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<\/a><\/strong>On a spring faculty-staff retreat, about fifteen years ago, the late Dean Marie McNeff, who knew my complicated Judeo-Christian (specifically Jewish-Catholic) background, asked me what I believed.\u00a0 I told her, \u201cI\u2019m an agnostic who prays.\u201d<\/p>\nI thought I was being very clever, but in fact I was exhibiting a trait shared by a growing number of Americans. According to reports on a recent Pew poll,[1] agnostics and atheists\u2014the \u201cnones\u201d\u2014have become more and more common in the U.S.\u00a0 And a lot of us non-believers pray.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
But what does that mean?\u00a0 In my case, the impulse to pray is culturally conditioned: Though both sides of my family were Jewish, I was raised a devout Catholic by my mother, who had converted to the faith, and went to Catholic schools until college.\u00a0 As a child, when I stayed with my father\u2019s parents, I followed my Orthodox Jewish grandfather around the living room of his Queens apartment as he prayed in his tefillin and prayer shawl. I carried a little white Hebrew-English prayer book my grandmother gave me that\u2014marvel of marvels!\u2014you had to read backwards. I droned\u2014and butchered\u2014transliterated Hebrew in imitation of my grandfather. My brothers and sister sometimes marched behind me\u2014all of us moaning and bobbing.\u00a0 Later, I became an altar boy right before the Latin mass gave way to vernacular English.\u00a0 To this day, when I do something I regret, I mutter, \u201cmea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.<\/em>\u201d\u00a0 Oddly, my contrition feels more authentic in ritual Latin.<\/p>\nSo I\u2019ve never intuited from my impulse to pray, or even from prayers that came true, the existence of Another, a Higher Power.\u00a0 My praying seems thoroughly conditioned by an upbringing in and between two compelling religious traditions; the occasional fulfillment of my prayers, mere coincidence.\u00a0 But the deep, sincere faith I experienced in my youth and have witnessed all my life in my mother and others has also prevented me from denying the possibility of such a Power: I know firsthand the comfort such faith offers and the goodness that so often flows from it.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, the possibility of a higher power no longer seems comforting: if god exists, I\u2019ve got issues with that deity.\u00a0 It really boils down to the age-old problem of theodicy: How can god permit evil and the coincident suffering it causes, especially among the innocent?\u00a0 Though I know there are many compelling answers to this question, I can\u2019t help but withhold trust in such a being.\u00a0 When I feel most hopeless, I don\u2019t even want to acknowledge the possibility of such an Unfeeling Omnipotence.<\/p>\n
Even to me, that response sounds petty and petulant, adolescent rather than mature.\u00a0 And yet, because I\u2019m a poet and love\u2014actually believe in\u2014literature, I have no compunction about praying.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because there\u2019s a kinship between prayer and poetry.<\/p>\n
My spirit soars when I read Gerard Manley Hopkins, the 19th<\/sup>-century Anglo-Catholic cleric, and his ecstatic prayer of thanks\u2014\u201cGlory be to God for dappled things.\u201d\u00a0 I feel the ominous and terrifying awe of Yeats\u2019s \u201cSecond Coming\u201d: \u201cAnd what rough beast, its hour come round at last, \/ Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?\u201d That poem speaks as clearly to our unfulfilled yearnings and anxiety about the unknown, as it did to the early 20th<\/sup> century\u2019s.<\/p>\nAnd then there\u2019s Dickinson\u2019s mysterious meditation on loss and death:<\/p>\n
My life closed twice before its close\u2014<\/p>\n
It yet remains to see<\/p>\n
If Immortality unveil<\/p>\n
A third event to me<\/p>\n
So huge, so hopeless to conceive<\/p>\n
As these that twice befell.<\/p>\n
Parting is all we know of heaven,<\/p>\n
And all we need of hell.<\/p>\n
Those last two lines have become a clich\u00e9, but they\u2019re really a paradox: we all know the hell of parting\u2014from leave-taking to dying\u2014and have had our fill of it, but in what senses is \u201cparting\u2026all we know of\u201d heaven?\u00a0 The lines glance at Shakespeare\u2019s \u201cParting is such sweet sorrow,\u201d but also offer death, quite conventionally in Christian terms, as the gateway to heaven.\u00a0 Is Dickinson serious or ironic?\u00a0 Would she, \u201cto dumb Forgetfulness a prey, \/ This pleasing anxious being [have] resign\u2019d\u201d[2]?\u00a0 The troubling subtleties beneath the surface of Dickinson\u2019s last two lines belie their seeming ease\u2014and hence capture a dis-ease with our short tenure on the world\u2019s stage.<\/p>\n
Whenever I read George Herbert\u2019s \u201cLove (III),\u201d the last poem in The Temple, <\/em>his 17th<\/sup>-century collection of religious meditations on the church (earthly, human, and eternal) I believe that \u2018communion\u2019 with others, with and through a Love that transcends our earthly understanding, is possible:<\/p>\nLove bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,<\/p>\n
Guilty of dust and sin.<\/p>\n
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack<\/p>\n
From my first entrance in,<\/p>\n
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning<\/p>\n
If I lack’d anything.<\/p>\n
“A guest,” I answer’d, “worthy to be here”;<\/p>\n
Love said, “You shall be he.”<\/p>\n
“I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,<\/p>\n
I cannot look on thee.”<\/p>\n
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,<\/p>\n
“Who made the eyes but I?”<\/p>\n
“Truth, Lord, but I have marr’d them; let my shame<\/p>\n
Go where it doth deserve.”<\/p>\n
“And know you not,” says Love, “who bore the blame?”<\/p>\n
“My dear, then I will serve.”<\/p>\n
“You must sit down,” says Love, “and taste my meat.”<\/p>\n
So I did sit and eat.<\/p>\n
These very human creations, these works of art, are what I believe in.\u00a0 If there is Something Higher, I don\u2019t think that it\u2019s out there waiting to be petitioned\u2014the answer to our prayers.\u00a0 It resides in whatever prompts us to do better, to foster human and humane community, to strive toward beauty and truth and to find those qualities in each other.\u00a0 If there\u2019s a greater being or power, it resides in Wordsworth\u2019s \u201cintimations of immortality\u201d or Frost\u2019s rare, ephemeral vision of \u201csomething\u201d at the bottom of a well: \u201cTruth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.\u201d<\/p>\n
And that will have to do.\u00a0 It will have to be enough.\u00a0 For me, faith means accepting, and caring for, this smaller world\u2014the earthy and earthly scope of our lives\u2014and learning \u201cwhat to make of a diminished thing.\u201d[3]\n
\n\n
\n[1] See the
Washington Post<\/em> <http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/blogs\/on-faith\/wp\/2013\/06\/25\/is-it-okay-to-pray-if-youre-an-atheist\/> and Huffington Post <\/em><http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/2013\/06\/25\/atheist-prayer_n_3498365.html> (25 June 2013).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n[2] This passage is from Thomas Gray\u2019s famous \u201cElegy,\u201d a very popular 18
th<\/sup>-century poem that Dickinson would likely have known well.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n[3] This is the last phrase of Robert Frost\u2019s \u201cThe Oven Bird.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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<\/a><\/strong>On a spring faculty-staff retreat, about fifteen years ago, the late Dean Marie McNeff, who knew my complicated Judeo-Christian (specifically Jewish-Catholic) background, asked me what I believed.\u00a0 I told her, \u201cI\u2019m an agnostic who prays.\u201d<\/p>\n