Don. Jersey City. Also, prayer.

[azurelunatic]

This plea made me tear up.

I've always prayed in private. If not isolation from others, I don't tend to share the thoughts I share with Deity aloud. I was raised Quaker, for the most part, religiously. We have silence, with people being moved to speak occasionally.

I just don't get the thing where people gather and one or two people speak and everybody else shuts up or sings along. It's alien. It wasn't part of my upbringing. Heck, I don't get it for the religion that's nominally mine, either...

I don't see that anything spoken can be honor for the dead. It does not compute, to me. Prayers are silent. Comfort for the living can be spoken. That's something it's good for. But prayer is silent.

Comments

[boojum.livejournal.com]

I think speaking of someone to others so that they may be remembered, and remembered well, can be honor to the dead. (And I think I think that I should not do so if it wouldn't be honor, but I haven't really thought about it.)

I think group singing or chanting can be very powerful, and necessarily needs to be organized by a very few people, to avoid death by committee.

I think that there is occasional value in asking another to speak for me: they may be able to bridge a communications gap or go where I would not be heard.

I think there is value in a single person offering religious thoughts to other people, provided the single person provides useful thoughts and all involved consent.

I no more understand many instances of public prayer than you do, despite their inclusion of one or more of the above things.

Oh, and I also think there can be a sort of value in street-corner preaching, at least the sort where the person preaching isn't speaking to gain an audience, but just putting words out where they have no choice but to exist. I may have my Martian-colored glasses on again, though.

[azurelunatic]

In this case, I'm the Martian, because I was raised ... on Mars, for all practical purposes relating to this.

[azurelunatic]

There's doubtless good in it, but at the end of the day, it's still not my culture, so I turn away.

Prayer. Diversity. Death.

[episkychic.livejournal.com]

What ever we do for the dead we are actually doing for the living. The dead, quite frankly are dead and no longer capable of feeling. Funerals are for the living. They allow the living to say goodbye, to make their peace, to note the deads' passing, and to grieve publicly.

On the issue of prayer, I'll respect that prayer, practiced different from how you are used to it is foreign to you. One of the wonderful things about this country is the diversity of people of faith. I was raised where occassionally women would get the "Holy Spirit" in them and start hollering, flailing their arms, and getting hysterical. And for a while I thought "less lively" churches just didn't have the Holy Spirit. Prayers are like people, some are extroverted, some introverted, some lively, some sedate, silent, loud, still, dancing, musical and spoken.

Sometimes I am moved to sing the lord's prayer, sometimes I pray while walking, head up, eyes open and silent. To me prayer is communication with G-d or whatever/whomever and there are various forms of communication.

Re: Prayer. Diversity. Death.

[azurelunatic]

Every now and then, I'll sing.

[chorus-of-chaos.livejournal.com]

prayer is a magical tool. It's how an individual's mind connects to diety. For some people the mindset is that they can't do it on thier own, for others, it's all about doing it on thier own. I'm one of those on my own people myself...even though I'm the families official wailer. (paternal side of the family custom...someone who wails/screams...it's kind of hard to describe the process..at funerals, basically on the premise that we are alerting those who have gone on before to be on the lookout for someone joining them. Was my grandmother's job before her heart got weak, she picked me to follow in her footsteps...part of the reason why I'm nicknamed Banshee.)

[azurelunatic]

I'm familiar with that custom from the Klingon culture. :)

[chorus-of-chaos.livejournal.com]

they stole it from the Irish. :)

[azurelunatic]

Star Trek is cool like that.

[bibble.livejournal.com]

wow you were raised quaker? that's unreal. wow. im too flabbergasted to say anything else, obviously. but bravo.

[azurelunatic]

Yep. In the way that many households are raised Christian-by-default, I was Quaker-by-default. I didn't identify as so by name, but FatherSir went to Meeting fairly regularly at some points, and we hung out with the Hidden Hill Friends community, and I babysat sometimes for people in the community, and at Meeting.

I didn't notice it very much at the time, but my father did stress the simpler ways of doing things. Of course, his idea of simple was "There are technological solutions to many problems, and it behooves us to not live with a problem when we could have it solved," but we had relatively little junk food, Mama made quite a few of our clothes when we were little, we never had visible brand names on our clothes except for on our jeans and shoes, and FatherSir made it known that he would far rather spoil us endlessly with tools and raw materials than get us one junky plastic toy.

Growing up in Alaska, I didn't realize that this was particularly out of step with mainstream US culture. Alaskans are generally solitary and practical, so it wasn't very out-of-place. Then I moved in with a woman who was raised Deep Arizona Trailer Trash... my standards of living have suffered shock, and her standards of living as well...