Revisiting "Why I pray to God"

I’m re-posting this essay from February 2025 for two reasons. First, because this morning at my dharma center, the teacher spoke about how when we return to center, when we touch into the original point that is the essence of awakening, for him, it could also be called God. I couldn’t agree more.

Second, when I sat at my family’s Passover seder two nights ago, I spoke about the revolutionary teachings of the Hebrew bible and how the idea that we are all made in God’s image, that there is a small piece of God in each of us, changed the course of history. My brother spoke about indigenous spiritualities that also point toward this truth, and he said that we, sitting around that sacred table, in our contemporary context, are incapable of living with that kind of knowing. I couldn’t disagree more. I experience that kind of knowing—knowing that I am not separate from God and that the essence of God lives within me and all other beings—on a daily basis thanks to the dharma and thanks to my patients.

Blessings to all for whom this week is a sacred time of reflection, rejoicing and loving.

When I pray to God I’m doing it with people. I started praying in this way for the first time when I was in my training to become a chaplain over three years ago. God, much less active prayer to God, had never been a part of my personal spiritual lexicon before, but now it is one of my most beloved and meaningful rituals.

When I pray with patients, families, and caregivers, we are entering into a posture of worship. We physically alter our bodies by closing or lowering our eyes, clasping our hands, holding each other, kneeling on the ground, or staring directly into each others’ eyes. We enter a posture of humility and devotion to that which is great, mysterious, and sacred. And in the process our bodies become more sensitive, tender, and intimate. The air stills, our voices become softer, and sometimes that space makes room for our tears and our cries to fill the air.

Praying to God is a way of joining with other people to call out for help and to call out for love, compassion, and tenderness. These are the honest words of the Dharma—love, compassion, tenderness—and they are often not easily accessible to most of us in our everyday lives. They are too intimate…too alive. But by naming God in the communal space between us, I find myself sitting in dingy nursing home rooms and unkempt bedrooms packed full of medical equipment, sharing in the truth of these words with people I hardly know.

Taking a posture of worship allows the truth to flow more easily. As we call out to God we are reminding each other that we are not separate from each other and we are never separate from the pervasive and awesome qualities of goodness that we so often name as God.

In this way, praying to God is my dharma practice. To remind myself and others that we are not separate from each other, and we are not separate from love. We become non-dual at the same time that we become tender to the suffering of the world. I remind myself often when I get confused by the words or the setting—what is that if not training in bodhicitta?

I went to Christian seminary to study Buddhism in part because of the interfaith engagement it promised, because I knew that most of my neighbors are Christian, or at least that is the lens through which they understand the sacred. And at the same time, I am Buddhist, and I hold vows that don’t exclude any being.

There had to be a way to bridge that gap. As Anagarika Govina, German lama and early participant in the modern translation of Buddhism to the west, said in a letter in 1985, “Without knowing the roots of our own culture, how can we absorb the essence of Buddhist culture?”¹

I never expected to end up where I am now—praying to God with non-practicing Catholics in the role of an interfaith spiritual care counselor, feeling more deeply rooted in my Buddhist vows and more actively practicing The Way than ever before. But I continue to try my best to hold the path of coming together, of excluding no one and no thing, as my north star, even if the language and the labels that arise along the way surprise me.

Every morning I ask Tara to hold me and to help me as I set about my day, and I feel her presence every time I hold the hand of someone who is suffering and ask God, with just as much honesty and vulnerability, to hold them, and to help them. And when we’re done with our prayer, we rejoice together in the warmth of something mysterious.