I need a new God. I need somebody to pray to. For a few years now, I’ve been working on emancipating myself from my poisonous Catholic upbringing (a ridiculously belated enterprise which I only undertook in my fifties) and building a new kind of personal integrity, one that allows me, among other things, to be a poet with courage.

But being a human being, I share the religious impulse, the sense of the numinous. I want to avail myself of the benefits of meditation and centering prayer. But who do I pray to?

Please don’t say Jesus. I was a Catholic for 50 years, a professional music minister for 13, and have two degrees in ministry. You don’t know who Jesus was and neither do I. You make up your own Jesus. One justifies one’s own version of Jesus by more or less arbitrarily picking out words from that infinite haystack known as the Bible. There are enough words in the Bible to justify any kind of Jesus you want, from the sublime to the ridiculous to the monstrously vindictive. My personal opinion (and I’m honest enough to admit it cannot and will likely never be anything but wishful thinking) is that if I want to know who Jesus was, all I have to do is look at Mahatma Gandhi.

So who do I pray to? Who do I praise when I’m transfixed by the transcendent beauty of music or nature? Who do I thank when a marvelous piece of serendipity brings a boon to my life? Who do I honor with the way I live my life–with humility, service, creativity, malice toward none and charity toward all–when I receive a miracle?

Wait, what?

After 20 weeks of chemotherapy, Carol just had an MRI, ultrasound, and a mammogram. The tumor is GONE. Lymph nodes are completely normal. She’ll have surgery in February as scheduled, but to remove the tissue where the tumor USED TO BE along with the Port-A-Cath and the marker. We don’t know if radiation is still in the cards.

So who do I pray to? My cradle-Catholic siblings all went through their Buddhist phases decades ago. My son’s mainland wedding this summer (for those of us who couldn’t make it to Maui) was celebrated by a female Buddhist monk and it was beautiful, authentic, and resonant.  I keep an eye open for the magic book which will provide me some entree into the Zen way, but haven’t found it yet.

My wedding to Carol three years ago Thursday and my daughter’s wedding to her partner this spring were celebrated by my son. Both celebrations were creative, fun, dignified, and wonderful. Two of the most important core values I have tried to model for my children are liturgy and community. As rooted as those were in the institutional model for the bulk of my life, I’m pleased my children and I are discovering the truth for ourselves that you make your own liturgy, and you find your own community.

So who do I pray to? Making up my own God seems arbitrary and less than satisfying–although I have to admit that 37 years ago my God was “my Higher Power,” and my Bible was “The Big Book,” and the miracle that resulted from that persists to this day.  I have been known to say that God is the aggregate of those things in your life that are impossible to explain, but that’s phenomenological and tautological. I need something richer and more personal.

Any ideas? Can you recommend a good book? Or should I say a Good Book? I’m open to suggestions. Don’t say the Bible. The Bible is a compendium of primitive myths and politically charged pious fictions. It’s an anthology. If you want to make a thoughtful case for the Letter of James or the book of Ecclesiastes, however, I’m all ears. In the meantime, I’m at the moment looking seriously into T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland and Other Poems and the Prophetic Books of William Blake. More on that later.

For now: Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, whoever You are. And deep, sincere thanks to all of you for all your prayers and support.

Love,

Doug

The Prompt

In poetry or prose, tell us about a book that shaped or shapes your life.

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