The Rosary
I was raised Catholic. I’ve paid mild attention to other religions and other forms of Christianity but nothing too extensive. The reason I mention this is, I don’t want you to get up in arms if I say something is common but it isn’t common in your church, or if I say something is rare but you do it all the time.
One thing that’s common in Catholicism is the Rosary. Saying the Rosary involves reciting The Lord’s Prayer several times and between each recitation saying the Hail Mary ten times. Usually this is done using a set of beads (in the form of a necklace) to keep track of where you are in the sequence.
I asked God how he feels about this practice.
He told me that if it helps people to focus or to meditate, then it’s great for them, but that he just ignores it. He said that’s how he feels about most formal prayers. He’s heard them so many times that they’re just background noise.
But would he miss them if they stopped? Yeah. Much the same as I’d miss the sound of crickets if they ever went away.
I’d use roseries for the meditative quality of them, if I were Catholic ( and I’m not sure how that works – I was born into a Catholic family, so I’m sure I was baptized there. Does that make me a lapsed Catholic? ). I’ve used prayer that way, and it’s had a calming effect. Our Fathers, Hail Marys, and all the formal prayers seem very much like mantras to me. Actually, they probably serve that exact purpose, along with whatever other salvation they may bring. Their repetition, while perhaps not as good a tool as ‘om’, would help clear your mind, so that you could see things more clearly. Yeah, I like that idea.
I’ve been re-reading CS Lewis’ “The Abolition of Man” because of the subject of this site. The book is a modified transcription of a couple of lectures he delivered, on how the modern educational system is failing our children ( though this book was published in 1947, the problem he addresses is still with us ). He posits that our educators are leaving out an important assignment : moral instruction. He’s not speaking of any specific religious practises, except for one, which really isn’t a religious observance at all. Moral conduct, he contrends, is not simply how we treat our neighbors, but how we look at the world, and react to it.
The practise that he does emphasize on is the Tao. He’s all for it, and I like the fact that he can look at it as a whole thing, and that it is truely the Way. I wonder if he knew Milne, because they both seem to be on the same track about this – they were both Tao-Christians.
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I think you may be on to something there. If you view prayer as a form of meditation, then it doesn’t matter if God answers prayers or not (and studies have shown no evidence of them working). If praying has a benefit to the person praying despite not being answered, that could explain part of the success of religion. On the other hand, real meditation is probably more effective for the practitioner than the pseudo-meditation of ritualized prayer.
Why is it that when we talk to God, we are praying, but if God talks to us, we are crazy?
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Or maybe the question is why do you make a distinction between being crazy and praying?
Well, we could go on for some time on the definition of crazy, but one broad stroke at it is to define sanity in terms of socially normative behavior and degrees of craziness as standard deviations away from the norm. The farther you are from the norm, the crazier society thinks you are. This allows people to be different without being labelled as (completely) crazy.
Back to the point, society finds prayer normative and many, if not most people do it. (If only just before exams…) On the flip side, when the wasted derelict wanders around the Venice boardwalk and claims that God is talking to him, it is hard for us to verify whether that’s true or he’s just deranged. But that is only the ‘little’ crazy – history has shown us a parade of folks who claimed to have been divinely inspired and then led humanity into some of its darkest episodes of barbarism and mass insanity. The Children’s Crusade, Jim Jones, Aum Shinrikyo and the list goes on. Yet as horrifying as I find their actions, I have no way of knowing whether they were truly divinely inspired or not. I really hope not, but I cannot know this.
So, to finally answer your question, I can pretty reliably verify with my senses when someone else is praying. I have no way of verifying if God is talking to them (including Toby). Thus, I draw a distinction between the known and the unknown and the unknowable.
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