More Thoughts on Prayer

I don't know about this praying thing.  It can be fraught with punji sticks and booby traps and weird, strange shifts of perspective.  I didn't do it for a long time in recovery and I think my spiritual growth suffered.  Then I sort of probed around the fringes of the practice, wary of nasty surprises.  Then I got sort of carried away and filled my Quiet Time with more and more prayers. That leaves me where I am today, wherever that is.

There's a tendency on my part to overthink the purpose of prayer.  There's a tendency on my part to overthink everything.  I overthink the concept of thinking, for chrissake.  Anyway, my perception is that a lot of people believe that if you pray then you can change god's mind about an issue or get him to do something that he wouldn't ordinarily do unless the specific prayer you're offering up reaches god's ears or whatever he uses to hear with.  That seems a little candy machine-esque to me.  Walk up to the god candy machine, make a selection, feed in some money, pull a lever, and out comes your treat.  If you don't put in your coins you don't get a treat but if you put in your coins then you get exactly what you want.

My god isn't short of cash, mister.

I was mixing in a selfless prayer with a selfish request for a specific result aka my Root Canal; namely, that I wanted to avoid a Root Canal.  You know the kind of prayer where you pray for whatever the fuck you want and justify it by tacking on an "if it be thy will" qualifying addendum.  Like god is going to look more favorably on a selfish, self-centered prayer if I pretend like I give a shit what he's thinking.   My mama convinced me it was OK to do this but it has always felt a little dicey, like it's a purchase or a contract or something.  On the other hand, how crappy is the thought that your prayers might just dissipate in the spiritual atmosphere, so much cosmic flotsam and jetsam?  Maybe the praying is for me and me only - maybe it changes me and that's all it does.  It's too weird to think that I can get god to go along with what I want done as long as I offer up a supplication.  Very transactional, don't you think?

So I get in to have my tooth fixed and the cavity is deep enough so that I have to have a Root Canal.  Apparently god decided to go with the "thy will be done" part instead of the "if it would be OK not to have to have a Root Canal that would be great with me" part.  I bet he saw through my naked self-interest in this prayer.  But now I feel like I wasted a lot of time praying.  If I'm not going to get what I want I don't see the point in putting in the effort.

Seriously, I was fine with the outcome.  It was the worst possible outcome but once I got my mind around the procedure it didn't seem that bad.  So I didn't do any praying about the Root Canal before my Root Canal appointment.  My thinking is that I got screwed with a Root Canal so what do I have to pray for?  It's the worst of all possible outcomes.  God can't really do anything for me at this point.  He's lowered the boom.  He's called in his chit.  He hath saith: "Root Canal!!"

Seriously, I left this part of my devotion off my prayer regimen because I wasn't upset about it.  I took my lumps and I didn't feel cursed.

The Root Canal procedure lent a great deal of credence to the power, the force, behind any phrase that ends with "it was like having a Root Canal," as in: "That play was so bad it was like having a etc etc etc."  I was in the chair for a long time.  The Novocaine eliminated the pain but it's still not great having all that drilling done in your mouth which is forced into an unnatural angle by all of the equipment and hands being stuck in there.  

Unfortunately for me the dentist started doing some mumbling under his breath about a crack in the tooth.  It's never good when your medical professional starts mumbling to himself.  Now I think: "Uh-Oh, maybe there's something worse than a Root Canal."  I can't imagine what that would be.  What's worse than a Root Canal?  That seemed to me to be the worst of all outcomes but it's beginning to look like there's something even worse than that.  It hardly seems fair.  I begin to regret the fact that I didn't make a specific supplication to my god concerning the Root Canal.  Remember now that I'm very conflicted about praying for specifics already yet I think that this may be some punishment for something I didn't do.

What a whimsical, cruel god I have today!

At one point I looked at my watch.  The dentist asked if I was good with time.  If I could have spoken I would have said: "Naw, I'm going to walk out of here right now with a mouth full of dental apparatus, you ass."  Actually, I felt like I had been sitting there for a year.

The point is that the tooth is irreparably damaged and has to come out.  One and one half hours of drilling and the dentist can't do a Root Canal.  There is something worse than a Root Canal.

Oral Surgeon: