My prayer

At Al Anon this morning the topic was how people meditate and pray to connect with their higher powers.  Yes, this is how we talk.

I will confess that meditation does me no good, I can only pray, and I try to do it each morning.  We are enjoined by Step 11 to try to achieve conscious contact with "God as we understand him," praying only for knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry that out.

Already the first thing in the morning, my mind shoots off on its habitrail of concerns about business, this client and that client and the market and the responsibility of managing peoples' money and funding my family's operations and this that or the other with one of the kids...  It is hard to center myself.  And yet, I try to do it each day.

Having been raised Christian, of sorts, or at least among "Christians", the only way to do this that feels natural and comfortable is more like prayer than meditation.  The problem is, I don't exactly believe in God, and certainly not in the sense of some grey-haired human-looking guy up there in the clouds pulling strings to make things happen and having a plan for everything.

But nonetheless when I try to connect my mental model is that of prayer. And I must confess that, rationally, when I look at the external circumstances of my life, I really can only be grateful, and as I believe I have blogged before, it makes no sense to be grateful to nothingness, and therefore something on the other side of my gratitude is presupposed.

I haven't figured it out yet.

I did think that, having recently read the chapter in Dean Smith's bio about his faith, that if I were to believe in God, that Dean Smith's concept of a deity seems a fairly decent one.  Gotta love the guy. It was appropriate, therefore, that I was sitting at the time in Binkley Baptist Church, where Coach Smith went for almost half a century.

(two days later) Just found a note in a private journal on this topic. In some sense, when I try to figure out the concept of God for myself, to make a firm decision on the existence or non-existence thereof, and/or what a deity looks like/consists of etc, I am trying to outsmart everybody else once more.  This attempt bespeaks insufficient humility before the question itself, which is what I really need to strive after.  I am not going to resolve this question.  I can only let go.

Pascal's Wager remains so pertinent.