Pray First

Ask questions later

Statue in the rebuilt Stoa of Attalos in Athens, Greece. Photo by MPM, 2024.

A few months ago, my dear friend Jen and I talked about the state of the world. She’s someone I’ve mentioned before, a brilliant and passionate soul who has devoted years to transforming five acres of scrub and weeds in Washington State into a self-sustaining, harmonious permaculture habitat. It’s astonishing what she and her partner have been able to accomplish.

We share many, many opinions, including utter dismay at the almost-unfathomably dire situation in the States, and I’ve always admired her hands-in-the-dirt response. In fact, I’ve generally felt that banging words out with my hands is not stepping up adequately to the challenge.

So when we both fell silent after our depressing acknowledgement of the challenges we all face, and she asked me, “So what do we do?” I was a little taken aback. Other than what she’s already doing? Literally regenerating the earth under her feet? What else is there?

And then I had it.

The thing I always forget, the thing I come to last when all of my practical solutions and well-researched ideas have fallen flat, the thing that requires me to shut down my ego and my eternally-recurring delusion of competence: prayer.

In June, Tucker Carlson sat down with Nayib Bukele, the recently re-elected President of El Salvador, who has transformed the country from the homicide capital of the world (when Bukele took over in 2020, El Salvador’s homicide rate was three times what Haiti’s is now) to one of the safest country in Latin America.

Bukele has his detractors (who doesn’t?) but in watching him speak with Carlson, I was deeply moved by his description of sitting down with his security cabinet to address the notorious, widespread gang violence that was making his country the most dangerous in the world.

He said, “We really tried to figure out what to do. And I basically said, we are looking into an impossible mission here.” He paused, and with a small smile, he said, “So we pray.”

This time they both paused, and as Bukele started to say, “And we—” Carlson, with a note of incredulity, interrupted to ask what I myself was wondering at that very moment:

“You prayed in the meeting?”

“Yes, yes of course. Several times.”

Now it’s time for me to pause.

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Having grown up in the U.S., where “separation of church and state” is bandied about often due to the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, I notice my surprise and discomfort at Bukele’s statement.

Yikes, I think. That’s not right. God should never be mentioned in a governmental context.

Yet that’s not what the Establishment Clause states. If it did, we wouldn’t have millions upon millions of children continuing to dutifully recite “one Nation under God” in public schools since 1954, thanks to President Eisenhower.

At a Flag Day speech that year, Eisenhower discussed why he wanted to include “under God” in the pledge of allegiance:

“In this way we are reaffirming the transcendence of religious faith in America’s heritage and future; in this way we shall constantly strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country’s most powerful resource in peace and war.”

A lifelong military careerist and commanding general of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, he stated that faith in God is the country’s most powerful resource. Not economic might, or military force. Not demography, environmental or natural resources, culture, statesmanship, or technology. Pretty stunning, I think.

A certain squeamishness about mentioning God in any governmental capacity has recently rooted itself deeply in our national culture — except for our acceptance of the platitudinous closeout to every politician’s public address: “God bless America.” And that same squeamishness resides in higher education, too — unless you’re getting a degree in religion.

During grad school for an MA in theatre, I brought forward a proposal to create an immersive theatrical performance that would attempt to heal the collective trauma that’s still buried in our nation’s psyche from the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I proposed incorporating shamanic ritual from indigenous ceremonies with theatrical storytelling, creating a community healing experience for the participating audience.

I remember my advisor shifting in her seat, her rapid blinking, the slow nod that meant no. “That’s mighty ambitious,” was all she said, which was true, but also damning in its brevity. I understood: spirituality, radioactive in government, also had no place in academia.

The funny thing is, the Establishment Clause doesn’t mean that religion can have no part of public life. The Clause stipulates that government officials can’t use their power to discriminate based on religion, or favor/disfavor any religion, but they can express their religious beliefs on the job, the way Bukele did.

