Straight from the top, I don’t mean to offend anyone’s spiritual practice. Just a thought as I rediscover and try to understand my own.
In working recovery, I’m getting reacquainted with “something bigger than me.” I was raised Catholic and always had this simplistic notion that praying was sitting and talking to some dude in the sky. Now I don’t think I ever fully got it.
Cuz I’ve always been a more secularly spiritual kinda guy, never confirmed into the family faith. At my best I practice various forms of meditation and read about other faiths and beliefs. And there was some kind of disconnect there.
Now I wonder, what am I really doing when I pray? I used to roll my eyes at the response, “Thoughts and prayers are with you.” Like… c’mon! What does that even mean?! What does that do for anyone?
Then I heard it said in the rooms, “Prayer is asking the question, meditation is listening for the answer.” I believed in meditation but didn’t get prayer. But maybe praying is more about trying to better sympathize/empathize with the world around us and appealing to the unknown.
So now I think an offer of prayer is, for me, a statement I will devote some time to trying to understand how to better support you even if right now I’m at a loss. An admission I don’t know what’s next, and that’s okay. And maybe in just trying to do that, just asking the question to something bigger, maybe we will discover more peace in some way I can’t yet imagine.
Anyway… it does help me not drink. Admitting when I don’t know it all when I so desperately want to exhaust myself constantly thinking I do.
