Now that I have some thoughts on prayer out there, I think it would be helpful and fun to talk about what we no longer think prayer is.

Here is the contest:

1. Write a prayer cliché
2. Comment or trackback on this post, so we can find your cliché (or just leave a comment containing it)
3. The winner will receive a free, one-year subscription to this blog’s RSS feed*

*This is not actually a prize. I’m bad about following through with prizes, so the entertainment and theological insight will be their own reward.

For starters:

“Prayer is like exercise for your soul”

“God always answers his knee-mail”

Lesley is had us answer these questions for church this week.

How do you pray?

I pray by thinking in my head the things that I want to say to God. I assume and trust that this is sufficient for getting the message across, but sometimes think that greater emotional involvement is important.

Sometimes I repeat a liturgical prayer (possibly one I’ve written), but I haven’t been doing this as much lately. Urban Monastery had a bunch of these prayers on it, but the site is down now.

I don’t usually pray before meals. It’s a good habit to pray frequently, but food is not the only thing I want to pray about, so it seems silly to pray about food 100 times more than anything else. I guess that means I need to pray more about the other stuff, rather than pray less about food.

I don’t pray before bed, because I would always fall asleep.

Why do you pray? No, seriously. I expect you all to share.

OK, OK. Fine. Several reasons.

I pray when I want something to happen, and either don’t think it will happen on its own, or think it just may, and want to tip the odds in my favor. For example, if I had been in the running to win a Video iPod instead of Amy, I probably would have prayed about it. The odds were good, about 20% that she would win, and praying seems like a very helpful thing to do in that situation. She won the iPod.

I pray when a bad situation occurs, and I can’t really do anything else about it.

I pray when I see something so beautiful that I must talk to God about it. If I have my camera, I take a picture, and sometimes consider this an act of worship.

Who taught you to pray?

My parents, though not in the way I pray now. When I was a kid, I prayed for long lists of the things I cared about - some of which were silly, some of which were very significant.

Now I pray mostly when I think of one of those things, or when I’m in a situation that seems to call for prayer.

Is it really something you need to learn, or something you can just do?

Both, I think.

Does God always hear you?

Yes, almost by definition. He can ignore me if he wants, but God’s omniscience means he always hears.

What is the role of the Holy Spirit in prayer?

I don’t know exactly, but I would think that the inner, transformative function of prayer is the work of the Holy Spirit.

What is the point of praying, if God already knows everything?

We pray to change us, and make us more like God. Prayer is the primary form of our interaction with God, and developing this relationship is the primary task of being a follower of God.

General observations:

• We don’t pray nearly as much as we used to (before meals, before bed, etc.)
• The things we say in prayer aren’t really meant to be shared - they aren’t especially eloquent or original thoughts
• We do pray in times of crisis
• Less of our prayer is devoted to asking for stuff than it used to be
• We become like the people we spend time with - including God. Prayer, then, helps us become more like God.
• There are forms of prayer that don’t need to be taught, because they are innate and natural, but other forms that we can learn.

Thoughts? Reactions? Angry accusations?

Every once in a while you see an SNL musical performance that is just beyond belief.

Beck is on SNL right now. Featuring:

• Backup nerd/morocco player/dancer guy, complete with skinny black tie
• The whole band represented by marionettes, with the camera cutting between the real band and the puppets
• Beck’s enormous red Christmas-present-style bowtie

I don’t even remember what song it was, but it was amazong. [Edit: Amy says it was "Nausea"]
Update: For the second performance at the end of the show, the percussion was handled by four guys sitting at a kitchen table (complete with turkey) and hitting spoons against bowls, glasses, and whatever else they could find. Beck busted out on the harmonica for added flair. “Clap Hands” was the song, and it rocked in that bizarre, found-audio, Stomp kind of way.

Kiva, the nonprofit that lets you loan money to needy entrepreneurs in the developing world, has deployed new social networking features:

• Lender profile pages - here’s mine
• Lender listings on borrower pages (example) - this lets you see who is sponsoring a specific business. If the lender hasn’t filled out a profile, only their location is shown
• Journal recommendations - Digg-like voting buttons to promote noteworthy updates from borrowers, which are uploaded by the local lending organization

This may seem like a limited set of social networking features compared to MySpace and the like, but when you consider that the purpose of Kiva is not to add people to your friends list but to change lives, I think it’s great. You can read more about Kiva, or take a look at the businesses currently in need of funding.

