, and/or that which “lays claim to us”, and through it to find the meaning and purpose of our lives (and what this is will be different for each person), we simply cannot be engaged in the kind of petitionary prayer that is all about transmitting our personal wishes outward; as Jesus memorably taught, in prayer we should not babble but become silent and enter into a quiet, un-showy, receptive way of being; it is to listen. It is this we, ourselves, must learn.
More thoughts from Andrew on how this could be done.
Prayer addressed to people
Meanwhile, Shinichiro Imaoka seems to use prayer and addresses it to someone, although that someone are the people themselves who are part of the community.
May we all be persistent in a free, creative, and universal faith, and go forward for the purpose of realizing the Kingdom of God, or Pure Land of Buddha, that is nothing but the Ideal Community.
Amen.