Don’t Pray For Me

• Lori Palminteri
• Uncategorized
• September 30, 2016

Anytime anyone tells me they’re going to pray for me, it takes everything in me not to roll my eyes.  A raised Catholic, turned agnostic, turned angry and outspoken atheist, turned (finally) to a passive atheist, I no longer feel the need to berate people for their religious beliefs.  Sometimes it’s fun, sure.  I’m still an asshole, after all.  But it took a long time to get to the healthy point of just letting people believe what they want to believe.  It’s their right, and I grew tired of lecturing people with logic.

For too long, I was angry with religion.  Not only religious people, but the idea of God, which had been drilled into my skull my entire childhood, a God that is all knowing, all good, and all powerful.  Which cannot be.  In this world, there is so much pain.  Every day, kids die from diarrhea, because they don’t have fresh water. Every day, women are raped, and young girls are given heroin and sold into sex trafficking.  In our country.  Every day, people are murdered.  Every day, disease takes someone too soon.  Every day, helpless kids are beaten.  Every day, the atrocities happening are too much to think about, otherwise, we’d go completely mad.  If there is a God, he/she is either all powerful or all good.  God cannot be both.  Otherwise, I fucking hate God, and when we meet, he/she will have to beg me for my forgiveness.

Now, of course I suffer from my own personal problems.  Of course I’m frustrated with my career, and worried I will never succeed.  But overall, my life is good.  I’m healthy.  I have family and friends who love me.  I was born into a good situation, I’ll take it from here.  Pray for the sick.  If prayer actually works, pray for the people who need it.  Who might die, and don’t want to die.  Pray for them.

Religion used to be the number one thing I’d love to argue about.  My disdain for religion needed some form of release.  But two moments in my adult life diluted this need to call people “moronic mindless sheep.”  The first was when I went to Barcelona.  I took a trip to Spain when I was 21.  These were very good years for me, mentally.  I was in college, I just started doing comedy, I felt I found my purpose, and I was young, and clear minded, and a tad delusional with hope and excitement.  But I still hated religion.

Entering the Sangrada Familia made me want to fall on my knees and pray.  To what entity, I’m not sure.  Gaudi’s cathedral is a masterpiece, and the beauty was almost more than I could take in.  For a moment, I wanted to be religious again.  I wanted to go to church, and feel the peace I thought, maybe, I once felt.  I wanted to be part of the same club as Guadi, who’s faith inspired him to build the most amazing work of art architecture I’ve ever experienced.  The divinity in the Sangrada Familia could be felt.  I wasn’t expecting that.

There’s only two things my parents don’t like about me.  The fact that I’ve repelled God, and that I’ve done LSD.  So let’s talk about that. Honestly, I was so moved by tripping on acid, and felt such peace within the energy of the universe, I was finally able to let go of hating on faith.  It changed me, for the better.  While still not religious, if prayer and the thought of God brings people a fraction of the amount of love I felt on that day, I knew I was wrong to shit all over that for people.  Even though I don’t agree.  Even though I know it’s absurd.  If prayer and Jesus brings you comfort in this overall shitty life, then that’s okay by me.  Atheists annoy me almost as much as the preaching douchebags on the subway.  Whatever faith you practice in the quiet of your mind, is okay with me.  Have at it.  Find your peace.  I never will.

The religious are threatened by atheists, because they harbor doubt.  Which is okay.  Truth be told, the world would be a better place if all the religious and non religious just said, “hey, I might be wrong.”  Could be no God, one God, multiple Gods, and all the myriad  religionss are equally right as they are wrong but I believe in BLANK.  The world would be such a better place if people were more apathetic about their faith.

Every one is uncertain.  That’s why people still cry when someone they love dies.  My family is especially religious, but we all cried when my Grandma died, because they have doubt, even if they won’t admit it.  They’re afraid I’m right.  I have no need or will for them to admit this to me, but if they admitted to themselves, I think it would help them.  Admitting uncertainty is scary, but also freeing.

As for me, I’m still drawn to prayer, in way, even though I know no one is listening.  This confused me.  I don’t like attending mass, because I find most priests sermons laughably horrific, and when people pray together it’s really creepy and cultish.  But I love going to churches.  They’re beautiful.  The idea of God, and faith is so pure.  However, the Catholic church is an evil corporation, and that’s not my opinion, that is fact (fun reading: “In God’s Name” by David A. Yallop will make you want to punch priests in the face, and google about what Mother Teresa actually did, because she was a fucking psycho).  Because people are both good and evil, religion is compromised as soon as people get involved.

For my part, I shouldn’t cringe when people tell me they pray for me.  This means, if nothing else, you’re in someone’s thoughts, and their intentions are to send positive energy your way.  But I saw prayer as pity.  And voodoo help which I neither needed or wanted.  The need to be fiercely independent has truly made me a shithead. Then, I read this passage below (author unknown) on the internet, and I think it’s perfect and wonderful, and worth sharing.  And I think it justifies prayer, and, why religious or not, we should all do it from time to time.

“Prayer is a type of thought. It’s a lot like meditation — a type of very concentrated mental focus with passionate emotion directed towards a concept or situation, or the lack thereof. But there’s a special X-factor ingredient that makes “prayer” different than meditation or other types of thought. That X-factor is humility. This is the most seemingly contradictory aspect of prayer and what many people dislike about the feeling of praying. “Getting down on your knees” is not about lowering your power or being a weakling, it’s about showing respect for the size and grandeur of what we call existence — it’s about being humble in the presence of the vastness of life, space, and sensation, and acknowledging our extremely limited understanding of what it all really means.
Being humble is very hard for many people because it makes them feel unimportant and helpless. To embrace our own smallness is not to say we’re dumb or that we don’t matter, but to realize how amazing it is that we exist at all in the midst of so much more. To be fully alive, we must realize how much else there is besides ourselves. We must accept how much we don’t know — and how much we still have to learn — about ourselves and the whole world. Kneeling down and fully comprehending the incomprehensible is the physical act of displaying our respect for everything that isn’t “us.””