There’s a sci-fi book in which time travel becomes possible. When a time-traveller goes to the past, however, he/she finds that the past is immutable - one cannot so much as pick up a blade of grass (IIRC, this was mentioned in the preface to C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce). Of course, other books and movies have also played with this theme - from Back to the Future to The Butterfly Effect.

With regards to “God”, we in the West often think in very Greek terms (omniscient, infallible, omnipresent, immutable…I’m sure I’m forgetting one or two from my Christian elementary school). I’m not so sure anymore that that’s what “God” is. I tend to think now that “God” is a being completely beyond our ability to imagine, describe, grasp; yet at the same time he has chosen in some way to reveal [a part of] himself to humans, to interact with humans. As Meister Eckhart said, “The unnameable is omni-nameable”.

It’s hard (impossible) to speak for God, but I imagine that God is simultaneously in some way beyond time (hence his ability to hear all prayers at once, and the Catholic/Orthodox practice of praying for the dead), and limited or bound by time (perhaps this is a self-limitation?). He doesn’t (that we know of) change events of the past, and he doesn’t (again, to our knowledge) mandate the future or have it set in stone.

I believe that God enters into relationship with his creation - a real, two-way relationship, with the ability for both “parties” to change and be changed.

I just published the alpha edition of the LogoFriendly theme, which you can see in action at WebbleYou.com.

Major features:

• Widget support
• Easy custom banner insertion
• Options page
• Rounded corners

If you like what you see, I will install it free for my hosting customers, or you can install it on your WordPress-powered site. Enjoy!

I’ve been blogging a lot about Kiva lately, and it’s very exciting to see how the small amount of money I’ve invested is making a real difference in the lives of specific people half a world away. Here’s an update from Amos, a man who cares for numerous AIDS orphans and supports them through several businesses:

Dear Justin Baeder,

This is an update on Tete Crafts & Brick laying written by Janet Alupot:

Amos Mayoka is very happy with the money that has enabled him raise up his businesses. He has been able to employ more than 20 strong men who manage to model 25,000 bricks. The bricks has been baked ready for sale. He plans to baked over 30,000 bricks immediately after the sales are made in a weeks time.

His other side businesses like carpentry as picked up very well with number of new orders from many customers. The loan money has helped Mayoka Amos to improve on the profit of his income from the businesses.

Amos is so grateful and sends his thanks to the lenders for the good benefiting hand given to him, that has enabled improve on the standard of his family and his businesses.

Thanks alot for supporting Amos.
God bless.
Janet.

Amos borrowed $1125, which gets raised in $25 increments. That means that about 40-45 people invested what is for Americans a trivial amount of money, which Amos used to employ 20 men and produce 25,000 bricks. Amazing.

I have recently discovered Ze Frank, vlogger extraordinaire and all around creative genius. His video blog, The Show with Ze Frank combines strikingly intelligent ideas with, well, poop jokes. Not for children or the faint of heart, but brilliant nonetheless.

Case and point. From yesterday’s episode:

When you discover some things, you get to name it, like planets. Xena. With other things it’s not so easy. For example, a friend of mine, Gal, discovered something, or at least a lack of something. He discovered that although there are plenty of words in the English language for using a large vocabulary (loquacious, garrulous, voluble), there’s no adjective that means you possess a large vocabulary. Being that he discovered it he figured that he could name it. But what? Vocabulaire? “He quite vocabulaire?” No, Gal had a better idea. He sent the Oxford-English dictionary a letter petitioning them to include the word ‘megagaltastic’. They replied that even though they did not know of any word which means having an extensive vocabulary, having a word named after you is a bit complicated. They need at least five published instances of the word and it needs to stay around for a minimum of five years. So the next time you have to write a paper, Sportsracers, make sure to include the term megagaltastic. We’ve only got five years to go.

So here’s doing my part to invent a word. Justin Baeder is a megagaltastic writer. I have to look up half of the words he writes in the dictionary!

Now let’s see if someone can get that in print.