I have been trying–albeit not very hard–to return here to write daily. The anxiety within me over this issue has not matched my drowsy, lethargic outward appearance, though. I sleep through the days.
Everybody says to me, “Don’t you just want to hibernate?” This brings me to prayer. Well, not directly, but let me try to explain.
Why does everybody think I am interested in how related their experiences are with mine? It seems universal that people have an overwhelming need to spontaneously share with me things they find similar between them and me. I find–and I am rather surprized at this–that I sincerely do not care. Not just that, but I am annoyed by their presupposition that I might care.
It is true, I do want to sleep most of the time, and I go to bed at about 6:00 AM on my days off instead of getting up at 6:00 AM on workdays; it’s a neat little trick to totally invert one’s schedule overnight. Rather like being bodily flipped about in the arms of some massive gymnast… (Now there’s a happy thought, but nothing to do with what I am trying to talk about, apart from the flipping analogy.)
But the fact that I want to sleep all the time does not equate with me having interest in the fact the you too want to sleep all the time. However, my definition of prayer–from practice, not theory–and I am being decidedly anti-eccliastical here, comes from a profound consciousness of the other. Indeed it is little more than that awareness coupled with a genereous intention to be of help to the other. In the past my prayers have been populated with “Oh, Lord”s and “dear Jesus”s, but I find those names (and conventional religion in general), to serve more as stones in the realm of spirit-wind; if anything they are anchors to the massive kites I use to power my intentions.
In fact, the most difficult time I have had with prayer is inserting ‘me’ where ‘God’ would be. Instead, I insert another person’s name, i.e.: Jesus, or Lord. I think God is us, not some rare and almost always absent other. This is one of the greatest injuries caused by conventional religion, advancing the concept of God as seperate from people, requiring people to be tied (religio) to it.
I said to a friend last night, “I think I should go around burning down Catholic Churches…”
“Yeah, that’s a good idea, no one would notice that,” he said. He must have been thinking that I would not want to be noticed.
Despite this, I went on, “I think the Church is responsible for my sexual repression.”
At this he gasped, “You call that repressed?” I can tend to be rather a slut, some would even say heroically promiscuous.
“Yeah, I know. My sexuality has emerged, but it has emerged warped and deformed, rather like the toes of a geisha.”
—-
In the kind of prayer that I am trying to describe, everything is OK. All injury is accepted with appropriate agony, but without judgement. The giesha’s steps may be tiny, but only those who choose despair walk not at all. And my sexuality may be deformed and of unnatural proportion, but only if I despair will I need to sleep all the time, avoiding all non-sexual social contact.
All that in little less than an hour. I should have a column.