Five Easy Prayers for Pagans
Philip Appleman
1.
O Karma, Dharma, pudding & pie,
gimme a break before I die:
grant me wisdom, will, & wit,
purity, probity, pluck, & grit.
Trustworthy, helpful, friendly, kind,
gimme great abs and a steel-trap mind.
And forgive, Ye Gods, some humble advice -
these little blessings would suffice
to beget an earthly paradise:
make the bad people good
and the good people nice,
and before our world goes over the brink,
teach the believers how to think.
2.
O Venus, Cupid, Aphrodite,
teach us Thy horsepower lingam, Thy firecracker yoni.
Show us Thy hundreds of sacred & tingling positions,
each orifice panting for every groping tumescence.
O lead us into the back rooms of silky temptation
and deliver us over to midnights of trembling desire.
But before all the nectar & honey leak out of this planet,
give us our passion in marble, commitment in granite.
3.
O Shiva, relentless Spirit of Outrage:
in this vale of tearful True Believers,
teach us to repeat again and again:
No, your Reverences, we will not serve
your Gross National Voodoo, your Church
Militant – we will not flatter the double faces
of those who pray in the Temple of
Incendiary Salvation.
Gentle Preserver, preserve the pure irreverence
of our stubborn minds.
Target the priests, Implacable Destroyer –
and hire a lawyer.
4.
O Mammon, Thou who art daily dissed
by everyone, yet boast more true disciples
than all other gods together,
Thou whose eerie sheen
gleameth from Corporate Headquarters
and Vatican Treasury alike, Thou
whose glittering eye impales us
in the X-ray vision of plastic surgeons,
the golden leer of televangelists,
the star-spangled gloat of politicos –
O Mammon, come down to us in the form
of Treasuries, Annuities, & High-Grade Bonds,
yield unto us those Benedict Arnold Funds,
those Quicksand Convertible Securities, even the wet
Judas Kiss of Futures Contracts – for
unto the least of these Thy supplicants
art Thou welcome in all Thy many forms. But
when Thou comest to say we’re finally in the gentry –
use the service entry.
5.
O flaky Goddess of Fortune, we beseech Thee:
in the random thrust of Thy fluky favor, vector
the luminous lasers of Thy shifty eyes
down upon these, Thy needy & oh-so-deserving
petitioners. Bend down to us the sexy
curve of Thine indifferent ear, and hear
our passionate invocation: let Thy lovely,
lying lips murmur to us the news
of all our true-false guesses A-OK,
our firm & final offers come up rainbows,
our hangnails & hang-ups & hangovers suddenly zapped,
and then, O Goddess, give us your slippery word
that the faithless Lady Luck will hang around
in our faithful love, friendships less fickle than youth,
and a steady view of our world in its barefoot truth.
It's Sunday, day of rest and reverence, day of no purchasing, no swearing, no work other than making dinner and cleaning up the mess, day of prayer and reflection, day of paying tithing and homage to god, his son, his mother, all the saints, depending on which church you're sitting in, of course. I try very hard to not sit in a church, and the most part, suceed in my endeavor.
I grew up Mormon, and sat in a church for three excrutiating long hours every Sunday. I remember thinking that when it was legal, I was getting out. I really thought it was some kind of law that you had to stay until the age of 18, and in reality, although I left my religion behind somewhere in early adolescence, it was law, albiet, unwritten, to sit in that church as long as I lived in my parent's house. So I did. Once I left my parent's house, I left the religion, although it took some time shaking off the habit, a lot of soap box monologues and saber rattling, hours wasted looking out the corner of my eyes at anyone and everyone who sat in a church or tried to get me to sit with them, years trying on other religions only to find I had to lie down on the bed to get the zipper up, and years denying, pretending, ignoring, all the while adding to my staggering collection of religious icons and ephemera, until finally cobbling together my own belief system that didn't include a church, or systemized structure. Can I articulate this system? Not really.
Which leads me to my off and on quest to discover the first myth, and the invention of god. Sacrilege? To some. Am I grateful I don't live in the bloody Middle Ages, or bloody Reformation, or bloody Enlightenment, or bloody name your time period, etc..., and that I exist in the age of religious apathy, where zealots and lunatic fringes are for the most part, well, on the fringes? Of course. Do I understand there are no aetheists in foxholes? You better believe it, and every foxhole I've ever been in, guess who's ear I want. Does that make me a hypocrite? Probably, but get a stick and shake it and I bet you will discover, that so is everyone else, church sitters, or not. I'm not an aetheist. I've tried to be gnostic (I still like this), an animist (think trees & everything connected with spirit), a pagan (think total New Age b.s.), a Baptist (think big choirs, a band, lots of clapping and shouting, stand up, sit down, sing, dance a little, and you'll understand the draw), a Catholic (I am a sucker for icons and ritual, and strangely, anything chanted in Latin, but a cursory glance at the Inquisition, Crusades, Popes past & present, and the whole priest abuse scandal, well, let's just say I've been disabused of my inclination in that direction), and a few non Christian religions as well. Nothing stuck.
I like Einstien's belief that he watches the universe to understand his idea of god, the Old One.
I can sit in that church.
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