Thinking about Prayer

“Crom, I have never prayed to you before. I have no tongue for it. No one, not even you, will remember if we were good men or bad. Why we fought, or why we died. No. All that matters is that two stood against many, that's what's important. Battle pleases you Crom, so grant me one request. Grant me revenge! And if you do not listen, then to HELL with you!”

I’ve been thinking a lot about prayer lately, and for some reason this prayer from the film Conan the Barbarian keeps coming back to me. Maybe because it’s an iconic cinema moment, maybe because it sums up how prayer seems to go. Best put by The Smiths really, “Please, please, please, let me get what I want.” Summarised, Conan’s prayer is little more than this: “God, I don’t talk to you because I don’t usually feel like it. But I know you, and I know what you like, so if I do what you like to get what I want, then give me what I want or else get stuffed.” It’s almost attempting to bribe or bully God by reminding him of his own nature, and then saying he’d better live up to it or else. I think most of us think of prayer a bit that way. Even if the process is more about reminding ourselves of who we think God is rather than telling him, it works out the same in the end. We lock God into an expected way of behaviour, and once you’re in that kind of a view of prayer, it becomes very easy to become disillusioned with God, to doubt or hate him. Because he doesn’t often answer the way you want. But I’ve also been thinking about another prayer.

Our Father in Heaven,
Hallowed be your name,
Your Kingdom come,
Your Will be done
on Earth as it is in Heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
Forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one.

The Lord’s Prayer has been obsessing me of late, I keep seeing more and more in it, or so it feels. It is an anti-prayer really, if we think of prayer as asking God for the things we want. For one thing, there is no mention of “I” in it anywhere. It is a prayer for “us”, prayed by the individual for everyone. It is not a selfish prayer. When you look at it, it’s a pretty dependent and selfless prayer. In it we ask God that His Kingdom come and His Will be done. There’s nothing in it about what we want. We ask God to provide for our needs, forgive us our sins and protect us from doing harm to others and ourselves. The entire prayer is about changing us and keeping us in service to God. It’s not about bringing us what we want, but asking God to give us what he wants to give us. Trusting him for all things, beyond our own ability to see what we think we need. This is the prayer that Jesus told his followers was the very model of prayer. I’ve seen in the past people try to break this down into some kind of structural thing, that what it's really about is that first we praise God, then we ask Him for what we need, or various approaches like that. I think that’s missing the point, just trying to wrestle the whole thing back under our control. The more I look at this prayer, the more I think we miss the point of prayer, especially when we turn it into a wishlist of things we want.

As I think about prayer these days, it has become more and more about surrender and less about what I want to get out of it. God is too big for me to be able to tell him who he is, or for me to even wrap my own mind around. But in prayer, we can approach an infinite and all-powerful God, and we can ask him to speak to us. I still think he wants to hear our troubles and our desires, if we pray anything less than honestly it’s hardly respecting God. But beyond that, I think God wants us to hear him. We can’t do that if we’re busy telling him who he is and what he should do, but if we are quiet and wait on him, then there is a gap in the conversation and he can say something to us. I think that’s why Jesus said not to babble on in prayer. It’s not a monologue, it’s a conversation.

The People in My Head: William's Father

William's father died at 6pm on the 17th of August. He wasn't found until two days later, when a neighbour came around to see if he wanted to go to a movie. William's father had divorced his mother when he was six, and had seemingly spent the rest of his years in isolation. When the time came to prepare the eulogy for the funeral, nobody had much to say. His life had been a mystery since he had withdrawn from his family. It seemed inappropriate to William that he or his mother should speak, since all they had was puzzlement and anger at his retreat from them. They searched his apartment for clues to his state of mind, but he left them nothing. There were no pictures of William as a child, no keepsakes from his time spent married. No photos of old girlfriends or any sign of a current one. Not even a paycheck to say where he worked. William was almost willing to believe that his father had never existed, such was the imprint that he had left on the world. But the ache in his heart, the absence he felt and the hurt and confusion over the dead man's silence told him he would never really believe that. In the end, he knew that his father was a mystery that would never be resolved, and so when the time came the minister spoke for them. He said that Daniel had been a man who had been many things, a husband, a father, and that he had abandoned those things for reasons nobody would know besides him. Daniel was a mystery, and that was all that could be said. So they buried the mystery. And life went on.

The People in My Head: Carlos Sebastian

Carlos Sebastian was a private detective, of a sort. He didn’t work out of an office and he didn’t advertise. He wasn’t licensed or registered, and he didn’t go to the big conventions on the latest surveillance techniques and gee-whiz technological gimcrackery. For one thing, his dole payments would have stopped if anyone knew he was working.

So when an unfamiliar man knocked on the door and said that a friend had said Carlos was someone who could check something out for him, Carlos was cautious. The man was well dressed, suit and tie, not the usual run of the mill client for him. But after a certain amount of idiosyncratic banter had satisfied him it wasn’t someone checking on him defrauding the government, he listened to the story. It was the usual deal, the guy thought his wife might be cheating, but he’s not sure, he wants to know before he confronts. Measure twice, cut once, the overcautious type who believes that sneaking around is better than an honest question and confrontation, perhaps over nothing but his own paranoia. Carlos’ stock in trade, in other words. Jealous men and women make the world of detectives go round. He took the case.

