A Book of
Uncommon Prayer

Contents

Introduction
Speaking to God
Gratitude
Spells, Charms and Oracles
Hope and Trust
Wisdom of This World
Mother, Virgin, Goddess
Death and Fear
A Note of Thanks
Acknowledgements

Introduction

Let me record at the outset that I was raised a Catholic, speaking English and Irish, and that my introduction to prayer was also my introduction to the seductive, rhythmic power of the imagination in language. Certain prayers and hymns, especially hymns in English and prayers in Irish, could make the hair stand up on the back of my neck, and so, as I soon discovered, could certain poems and songs. The power of prayer and hymn, I concluded, was the same kind of power as the power of the poem: language deployed with intelligence, flair and feeling. I came to believe in the power and central importance of the word.

At the age of fourteen, easily and without fuss, I discovered that I did not believe in God. I did not believe in God in the same way that I did not believe I could fly unaided, did not believe I could become pregnant, did not believe that by sheer concentration of willpower I could make a malevolent teacher shrivel up and die. I have little interest in arguments for and against the existence of God – such arguments always seem to me somehow futile – but I am interested in prayer because prayer is language under pressure intended to lodge in memory, and I have a lively interest in that.

I want to put these things on record because here before you is a collection of prayers assembled in good faith by a lifelong agnostic.

What I often find off-putting in prayer is its other-directedness, the fact that it is invested in and seeks its warrant from a God who is elsewhere, a reality that transcends our common world. Given the brute and often cruel truths of human existence, extinction not the least of these, it is understandable that some in seeking God seek also to deny or devalue this world in which we live. The idea of a salvific eternity, where one is not poor or powerless, despised or neglected, holds an obvious attraction for the majority of human beings. The negation of pain, the profound comfort of eternal life in the hand of an omnipotent guarantor of all things – these are not negligible promises. But, for believers, it can be all too easy to lose your respect for this fallen world, and when once this bond is loosed it is no step at all to neglectful inattention, and worse. Allowing for the fact that great atrocities have been visited on us by non-believers of one kind or another, nevertheless I am constantly, and I admit naively, shocked by that large cohort of believers who become indifferent to and often actively hostile to this world – as long as they can bask in the assurance of their God that they will be saved in some next world. It is from the ranks of such believers that the suicide bombers come – and the inquisitors, the earth-despoilers, the architects of holocaust. Why is it that so many true believers come to hate this very earth, its substance, its creatures and its people?

It can only be that they do not believe, in any meaningful sense, the central truths of their faiths; they pay lip service to their God, even as they dishonour and traduce the core beliefs they claim that God has taught them. I learned early in life that prayers can be hollow, devoid of meaning, mere empty formulae; I learned early on to listen carefully to the voices of true believers, to see if the bell rang hollow or true. I brought the same test to my selection for this book.

Orthodox or heretical or of some provenance I do not understand or cannot easily categorize, I hope that every text here is a clear, dignified voice speaking memorably, human to human, in the face of the cosmos. I have done what I could to assemble a collection of prayers in which the felt pressures of thought and emotion find an answering sense of life in the language deployed, so that we, reading, are ourselves opened into the direct urgency of human plea or praise. God’s certainty is cold and remote; God’s dignity must be vast and is surely beyond us: we live on a different scale, we are small things, mortal and often unsure, with intuitions and intimations of a vast unknowable universe. At their best, our prayers enact something unquenchably ambitious in us, the pure desire to speak and to know, to square up to unknowable immensities.

All prayers are composed and spoken by men and women born in a particular place, into a particular tradition. I have chosen texts for this book in large part from the Irish and English traditions because those are the traditions I share, the traditions that are in some sense home to me; it seems to me sensible that, as this book is in some sense a journey, I should set out from the known place. I have of course included many prayers from other traditions, and I have tried in those instances to choose texts that work well in English. Exoticism for the sake of it is a form of disrespect; I hope I have avoided that.

I hope that believers may find here prayers that speak to their living faith. I hope that they will find here words that speak to their unbroken kinship with people of no faith. I hope that non-believers may find here texts that illuminate, however obliquely, the unavoidable question: How should we live, unsustained by belief?

Theo Dorgan

Speaking to God

It cannot be easy to step outside the bounds of the conventional when addressing God, or gods. As an organized religion gains ground, as its orthodoxies become more and more minutely elaborated, there is less and less room to manoeuvre for that individual who feels pressed by circumstance towards direct speech with the divine. The growth of a priestly caste is chiefly responsible for this: priests have a powerful vested interest in mediating between God and man – and hence a powerful motive for controlling that language and those forms of language in which God is ‘properly’ addressed. The more elaborate the outward forms and structures of a religion, the more conventional and, eventually, emptied of urgency the prayers of that religion become. It is of course possible for the devout orthodox person to press meaning into a prayer learned by rote, dulled by infinite repetition – the sheer familiarity of words said over and over again can give a comforting sense of belonging, can induce a meditative near-trance which creates a nearness to God.

Borrowing a phrase from Ezekiel, Robert Graves writes of the dictionary as ‘a valley of dry bones’ and says that the proper business of the poet is to breathe life into these bones, so that they may become articulate, and move about, and dance and caper. The man or woman urgently in need of addressing God directly is also possessed of that need to breathe life into dry bones; the more urgent the impulse, the more lively the language of the resulting prayer is likely to be.

There are as many reasons for speaking to God as there are ways of so speaking, and I have tried in this section to give as wide a range as possible of speaking, motivated voices. What strikes me most, in these prayers addressed directly to God, is the robust sense of self, and self-worth, displayed by their authors, even when playing the abject. They are addressing, by their own estimations, the lord of all creation, the maker of all things, the master of all that is, was and will be, and they expect to be heard. Sometimes the effect borders on the comic, sometimes a small timid phrase will pierce you to the heart, but over and over again, believer or unbeliever, you will find yourself warming to the humanity of these often anonymous authors: they are so alert to circumstance, so full of appetite and busy-ness, so endlessly curious, lustful, remorseful, terrified, elated, in love with the world and aching for peace in the hereafter. They speak to God, and they expect to be answered. If I were God, I should be glad to answer them.

When wilt thou save the people?

Grandfather, Great Spirit

Black Elk, trans. John G. Neihardt

Grandfather, Great Spirit, you have been always, and before you no one has been. There is no other one to pray to but you. You yourself, everything that you see, everything has been made by you. The star nations all over the universe you have finished. The four quarters of the earth you have finished. The day, and in that day, everything you have finished. Grandfather, Great Spirit, lean close to the earth that you may hear the voice I send. You towards where the sun goes down, behold me; Thunder Beings, behold me! You where the White Giant lives in power, behold me! You where the sun shines continually, whence come the day-break star and the day, behold me! You in the depths of the heavens, an eagle of power, behold! And you, Mother Earth, the only Mother, you who have shown mercy to your children!

Hear Me, four quarters of the world – a relative I am! Give me the strength to walk the soft earth, a relative to all that is! Give me the eyes to see and the strength to understand, that I may be like you. With your power only can I face the winds.

Great Spirit, Great Spirit, my Grandfather, all over the earth the faces of living things are all alike. With tenderness have these come up out of the ground. Look upon these faces of children.

O Lord, love me intensely, love me often and long!

The Wish of Manchán of Liath