A Prayer For Those of Us Who Don’t Believe in Prayer
“Prayer is taking a chance that against all odds and past history, we are loved and chosen, and do not have to get it together before we show up.”
- Anne Lamott
I prayed as a child but I can’t remember when I stopped. Definitely by age 16, prayer was a thing of the past. It had always felt distant, like casting a stone into the ocean and hoping something would come back.
At some point as a teenager, I became tired of throwing stones. And as I moved into adulthood, the whole idea of prayer seemed like an archaic, childish, borderline psychotic-but-benign habit. Even when our son Max was diagnosed with a brain tumor and his life was in the balance after an intense, emergency surgery, I never even considered prayer.
But now I believe that prayer can be a central emotional health tool in the lives of everyone from the deeply devout to the stridently atheistic. Hear me out.
Humans are hard wired for spirituality or woo or whatever you want to call the way of relating to the world that sees it as full of meaning, purpose, spirit, and personality. This doesn’t mean this is how the world REALLY is. Just that our brains evolved to see the world this way.
To resist this is to narrow the range of emotional vitality, interpersonal connection, and a feeling of flow in our lives. You can feel pure and superior in your castle of rationality, but you’ll be eating dinner alone.
Also, to resist spirituality in favor of a cold, calculating rationality is to fall into a trap of false choice. It is possible (as some philosophers have long acknowledged) to approach parts of our lives in a totally mystical way while approaching other parts in a coldly rational way. Fix a broken door using rationality; fix a broken heart by opening up to the numinous in the world around you.
The ideal prayer would honor our spiritual heritage as Homo sapiens and support emotional health WITHOUT leading us back into a stifling religious traditions or into another belief system that demands too much.
I think Anne Lamott’s “Help, thanks, wow” prayer does just this. I came across it last year and have been doing it every day. I gotta say, it fits the bill: it allows me to tap into some larger flow of the universe, it helps me feel grounded and connected, and it opens my heart. And it does it all without me needing to believe anything.
**If you’re a member of the Yes Collective, you can click here to go to our article on Lamott’s prayer. It has a bit more detail from her.**
Here’s how to do it:
Step one:
Think of something that feels to big or complicated for you to do on your own and say (quietly or out loud): “Help me, help me, help me, help me, help me.”
Step two:
Think of something you experienced in the last day that you’re thankful for (literally anything) and in the same way say “Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.”
Step three:
Finally, think of something in the last day that caused you to feel a sense of wonder, a sense of “wow.” And then, quietly or loudly, say, “Wow. Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow.”
That’s it. Don’t over think it. Just pray like this and see how it feels!