What would Patti Smith do?

After posting that I was unsure what to teach my kids regarding God and prayer, I was reminded how, at San Francisco’s amazing Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival last Fall, Patti Smith, in the middle of rocking out (I think to “Gloria”) pulled a crumpled paper from her coat and recited the prayer of St. Francis. “San Francisco!” she said to us, all watching her, wide-eyed and smiling, standing there in the fog and sun under all those Eucalyptus trees. “Be happy!” Patti said. “Work hard! Love one another!”

Here’s Patti’s prayer. I may try reading it to my kids tonight; they are San Franciscans, after all.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.

Where there is hatred, let me bring love.

Where there is injury, pardon.

Where there is doubt, faith.

Where there is despair, hope.

Where there is darkness, light.

Where there is sadness, joy.

Grant that I may not seek to be consoled, as to console;

to be understood, as to understand;

to be loved, as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive.

It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

Amen

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Kids and God

What do you tell your kids about God? And praying? Anything?

I didn’t learn how to pray until I was 26 and someone taught me this simple skill (and I do look at it as a skill) that changed my life forever. I’d love to teach my kids so they know about it much earlier than I figured it out. Praying can be so incredibly cool and calming. But the prayer I was taught, the only one I do really, seems way too grown up for them.

I was told to get on my knees every single morning and say:

“God,

I am totally powerless over people, places and things and my life is unmanageable. I’ve come to believe a power greater than myself is restoring me to sanity and I’m turning my will and my life over to that power.”

I did not believe a single word of this prayer. Most of the time, I still don’t.

But I was told then: what you believe doesn’t matter. If you want to get better, try getting on your knees and saying this. You’ve tried everything else, and nothing has worked. So, why not this? Is it any stupider than sticking your finger down your throat and making yourself throw up several times a day?

I had to admit, it was not.

I don’t know how praying works or why it works. I don’t even care anymore. All I know is that if something is bothering me or obsessing me, and I get on my knees and ‘turn it over,’ instantly, I feel calmer and happier. Remarkably and paradoxically, I also get the energy and focus to move forward and ‘do the next right thing.’ After praying about how powerless I am, I act. Happens every time.

So I’d like to teach my kids about this because it’s so damn useful.

Also, my seven year old daughter has started to ask me about God. What she’s picked up, somehow, somewhere, just as I did when I was a kid, is that praying is all about asking for stuff. And then if you’re ‘good,’ you get what you asked for.

But the kind of praying I do isn’t like that at all. More like the opposite. Still, those things I say– which as I wrote, I often don’t believe– seem way too heavy to put on a little kid. As is the whole powerless/powerful paradox. I don’t even get it!

I could tell my daughter: just tell God what you’re grateful or thankful for, but that seems sanctimonious, and it’s not what I do either.

Please let me know if your kids have asked you about praying or God, and if you’ve had any luck in teaching them anything. Especially if you don’t know if you believe in God.

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Guest Post: The Holy Hot Button, Unveiling the Vote

This is great piece by Beatrice Bowles. As she writes, people are afraid to talk about money and sex,but especially God/ religion/ spirituality in an open way. In my earlier post today, it mentions the Vital Voices event I attended, where retired Bishop William Swing of the United Religions Initiative said, “A lot of times religion keeps women from taking a place at the table.”

Here is Bowles’s piece about that issue:

Before the sixties, sex, money and, God forbid, religion were considered off-limit topics–three subjects we were supposed to never discuss.  In the sixties, sex became more open and sexologists’ once-scandalous insights became common knowledge–from the joys of orgasm to the horrors of abuse.  The subject of money, too, has become anything but taboo.  Whether in the media or in political debate or at the dinner table, we assess the uses and abuses of wealth.  We debate the design of our economic system–free-market or regulated?  Books on economics for adults and children flourish.  Economic reformers and white-collar criminals make the news about equally.

Still the subject of religion remains on shaky ground.  The comfort, guidance, and inspiration that religions offer stand in stark contrast to the prejudice that can breed within and between them.  Despite freedom of religion (and/or from religion) being a tenet of our society, a dangerous propensity for intolerance shadows faith.  In some places, the scientific teaching of evolution is banned by doctrinal literalists.  In others, doubt or discussion of religious differences is considered heresy.

Caught in the quagmire, intellectuals flail about.  Cultural gadfly Christopher Hitchens pushes for a new atheism in “God is Not Great: Why Religion Poisons Everything.”(2009)  In his New Yorker article, ‘God in the Quad,’ scholar James Woods retreats cautiously towards the holiness of science as grounds for faith.

So far, spiritual leaders have us failed, too.  Asked recently if there was anything new in spiritual education that might ease the muddle, a top Christian cleric assured me, “Nothing.”   Religions persist in misguided conflicts with science and/or with each other.

Yet a solution lies within reach if we establish two grand and desperately needed distinctions.  First is that religion and science are parallel but different levels of thought.  Science attempts to explain physical matter, its laws, properties and energetics, at a whole level above and beyond science.  Religions attempt to explain the abstract meaning of life: why are we here, how shall we best live, what vast intelligence lies behind creation, what happens when we die?

Secondly, all religions, being abstract in essence, are relative in nature–no matter how grand, prescriptive, helpful or precious each may be to their leaders and followers.  Is there only one right deity?  Only one right prayer?  One right ritual?  Only one sacred story?  No more than there is one right flower or river.  No religion can ever trump another.  In a democracy, no religion should be allowed to trump freedom of faith.  As we know too well, the worst abuses of spiritual authority seem to arise in religions which claim infallibility and demand blind, unthinking obedience from their followers.

Properly defined, religion and science cannot and do not negate each other.  Scientific thinking and mythic thinking are complementary, not contradictory, forms of thought.  Conflicts arise when either realm attempts to deny the validity of the other.  Ask Galileo.  Sorrily, our educators seem stymied by fear of offending devout worshippers of one tradition or another.  Rather than teaching students about tolerance, respect, and appreciation for the varieties of religious expression, for the most part, nothing of the sort is taught.

Politicians behave equally poorly.  When French President Sarkozy banned women from wearing the head scarf in public, he double-faulted.  First he denied Muslim women’s freedom of religion as well as all women’s right to wear what they want.  Second he failed to assert the over-arching requirement of citizenship in a democracy.  Why not rule that women have the right to wear veils, but that they must show their faces when the public good requires–as when applying for driver’s permits and identity papers, answering police inquiries, or performing other such public duties?  Such acts of intellectual ineptitude on a politician’s part only inflame zealotry.

Since we are left to educate ourselves, as a start, I propose reading some of the world’s great sacred myths in which heaven is almost always envisioned as a beautiful garden where the fruit of a central tree holds knowledge of good and evil.  Human nature almost always appears as both tricky and powerful, and love and kindness are deemed paramount.  When we discover the striking similarities beneath the vast diversity, all we risk is deepening our spirituality, widening our humanity, and bolstering our respect for freedom.  Such awareness might help to dethrone power-mad hierarchs, haters, and holy war mongers.  After all, we delight in the food of many lands.  Why should we and our children not dine on Earth’s divine wisdom as well?

Beatrice Bowles, writer and storyteller, creates award-winning CDs of world mythology through her company, Harmony Hill Productions

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