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Help: I Can't See the Stars


I have started reading a book called "Help, Thanks, Wow." It is basically a how-to guide for prayer, geared towards spirituals and skeptics alike. The book tries to answer the difficult question: How do we pray? The author, Anne Lamott, recalls her childhood, growing up in an atheist household where only rock bands were worshipped and the New York Times was a temple. Feeling alone, lost, and caught in existential despair, Lamott "snuck off" into the attic to pray to God for help.

Prayers for help humble us. They make us feel that the world is out of our control. The cosmos does not act in accordance with our wishes, and our prayers are not answered in the way we would like them to be. Thomas Merton's prayer reads: "My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me" (Lamott 33).

Just by reading the "Help" chapter, I realized why I have trouble with uncertainty. Because it is admitting defeat. It is admitting that I am not God. If God is too abstract of a concept for you, Lamott explains her pathway to God beautifully. First, you look inside yourself, and you ask yourself, "Why are things this way?" or you simply say "I need help." Then, you wait for an answer. Since the answer will not come from you (because you are not that powerful) it must come from an outside source- the universe, the earth, intuition, the rain pattering on the sidewalk, the doves in the sky- from God.

But, people will still die. There will still be injustice. It is okay to be angry at God. Our anger and helplessness breeds servitude. Our submission to the forces of the world helps us be kinder, more forgiving, and more willing to help others.

As I read Lamott's words, I related to the little girl surrounded by those who worship music artists and magazines. We live in a culture where radical independence is the norm; where secularism and political correctness are slowly silencing spirituality; and where, in a Nietzsche-esque way, we have killed God, so we wonder, who is hearing our prayers? And we conclude: the abyss.

I think that prayer, especially prayer for help, requires an immense amount of self-restraint, trust, and, of course, faith. Yes, you can have faith, even if you are angry, and even if you are skeptical. Whenever I pray, I begin with, "I feel really silly right now kneeling in front of my window and asking the stars to save me." Yet, even from the most dark and bitter cynicism, theres shines a light: the light of faith. The absurdity of praying proves to me that the world is much more complex than we can comprehend. I think that we were not meant to see or speak to God directly, or else why would we need to pray to Him?

So I disagree with the skeptical Nietzsche and Marx and say: It is God who created us, not we who created God. The more we try to take matters into our hands, the more we fail. We cannot keep people from dying, we cannot wish others to die, we cannot see our career paths and we cannot yet meet our future children. The more we worry, the further we are from God. The more we look at the night sky and cry in disbelief at the beauty, the closer we are to understanding that our prayers will be, or have already been answered.

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