Sitting in a car all day is a boring task, so the detective cannot be an imaginative sort. You can’t let your mind wander, you have to stay focused, and you have to have a high boredom threshold. Carlos wasn’t a particularly active man in the mental department, which made him perfect for this kind of work. He could pay attention without losing focus, but it was a knack, not a practiced skill. His skill was the ability to appear authoritative when the nosy neighbour came knocking on the car window and asked what he was doing. The directive to call the local police station, telling them they knew he was there and that was all he could say usually diverted them. People respect authority and confidence, even if it’s all a lie.

There was another man, as it turned out. He would come during the day, go to bed and sleep, get up, potter around the house, whatever. He acted like he owned the place, and like he owned the woman too. There would be fights, shouting and screaming. This happened every day of the week with clockwork regularity. Carlos couldn’t understand it. So he broke in and installed a surveillance camera. He would watch the fights take place, the beatings, and he felt powerless for the first time in his life. Once the man left, the woman would put makeup on, hide the damage, and when her husband returned at night there was tenderness and love. He couldn’t work out why she would have an affair with someone who would treat her so badly. What was the appeal? Why did she seem to enjoy the rough treatment? Or was it simply that the husband spent every weekend away on some kind of business trip, and some nights would not even come home. Carlos speculated that attention of any kind was better than being ignored, at least maybe to the woman he was coming to pity.

He didn’t tell his client about the affair. The violence of the situation made him think it wasn’t a good idea to provoke the issue. And the more he thought about it, the more he realised that to confirm the man’s suspicions would leave the woman trapped in the abusive relationship she seemed unwilling to remove herself from. Or perhaps that he would not let her escape from. Carlos understood lies, and he knew how they trapped a person. If she left this man and he came back while the husband was around, then her secret would be out. She’d be stuck between a man who wanted to hurt her, and a man who would want nothing more to do with her. For a detective, empathy is a useless emotion, but Carlos felt like helping the woman. He had grown tired of letting people’s lies destroy their lives.

One night as the man left for work, Carlos followed and ran the car off the road on a deserted stretch of highway. As the man dazedly got out of the wrecked car, Carlos took a crowbar and beat the man to death. He dumped the body and torched the car.

He told the client he’d seen nothing, nobody was having an affair and he could rest easy. The man went away smiling, happy. Carlos felt good about his job for the first time in several years.

When the next knock at the door came, he hadn’t expected to see a uniform there. Fear gripped him with the conviction that seven years of welfare fraud had finally caught up with him. Several policemen came in with a detective and arrested him for the murder of a Mr James Haddon. Mrs Haddon was distraught, especially because they had initially believed that she was responsible for the murder. Apparently Mr Haddon was a shift worker who drank heavily and beat his wife. He was not a good man, but he had no known enemies and he had been murdered inexplicably. The only explanation that seemed reasonable was that she had hired someone to kill him. As the detective explained, once they had cleared her, someone had anonymously tipped them off to his actions. Carlos tried to explain that he’d done it because someone had hired him to check on her. But with no files, cheques or bank statements, he couldn’t prove anything. When he saw Mrs Haddon’s lawyer at the police station, he tried to say that it was the man who had hired him, but nobody would listen to a dole bludger the neighbours said was a creep who got off on stalking women in the neighbourhood.

He was sent to prison and hung himself several days later. He never understood what he’d done wrong, but he would never have been able to. Imagination and empathy are not useful tools to the detective mind.

What's in the box?

This is a very basic comic I did a while ago. View it here.

The Chumscrubber

Read my review of this unusual but entertaining film here.

Renaissance

Read my review for this visually impressive film here.

The Omen

Check out my review for this dire yet hysterically funny piece of trash here.

The People in My Head: Frank Boone

Frank Boone was a small time crook and big time addict. His preferred method of raising funds was to snort several lines of coke, pick up his .44 revolver (stolen of course) and find the nearest convenience store or petrol station. Generally there were at least three of them within short walking distance of whatever hostel he happened to be paying a few dollars a night to sleep in. He would often move straight after the job, put down his cash in some new dive and spend a few days scoring whatever he could find. He wasn't addicted to anything in particular, he would take whatever he could get.

One day he shot a dealer and stole the entire stash, he didn't worry about the chain of events he was setting in motion. Nobody knew who he was, but a turf war had been fought, undeclared, in the area for several weeks. When the poor stooge got hit, nobody even considered Frank part of the equation. Everyone knew it was war. Soon dealers on both sides were vanishing into the ground, families wept for missing children and widows and orphans were left to fend for themselves. In another ten years a new wave of dealers and hookers fighting and killing would be the fruit of a single bullet fired from the gun of a confused addict.

Frank still went on his merry way, knocking over convenience stores, killing the occasional attendant, taking whatever he could find and numbing himself to something he couldn't define. He never paused to consider a soulless existence. He needed, he took, he wanted, he had. His was a simple life equation, but nobody who saw him thought it equated to life.

The day he was shot and killed, it was snowing. The one thing people marveled at when they saw the body was that no blood appeared to have been spilled. So he was remembered as the man so dead that he didn't bleed. And then he was forgotten.