People posting on the Internet often request prayers.
Reading these posts, I used routinely to type "Prayers said." It was true. I would in fact bow my head over the keyboard and silently pray, "Dear Lord, please help this person, whoever and wherever the person is."
Many times, that was all I knew about the situation and all I ever thought about it afterward. I would park the computer in town overnight, and by the time I turned it on again the next day, I might remember that a long-term e-friend was preparing for surgery but I would have forgotten the strangers with the sick children, the need to find lodging in a new city, the employers going out of business, and so on.
Some people began to complain, not to me specifically but to the Internet generally, about the routine typing of things like "prayers said" or "you will be in our thoughts and prayers." They didn't believe these things were even true, they didn't believe it would do any good if they were, and what if the people being prayed for had a different religious identity and thought our prayers were idolatrous?
Considering the matter, I decided that those momentary prayers that didn't take longer for me to think at God than they took for me to type "prayers said" were not worth mentioning on the Internet. I did not stop thinking those prayers at God. I recognized that typing the phrases did not necessarily send moral support to the strangers for whom I entertained fleeting thoughts of good will, and might even be seen as trying to claim some sort of credit from other people for having thoughts of good will, which seemed absurd. Christianity itself is hard enough to understand without having to try to understand things that aren't Christian at all, like a person claiming credit for thinking kind thoughts, as if they had anything to do with Christianity. So I stopped retyping the words.
During the past week I felt a very strong urge, more than once, to pray for a specific e-friend who had not requested prayers or even directly expressed a need.
In real life I've had only a few friends who identified as Neo-Pagans, the catchall category that includes several unaffiliated groups of people of different types and outlooks. The few were especially congenial people, when we were forty years younger. They wanted to express their spirituality in lively and practical ways, without going back to churches where they had been spiritually, emotionally, or even physically abused. They wanted to affirm what many classified as feminine aspects of the spirit and of the Great Spirit--peace, tolerance, love of Nature, acceptance of the body, nurturance of the environment--and to replace the nasty baggage some people had placed on femininity itself with an awareness of the feminine qualities even the Bible ascribes to God.
They were easy for me to like, and the writings of Neo-Pagans like Isaac Bonewits and "Starhawk" (Miriam Simos) were also easy to like. I myself, however, never felt rebellious enough toward God or Christ or Christianity to feel a need to worship Juno or Kwan Yin. (A lot of cultural appropriation went on in Neo-Pagan circles.) When I read The Spiral Dance I always thought, "What's missing from Christian practice today that people are finding here? What in this book properly belongs to, and ought to be reclaimed by, Christianity, and what is mere self-indulgence?"
At the time, in the churches I attended, about the most charitable thing that would ever have been said if someone had come in saying "Well I'm 'gay'; I've been happily living with the same person-of-the-same-sex for ten years and think I'm committed to person for life, I only want to let people know that we don't need to meet your single relatives," would have been "Let's all pray that God will heal you of THAT!" In contrast to that, the Neo-Pagans would say "That's cool! You know the virgin goddess Athena had a very dear friend, Pallas, whose gender the Greek writers disagreed on, whom she accidentally killed in a game. In real history the cult of Athena must have destroyed or absorbed what started out as a friendly group, possibly the cult of Pales. In Greco-Roman religion Athena adopted Pallas's name, never married, and ritually mourned for her beloved friend. She would understand how you feel about your girlfriend," or "The Greek gods replaced Hebe with Ganymede as their cupbearer because Zeus preferred the view when Ganymede bent over. He would sympathize with your feelings for your boyfriend." Sexual diversity was welcome in Neo-Pagan circles, as were other deviations from social norms. There were even Neo-Pagans who accepted asexuality. That was nice to know during my ace phase.
Toward the end of my ace phase I was even invited to a Neo-Pagan spring gathering by an older male friend who was entering his own postsexual phase. We went to a large public park, where we were greeted and handed cookies. Mine was the sort of coconut walnut macaroon Mother used to make, and I was glad it didn't have the overpowering taste of the honey Mother used to buy from the old neighborhood beekeeper. I didn't pay much attention to the cookie because I was noticing, as a freshman-class baby-boomer, that every other person there appeared to be a senior-class baby-boomer except for a few people with (yikes!) white hair! Someone kept walking around asking "Who got the cookie with the whole nut in it?" and I finally had the presence of mind to ask, "Was it an English walnut?" Apparently everyone else's cookie was plain coconut. Having got the walnut half, I had been selected by lot to impersonate the goddess of spring. Body language suggested that whatever good will some other women in the group had been prepared to extend toward a stranger had just evaporated--they might have wanted to take that role. In some close-knit covens this would have been altogether inappropriate for a stranger and unbeliever, but at this public gathering, where all I had to do was stand in the middle of the circle and exchange fresh strawberries with one of the older men, it didn't seem like a bad thing so I played along. I didn't think I was all that gaunt, jaundiced, and haggard, after two or three years of being able to work and live a normal life, but I took it as a reality check that someone said, "Inanna would be a good spiritual name for you." For a small group of people in Maryland it may still be my name. I avoided those people, after that. Inanna's best known attribute was not the part of myself with which I wanted to be identified. Fortunately they seemed content to be avoided.
It was a nice day in the park but on the way back my friend and I felt that, although nobody seemed to take the notion of "worshipping" randomly chosen fellow mortals seriously, although the crowd were mostly nice sober employees of the federal government who thought that, if anything, asking people to stand around symbolizing the cosmic principle of springtime and new life was too theatrical and silly, nevertheless we'd participated in something that was not appropriate for non-churchgoing Christians to do. ("Though it was suitable that they picked you," he said thoughtfully. "I mean a lot of the other women are prettier than you are, but you're so young..." We remained friends.)
