Anna Badkhen at VQR:
When was the first prayer? Was it immediate, a direct appeal, like Abraham’s plea that God spare Sodom? Or was it asymptotic, a request that the petitioner be somehow granted an exemption from the world’s sorrows? Did it require mediums—a waterfall, for example, or a body part, like the 160,000-year-old skull of a child from the Great Rift Valley that bears marks of intentional scalping and polishing; or rocks particularly arranged; or a space specially dedicated, a sanctuary? Was it one person beseeching in utmost concentration, like a monk who seeks devotional seclusion to focus on worship? Or did it require a congregation, a jummah, a liturgy of togetherness? Was prayer “absolutely unmixed attention,” in Simone Weil’s words, or, as Iris Murdoch says, “a form of love,” and was there a difference between the two, and what was that difference? Having been raised entirely outside of any kind of faith, and having spent all of my adult life surrounded by people for whom faith is paramount, I have a complicated relationship with prayer. I can’t help but wonder at how this specific kind of love and attention has miraculously sustained us since the beginning of the immense human journey, through epidemics and genocides and all the grief and suffering of history.
more here.
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