Delphic Maxim 52: Pray for things possible

I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day

52. Pray for things possible

When I think about what it means to ‘pray’, I always seem to reach back to a time when I was much younger and did so fairly regularly. The reason I do this, of course, is because I am not a religious person anymore — though the strange thing about a Catholic youth (though I wouldn’t necessarily say a Catholic upbringing) is that something about that identity sticks with you for life. It marks you — Catholic guilt, some would say — and shapes the way you interpret matters of faith for the rest of your life. Incidentally, it’s why for all of the faults of the institution of the Church, I still see the good in Catholics as a community guided by social justice. (Not so Catholic Conservatism, but that’s partly where things get bound up in the institution as well — thoughtless dogma is always gross, but thoughtful faith is enlightening).

What a digression straight from the outset!

When I was very young, I would pray. Then as I became less religious, less a man of faith, more agnostic — I would pray when situations felt hopeless. It would happen if I was worried about something: I’d strike bargains with a silent God, there’d be a negotiation with a vast, indifferent universe. Then over time, I grew out of it. I stopped praying, and I realised that I was no longer a part of a community of believers, but instead a humble little human — a part of whatever community I chose to create. So I look back and wonder to myself…what was the meaning of prayer?

The circumstances in which an act like praying clings on to our habits is a bit of an indicator. Prayer is an expression of desperation — a hopeful cry in hopelessness. I know that people pray out of gratitude, but that isn’t a prayer ‘for the possible’, that is a retrospective and reflective prayer — as much a meditation or affirmation as it is a communion with God, whomever or whatever you hold that to be. Praying for things possible involves projecting into the future — an ask or a hope or some turn of events to transpire.

It’s interesting that the Greeks were so pragmatic about it too. If there really were a God, I would obviously pray to have the same powers as the Genie from Aladdin, sans Lamp Prison. An all-powerful God could make this happen — so really, anything is possible if God exists! Why would the Greeks propose that we pray ‘for things possible’? Perhaps there’s an unconscious recognition that much of what we ‘pray’ for is either left to contingency and fate, or else it is a product of human effort.

Prayer is a psychological release, and for many it is a perfectly valid one. How someone practices their faith is a personal matter, and if they express hopes for the future through prayer, then that is just another mode of interpretation which people layer into our lives as we breathe meaning into the world.

My read of this maxim is that we should keep our hopes — our prayers — realistic. Not because there isn’t a point to dreaming audacious, big dreams, but because it is through our agency as people that we change the world, not by leaving things to chance. Hope is a powerful emotion, but not when it is used as a disabling excuse to leave it all up to a higher power.

Things become possible when we make them possible.