I never tried to worship any attribute of the Holy One in fellowship with a Neo-Pagan, ever again. The experience wasn't traumatic; it felt more like having put my shoes on the wrong feet. And I never seriously tried to cast a spell, although I did once try to psych someone out with the surface trappings of one. Christians pray and trust in God. I wondered whether God withdrew support from me, in the conflict with that person, because I was meant to give the person a solidly Christian message rather than appropriating a message from the person's non-Christian culture.
In the church of which I'd been a full member, for a few years, anything to do with Neo-Paganism was considered idolatry. I should have repented, burned all those Neo-Pagan books, and shunned the friends who weren't willing to burn theirs. In the church whose college had finally accepted me as a student, Neo-Paganism was seen as a valid path to spiritual understanding and could be practiced in a Sunday School room, if not in the sanctuary. If I'd wanted to worship Wicca or Artemis or Sarasvati, with the Unitarians that would have been cool. I never have taken either position. It's seemed to me that the strictly Christian path my family set me on was better, but that the Holy One knows each of our hearts well enough to know whether Neo-Paganism is a valid spiritual path for one person or an infantile show of rebelliousness for another person. I am not qualified to judge.
The Old Testament prophets had an easy job. Their religious group was defining itself in opposition to groups that had not fully rejected human sacrifice. The various cults of Baal (which was a general Semitic word for "lord and master," and was sometimes used by devout Israelites to mean the God of Israel, and is still used in Hebrew to mean the owner of a house or business) still encouraged people to produce too many babies and get rid of the babies whose fathers didn't want to rear them, whether by "making them pass through the fire" and burning some of them alive, or by "exposing" them to the care of the general group in a public place where some babies were adopted and some starved. The questions we debate today about how bad overpopulation is, whether it's justifiable for people who can afford multiple children and think their DNA deserves to be preserved in extra copies, etc., don't seem to have been raised; only the question whether a baby's parents were willing to rear it, as in our abortion clinics today. The Old Testament prophets could repeat, "Thou shalt not kill! Thou shalt not commit adultery! Thou shalt worship our God who has made these Commandments, and our God only shalt thou serve! All other forms of worship are idolatry and abomination!" And so for them it was.
The New Testament church had, however, a more difficult time. The Pagans they knew were more or less civilized. Paul said that if you were enlightened enough to have lost all fear of the idols of the Emperor's ancestors to whom most of the meat in the markets had been ritually dedicated before it was sold, then no guilt for "worshipping" those idols adhered to you. Paul even found a Greek temple dedicated "To the Unknown God," and cheerfully told an audience, "Whom therefore you ignorantly worship, I declare unto you. That's the God I'm here to tell you about." Sincere believers in the Pagan gods who embodied ideals like Justice, Health, and Public Spirit were worshipping attributes of God and were to be further enlightened, not chastised. It was the people sitting in the Jewish Temple and worshipping Money who deserved to be whipped.
So I did not think it was my business to tell Neo-Pagans that they ought to be Christians.
I do think, from what those few Neo-Pagans I knew told me, that reconciliation with Christianity would have been the best thing for them. I've never felt called to oversee that process. If in your mind "Christianity" really means "the Catholic Church where the priest molested me and the nun whipped me for telling her," then I don't know whether God demands that you become what you believe a Christian needs to be; I certainly don't demand that. If in your mind "being a Christian" means "not making my mother, in whose home I live and from whom I regularly receive material benefits, weep over my apostasy and pray that I'll repent, because I enjoy torturing my mother," then you are not a friend of mine. Either way, I believe that God can send you a Christian vision when God knows you can benefit from one. That is between God and you. If you have been living in rebellion against the form of Christianity you knew in the past, and would like to hear more about a different kind of Christianity, then talk to me.
In cyberspace I've found far more Neo-Pagan e-friends than I've found Neo-Pagan friends in real life. In cyberspace as in real life, they are congenial people--although they tend to vote blue, which has reduced their congeniality to Independent thought in recent years. I wish them all well, even if I wish them the great blessing of seeing how unhelpful socialist ideas are before they have a chance to aggravate the socialist ideas that are already doing us damage today.
It surprised me that the thought kept popping into my mind last week, "Pray for X." Why X? Well, X is not a Christian. I've never asked why not. If I'd made a more diligent study of X's published writing I'd probably know. I've saved several of X's blog posts to files for printing, but printing costs money and those files are still languishing in cyberspace, unprinted. But X is older than I am, and may have some Christian people to seek reconciliation with, this spring, while X is still healthy enough that reconciliation with them might mean home nursing care.
I've prayed for X. I don't want to burden X with even a private message that "by X, I mean you." I have had these thoughts about one older writer who's often been mentioned here, more than the others; I don't know that it matters, to readers, which one that is. All of them are nice cyberspace entities and good writers. I think some of them are ex-Christians, some are ex-Jews, and some may be ex-Scientific Humanists who have dared to reclaim spirituality as part of their humanity; that doesn't matter here. I don't know that it even matters that the need to pray for X felt urgent to me because X is older than I am. At any age people can lose loved ones with whom they need to be reconciled. At any age people can become ill.
This much I do know from personal experience: Grief is cleaner when we were reconciled with people while they were alive. Spiritual feelings tend to seek reconciliation with the first true things we learned about God. Facing the Great Unknown is easier when we have accepted that feelings of guilt can have valid causes, and are most easily put behind us after those causes have been addressed. For anyone. At any age.
