Punk Prayer

The following is excerpted from Mitch Horowitz’s book The Miracle Club (Inner Traditions). 

BY MITCH HOROWITZ

The writer and religion scholar Michael Muhammad Knight saw Spike Lee’s movie Malcolm X at age 15 and began his conversion to Islam. “Can a movie,” Mike wondered, “be sacred scripture?” I strongly believe that it can.

For me, one recent screen experience that verged on the spiritual was Jude Law’s performance in the HBO miniseries The Young Pope. Law played a rebellious, archconservative, and fiercely individualistic young pontiff whose behavior no one could predict or control. His approach to prayer was to make demands on God and the saints: “You must, you must, you must!”

This form of prayer is not wholly out of step with Judeo-Christian tradition. The Bible is filled with episodes of the patriarchs and prophets bargaining, cajoling, and arguing with God: Cain protests (successfully) that his sentence is too harsh; Jonah voices displeasure with God for being given prophecies to propagate, only for God to reverse them; Job demands explanations for his miserable fate; Adam, after biting the apple, answers back to God in confusion and challenge.

In this light, the prayer style of the young pope, an orphaned Queens, New York, native named Lenny Balardo, comports with classical tradition. And Lenny’s petitions appear to work. When everything around him is coming apart, when the faithful are demoralized by his harsh social dictates, and when Vatican apparatchiks are befuddled over his inscrutable priorities, Lenny delivers apparent miracles: bringing motherhood to an infertile young woman; mortally punishing a corrupt and abusive mother superior; and, earlier in life, healing a terminally ill neighbor.

Drama aside, I am a believer in petitionary prayer—that is, in asking, even demanding, something very specific from God or a saint, especially when you’ve made a significant personal sacrifice or struggled to uphold a classically sanctioned ethical teaching, and also labored to validate the goodness and generativity of what you’re requesting (it must be acknowledged, however, that such perspective is never fully ours).

The act of belief itself may be key to the outcome you experience. “I confess,” William James wrote in his essay Is Life Worth Living? in 1895, “that I do not see why the very existence of an invisible world may not in part depend on the personal response which any one of us may make to the religious appeal. God himself, in short, may draw vital strength and increase of very being from our fidelity.”

Now, some in the New Thought tradition—and Neville Goddard is the prime example— teach that consciousness is God, and that there is no one and nothing to whom to appeal beyond your own mind. “There is no God,” Neville told listeners, “other than he who is your own wonderful human imagination.” He chided people for praying to “these little pictures … little icons, little medals,” as he put it, and insisted that if the word God summons for you a persona or entity outside of yourself, you have missed the true nature of things. But I seriously question the need for this division. If God is, in fact, awareness or consciousness, then why couldn’t the mind-as-God model comport with humanity’s collective awareness of a Higher Being to which an appeal can be made? I see no necessary conflict between a Divine Entity and the holiness of the mind: the latter is the branch and the former the tree, or the root. (And, I’m proud to add that as a New Thoughter, I wear the Miraculous Medal around my neck, and use iconographic prayer cards.)

Moreover, I think that our network of psychologically conditioned fears and reactive emotions are sometimes impossible to break through without resorting to prayer. As a prerequisite to visualization and other methods, there are times when we must pray for respite from emotional habits, anxieties, and compulsions that becloud our psyches, and sap our energies and enterprise. We need help to pierce the shell of our own psychological limitations in order to embark on the path of using the mind in a creative, generative manner.

I think it’s vital to resort to prayer—in a direct appeal to the Higher—when we feel incapable of mustering a feeling-state of fulfillment, or the ability to use our minds constructively. At times of brokenness, I believe it’s efficacious and appropriate to throw yourself on your knees and beg God for something. Yes, beg. We’re not supposed to do that in New Thought and positive-mind traditions. New Thought teaches “affirmative prayer,” which means holding a thought or visual image, asking a Higher Power in deepest confidence to fulfill your needs, and “believing it is done.” But why be bound to that convention? If you believe in the intercession of a Higher Power, as I do, use the language of your heart. Whether demanding, lovingly requesting, arguing, or pleading, there is no wrong way to pray, just as there is no wrong way to affirm.

The Miracle Club is available here: