BY MICHAEL KEARNS

The Politics of Prayer

Ghandi said, “Heartfelt prayer steadies one's nerves, humbles one, and clearly shows one the next step."

I pray. To whom or to what, I am not always certain. I've been praying for half a century and I'm still not sure if I'm doing it right.

A few nights ago, I glanced in my teenage daughter's well-lit room and she was laying there, eyes closed, almost corpse-like in her stillness. “What in God's name are you doing?” I asked.

She responded in a whisper, “Praying.”

My child inspired me to contemplate the act of praying, a practice that seems as individual as it is intimate. Prayer—whether you dwell on this continent or another, no matter the color of your skin, and irregardless of your political stance, your level of education or your choice of who to love—is universal. To pray is to believe, to desire, to hope, to seek redemption and reconciliation—in any language.

The vagaries of prayer are dicey. Often predicated on a belief system that is informed by organized religion, prayer can also be employed to prolong wars and build walls, to justify racial hatred and rationalize wrongdoing.

In his book What God Does When Men Pray, William Carr Peel writes that "prayer is simply a conversation between a child and his Father—verbal or non-verbal, formal or informal, public or private—concerning the topic of child's choosing. It takes no special training, no specific language, no specific formula, no certain place or posture. No topic is off limits. The child of God can pray anywhere, any place, any time, about anything."

Peel assumes two things: a belief in God and a belief that God is a man. His notion is also infantilizing. A parent-child paradigm leaves little room for choice. Can't one's “God” be just as easily female as male? I like the “higher power” definition, popular in twelve-step recovery programs, that doesn't discriminate against self-described atheists. You don't need to be a card-carrying Christian in order to pray.

I personally fluctuate between God as that technicolor dude in the sky and a more androgynous being found in the phenomena of nature. More often than not, my God possesses the voice of Marvin Gaye rather than Morgan Freeman and I find her in the sound of thunderclaps, the feel of Santa Ana winds, the taste of the bittersweet ocean, the smell of pine, and the wetness of an orgasm.

“Prayer is not an old woman's idle amusement,” Ghandi said. “Properly understood and applied, it is the most potent instrument of action.” Prayer = Action: What a concept!

This is not to imply that prayer be mandated. I strongly object to the Christian denominations that have relentlessly fought for school prayer in spite of clear laws that separate church and state. And the “faith-based” posturing of some of our (primarily Republican) presidential hopefuls verges on burlesque.

“This country has had its fill of often hypocritical family-values politicians dictating what is and is not acceptable religious and moral practice,” writes Frank Rich of the New York Times. Referencing Oprah Winfrey's effect on the Barack Obama campaign, he says, “Instead of handing down tablets of what constitutes faith in America, Romney-style, the Oprah-Obama movement practices an American form of ecumenicalism. It preaches a bit of heaven on earth in the form of a unified, live-and-let-live democracy that is greater than the sum of its countless disparate denominations.”

Imagining my own definition of “prayerfully correct,” I get down on my knees (well, sometimes) for those who are struggling—fighting a war, making a transition, or facing a reality. Prayer as activism. Whether it's the family of an Iraqi soldier killed in battle or a kid in Ohio who is being bullied on the playground; a middle-aged woman in the throes of chemotherapy or a homeless drug addict on Skid Row; an imprisoned Catholic priest or an embattled Congressman: I pray for all of them. I pray for the souls of my dead brethren and the hearts of babies born with AIDS. I pray for blood relatives and my family of choice, whether in this earthly world or another. I pray for my daughter. I pray for myself. I pray for you.

When I asked my kid what she was praying for, she admitted that she was requesting that a boy at school pay more attention to her.

Amen.