Year and a day: Day Four

This one is just going to be a quickie little quo.

What is prayer if the gods aren't literal?

When I started out in Wicca I cast of prayer, because I only knew how to pray to the Christian construct god. I spent a lot of time memorizing chants, thinking they would be the Wiccan equivalent. In short order I came to understand that prayer and chanting are definitely not interchangeable. The difference is that when you are chanting, you are focusing mainly on the words you are saying, how they sound, the soothing percussion of syllables ect. With chants, it is the words themselves that work magic.

Prayer is a bit different. Unlike chants, they are usually spontaneous and not practiced, therefore they are usually a little awkward and not nearly as methodical as chants. When you are praying the words matter much less, it is about the feeling behind the words. For me, praying is a lot like writing in a journal. It is a matter of getting things off my chest. When I can say things out loud and let go of them, I can be free of some of the weight those words carry.

When I pray for courage, I pray to God, because He is the one who can show me the courage I already have (I don't believe that the Gods can actually 'give' anything to you. They merely illuminate that you already have what you need, it just might be hard to see. Kind of like Oz.) When I pray for something like peace or inspiration, I pray to Goddess because she is the one who is in charge of those emotions and can show it to me.

Wiccan prayer is a lot different from what you probably know as prayer. We don't ask for the Gods to do things for us. We know that the Gods would be offended if their children were so weak that they had to come running to them for every little mundane thing. The Gods made us strong and they like to see us figure it out ourselves.

Case in point, a Wiccan doesn't pray to God saying things like "Could you make sure I pick the winning lotto numbers?" or "Hey, "I'm having issues at work. I don't feel like I can deal  with it myself so...do you mind?"

Our prayers sound a lot more like "I need to realize my courage and realize that money is not the most important thing" and "I am having issues at work, it sucks. Let me harness my own peace and reflect it outwards to help my co workers who are just as stressed as me."

 

I think that sums it up. Makayden needs help getting her shoes on for when her mom comes to get her.

I think tomorrow I will talk about magick and spells.