My Devotion is No Longer Wasted on Prayer…

…because there’s no guarantee that any prayer will be heard.

I was raised a Jehovah’s Witness and while there were some things very specific to the religion that I had to live my life according to, there were other things that my parents forced me to do that was part of their own shit they believed everyone (in their home) should be doing. Prayer is universally an important part of people’s religious AND spiritual practices; us being Jehovah’s Witnesses was no exception to that rule. However, in our home, prayer was pushed in a dogmatic way. A shit ton of memories flooded my mind as I sat watching Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother when the praying scenes popped up on the screen.

If you intend to watch the film, this next point isn’t so much a spoiler as it is connective tissue to what I’m about to say. Read at your own discretion.

There’s a point in the film where the main character questions if his prayers to Allah mean anything because of what’s happened within his family. I know this feeling all too well and it wasn’t just one particular event that caused me to question if God or ANY god was listening to shit I was saying. A little background on how frequently I prayed though… you would have thought I was Muslim because of how often I was talking to God. In addition to praying for all of my meals and snacks (that was at least 5 times daily), I was also praying a couple times throughout the day and at night before I went to sleep. There was no way God wasn’t going to know how grateful I was for anything and everything good in my life. Especially because my father instilled in me that if I could count how many times I was praying, I wasn’t praying enough.

There was something else he instilled in me regarding prayer… if you were doing what God wanted and living your life devoted to him, there was no reason your prayers would not be answered. If your prayers weren’t being answered, you weren’t praying enough. Again, if you could count how many times you were praying, it wasn’t enough. My young mind had reasoned that I needed to be praying as much as I was breathing. Unbeknownst to anyone else, I was praying with my eyes closed and opened. I was praying while riding in the car with my parents; using the bathroom; doing chores; doing classwork; while sitting in the Kingdom Hall. This was an everyday thing that lasted for years.

Prayers were supposed to be a private thing outside of praying aloud before a meal, during family Bible Study and when attending meetings or before field service. So, my parents had no idea how much I was praying or what it was about. I was praying incessantly that God would save me and my siblings from our parents. It started out just about saving myself from my dad. I figured my prayers were going unanswered because I hadn’t included my siblings. Selfishness had to be the reason I wasn’t “heard” so I regularly asked for forgiveness and started making my prayers about me and my siblings being saved from my father. After years of watching my mother make no real efforts to get us away from our father, I started asking that we be saved from my father AND mother. Those prayers weren’t answered by my god, nor anyone else’s.

I sat and watched my father pray an inordinate amount too and often wondered, what could he be praying about… while also reasoning that maybe it was his prayers being answered instead of mine… or maybe God wasn’t listening to him either and that’s why he prayed so much too. I was eventually delivered from the hellscape that was my family home at the age of 16 when I left home and eventually ended up living with my maternal grandmother. There was no way I was ever going to give God credit for delivering me because I had been praying to this useless entity since I knew how to pray. It was at least 10 years, on the low end of things. Any god that would allow a child to suffer daily abuse of any kind for over a decade, isn’t a god I wanted to continue serving.

So, I decided prayer was not for me… because it wasn’t JUST my god that didn’t answer me… NO GOD ANSWERED MY PRAYERS. And before anyone reading this says anything to the effect that my grandmother was the prayer answered, don’t. She wasn’t an answered prayer because neither of my parents ceased to be abusive just because I moved in with my grandmother. They just couldn’t abuse me UNLESS I was in their company and since I didn’t have to live with them anymore, it limited the abuse. This aided in my belief that prayer is a social construct…it isn’t a biological imperative and if I don’t do it, there’s no punishment to suffer. It’s a choice and one I had the right to not choose.

Did I stop praying at 16? Nope. Despite my prayers not being answered, I continued praying until I was about 32 years old. I figured the god I once served as a Jehovah’s Witness might not have been giving a fuck about lil old me but what if another god heard me? What if the universe heard me? But the way my brain is set up, it reminded me that these other gods and the universe were around back when Jehovah wasn’t giving a damn about the abuse or my prayers either. Nothing was done back then so why would anything be done now while I was an adult?

So, I stopped relying on prayer to do anything for me.

I haven’t taught my daughter to pray because to what or who would she be praying? For what reason? And also, I never wanted her to get used to one-way conversations with anything/anyone who never had to acknowledge a word or thought she had; believe it or not, accepting being ignored as normal can filter into our very real human relationships. If there’s no expectation that God will pay you attention, it sets the bar for any standard or expectation you could have for yourself with others. So, what do I do and what do I teach my daughter?

We consider our options and work on tangible results versus maintaining hope that an intangible entity will manifest anything we want or need. Yes, I know the whole idea behind just having faith is a widespread belief, but that’s another social construct that is based on personal attachment to a belief, not a fact. Yes, I need to see the fruits of my labor, mental and physical. I need to see a hell of a lot of things before I just blindly believe they will be true. I blindly believed for decades that prayer was worth doing and believing someone/something out there would hear me…only to be unheard, unloved, unprotected, and ultimately ignored.

Reasonable logic won and this is what I continue to teach my daughter. Now, should she decide to invest her hopes, dreams, and prayers into celestials and entities of her choice, she’s free to do so…but as for me, I no longer pray to anything or anyone not listening to me. This has also served as a reminder within my relationships to remove myself from people who don’t listen to me or acknowledge my existence. Regardless of religious or spiritual beliefs, everyone deserves to be acknowledged, kept safe, loved, cared for, and heard.

Prayer is no longer the thing that sustains any of my faith in the things that are present or the things to come.