Back to Bukele for a moment.

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“What did you pray for?” asked Carlson.

“For wisdom, to… to win the war,” replied Bukele. “To have — I thought at the time we would have civilian casualties, so we prayed that casualties would be as low as possible. And we didn’t have any civilian casualties.”

“And was everyone in the meeting comfortable with that?”

“Yes, yes. All my security cabinet are believers, they believe in God. We’re a secular country, of course, but we [his cabinet] all believe in God.”

We’re a secular country, too. At the time Eisenhower added “one Nation under God” to the pledge, 98% of Americans believed in God. Now, it’s 81%, which is still a pretty hefty majority. But by the size of the squeamishness I felt, I expected that percentage to be much, much smaller.

My squeamishness is based on the social and professional circles I used to inhabit. Saying “the spiritual realm” in a Waldorf school is fine, ditto in yoga studios. But not “God.” And none of it is generally welcome in academia or the theatre — unless you’re confidently deconstructing the “opiate of the masses” in a thesis or onstage. Otherwise, you’re considered a bit of a rube.

I’m not alone;

Dr Naomi Wolf

has written eloquently about her own “coming out” process. In her own words:

Grounded postmodern intellectuals are not supposed to talk about or believe in spiritual matters — at least not in public…

It was not always the case that Western intellectuals were supposed to keep quiet in public about spiritual wrestling, fears and questions. Indeed in the West, poets and musicians, dramatists and essayists and philosophers, talked about God, and even about evil, for millennia, as being at the core of their understanding of the world and as forming the basis of their art forms and of their intellectual missions…

It was not until after World War Two and then the rise of Existentialism — the glorification of a world view in which the true intellectual showed his or her mettle by facing the absence of God and our essential aloneness — that smart people were expected to shut up in public about God.

So — I am going to start talking about God…

And I’m choosing to talk about prayer.

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In 2021, when I was co-organizing a Health Freedom group in New York State, a friend I’ll call “Amy” (who shows up in my BlueEff essay) declined our invitation to join even though she was right in line with the group’s beliefs. She thanked us for wanting to include her, then said that that kind of group was not her thing.

She said she’d rather pray.

My first thought was, can’t she do both? followed immediately by okay, yeah, prayer is good but we need real action, culminating in back off, Mary, every one has their own path to walk. All within the amount of time it takes to get in a car, start the engine, and put it in reverse.

For a long time, I’d separated prayer from action. I equated it with passivity. If you can’t DO anything, well then, just pray. It was the last resort, the literal Hail Mary. I probably adopted that attitude from my atheist father, who told me he didn’t believe in prayer, but would begrudgingly do it in dire circumstances to “hedge his bets.”

I’ve since come to appreciate Amy’s clarity of purpose, and her singular determination to do what she felt was her highest and best. And I’ve come to believe that prayer — in whatever form, to whatever formless higher power — is, as Eisenhower stated about faith, our most powerful resource.

Which brings me to the crux of this essay.

The phrase “ask and it is given,” understood to be a metaphor for prayer, is also the name of the famous-in-some-circles, notorious-in-others book about manifestation that I found both inspiring and infuriating when I read it decades ago. You probably recognize the phrase as the lead-in to “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you,” found in Matthew 7:7.

The point of that book is that we have to ask. There is help all around us, just waiting for us to petition it. My yoga teacher Todd Norian used to say, “The winds of grace are always blowing, but you have to set the sail.”

Righting the world as it stands now is, as Bukele called his country’s predicament, “an impossible mission.” We are so far in over our human heads, there seems to be no possible way of fixing this mess on our own.

I agree completely with Wolf:

I do think we need to call, as Milton did, as Shakespeare did, as Emily Dickinson did, on help from elsewhere; on what could be called angels and archangels, if you will; on higher powers, whatever they may be; on better principalities, on whatever intercessors may hear us, on Divine Providence — whatever you want to call whomever it is you can hope for and imagine…

…we have no other choice but to ask for assistance from beings — or a Being — better armed to fight true darkness, than ourselves alone…

And not only must we get on our proverbial knees — could there be a more perfect metaphor for letting go of our overweening, stubborn ego? — we must do it before we do anything else.

