Finding My Way Back to Prayer

I quit praying when I became a pagan because when I turned my back on Christianity I turned my back of anything that reminded me of the hours spent listening to a misogynistic minister tell me that all I was capable of was being the woman behind the man.  As a young adult in my 20s, I wasn’t sophisticated enough to separate the tools from the rhetoric.   I’ve also always been an all or nothing type of person and despite the peace  that the Serenity Prayer had always brought me, I wanted nothing to do with anything that was even remotely Christian.

In my early 20s and 30s, I eagerly embraced Paganism and I loved to do magick.  I loved dressing candles, saying invocations, and seeing what I’d asked for manifest.   I also loved to do ritual and invoke the Gods and Goddesses as there was something magical about inviting them into my sacred space and feeling the energy shift when they entered the room.  I loved writing invocations and thinking about the attributes of the various deities so that I could call upon them respectfully and appropriately.

As I started to recover from my bad experience with Christianity, I started to remember the Bible stories of my childhood .  I thought about how Jesus had turned water into wine, how a small basket of fishes had multiplied to feed the multitudes, and about how Jesus had raised Lazarus from the dead.   I started to realize that these were true acts of magick and that maybe Jesus was a Pagan Priest in disguise, a thought that Christians would find heretical.  However, thinking of Jesus as a Pagan Priest helped me to expand my thinking to realize that if Jesus had been doing magick, maybe I’d actually been praying with my spells and invocations.

A prayer is defined as “Prayer (from the Latin precari “to ask earnestly, beg, entreat”) is an invocation or act that seeks to activate a rapport with an object of worship through deliberate  communication.   Prayer can be a form of religious practice, may be either individual or communal and take place in public or in private.”  In practice, prayers can take the form of thanking the gods for something they’ve provided, establishing a connection, or asking for something that is needed.  These last type of prayers are what I call “gimme” prayers and they can include asking for something as life altering as cancer being cured to getting a new car.

Wikipedia defines a spell as “A spell, charm, invocation, or hex is a set of words, spoken or unspoken, which are considered by its user to invoke some magical effect. Historical attestations exist for the use of some variety of incantations in many cultures around the world.”    In practice, the magical effect that spells are hoping to achieve can range from love to protection from enemies.  When I look at the definitions side by side and think about how I’ve done spells in the past, I realize that spells are really just “gimme” prayers that often use physical objects such as candles to focus the intent.

As for invocations, how different are they from Christians asking God to join them during their religious services or invoking him through communion?  When I really think about it, the only difference is that there are different words and different deities involved, but the intent is truly the same.

Realizing that spell work and invocations were really just different forms of prayer, helped me to open my heart and mind to exploring prayer more deeply as a pagan.  I picked up a few books of prayer and as I read them, I saw that with just a few minor modifications (i.e. changing God to God and Goddess) these prayers were appropriate for me as a Pagan and I started experimenting with various forms of prayer including morning prayers, evening prayers, and just those quick one liners when I need to connect with a power higher than myself.

Opening my heart and mind to prayer has helped me to deepen my connection to the divine and what I’ve learned is that faith is a lot like a bank account: if I pray when things are going well (i.e. make deposits), that faith will help sustain me when life isn’t going so well and I need to make some withdrawals.