There’s a scene in one of my favorite movies, It’s A Wonderful Life, when Mary (Donna Reed) watches George (James Stewart) explode at their children on Christmas Eve. He’s in a state of pure despair, driven to suicidal thoughts at the prospect of financial ruin and going to jail — but Mary knows none of that.

All she knows is that she’s never seen him like this. After he leaves the house, she hurries to the phone, picks it up and says to the operator, “Bedford 2-4-7 please.”

Her children cluster around her, worried.

“Is Daddy in trouble?” says her eldest.

“Yes, Pete.”

“Shall I pray for him?” says her daughter.

“Yes, Janie, pray very hard.”

“Me too?” pipes up another.

“You too, Tommy,” says their mother.

That’s the first thing those kids jump to: prayer. Our dad is in trouble; pray.

And if you’ll recall from the very beginning of the movie, it’s the prayers from the whole town that come to the awareness of the sparkling, Divine Powers That Be, who in turn send angel-in-training Clarence down to Earth.

You know the rest: Clarence shows George what life would have been like had George not been born; George realizes the mistake of wanting to throw his life away; George returns home to find the town has rallied to save him from financial ruin and they all sing Auld Lang Syne while I bawl yet again.

But if you boil it all down to its very essence, George’s life was saved by prayer first.

What makes us creative, powerful beings? It’s not our brains, though our egos (and the Human Powers That Wannabe) want us to think that. It’s our connection to Source, through our hearts. Remember, Clarence is described by his superiors as having the IQ of a rabbit but “the faith of a child.”

By praying, by connecting in some way with Source first, we are prioritizing God and inviting help in ways we cannot fathom. Prayer is not about hedging bets, it’s about stacking the deck. It opens the field to all possibilities, all potentialities, all facilities, and all faculties — including miracles. And even that doesn’t come close to its immense power.

Clearly, I’m not the first person to discover the importance of communing with spirit before you start flopping around in your brain to solve some dilemma. There’s even an app for it. Of course.

But just because we know something’s important doesn’t mean we do it. I read about meditation for decades — I’m not exaggerating here — before I actually sat my arse down, closed my eyes, and attempted to clear my mind. I knew how much I needed it, but I simply couldn’t find the requisite willpower to do it.

I meditate fairly regularly now, yet when I’m faced with challenges I still often default to either seeking answers outside myself (hello, internet?); or thrashing around inside my intellect in the vain hope that I’ll stumble, eureka-style, on a thought I hadn’t had previously.

That’s why Bukele’s straightforward “so we pray,” as the first act taken in the face of a seemingly insurmountable challenge, had such an impact on me. He reminded me of what I keep forgetting.

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On the phone with my dear permaculture friend Jen, after she asked me “what do we do?” and after I offered the single word “prayer,” I thought I should tell her the story of Bukele and the gang warfare. But before I could say another word, she had already responded in total agreement. “Yes. That makes sense.”

I told her the story anyway. A few days later, this little poem came knocking. I leave it with you, an offering from my heart to yours:

Skylight

So simple, isn’t it,
the act of prayer:

raising shades,
unlatching windows,
welcoming the freshness
that waits beyond

and waits,
and waits,

for me
to remember
it’s the only answer
to a suffocating room.

So easy. So clear.
So why do I forget?

Let these stanzas
be a prayer
for remembrance:
God, may I open

the skylight
of my heart

to you
before all else;
may I always
pray first…

and ask questions
later.

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Thank you for being here, and for your support! I’m grateful for the burgeoning community here at The Art of Freedom, and I welcome your thoughts.

Feel like buying me a tea?

As always, keep your light shining bright.

xox
M