We talk to the ceiling. We bow our heads, close our eyes, and speak our fears, our hopes, our desperate pleas into the empty air above us. We call this prayer, and we tell ourselves it matters.
But let's be honest about what we're actually doing.
If God is real - if there's an omniscient, omnipotent being who created galaxies and orchestrates the fall of every sparrow - then our prayers are an insult. We're suggesting that the infinite intelligence that holds reality together needs our input about Venezuela. About cancer. About the weather. We're acting like the fundamental pattern of existence is waiting for our advice.
That's not worship. That's presumption bordering on blasphemy.
But most of us don't really believe the universe needs our suggestions. We're not that arrogant. We pray because we need it. We need to feel like we have some say in an unresponsive cosmos. We need to believe our words matter, that someone's listening, that we're not just small, powerless creatures shouting into the void.
The terror of powerlessness is real. The desire for agency in the face of suffering is profoundly human. Prayer soothes that terror. It gives us something to do when we can't actually do anything.
The problem is what this costs us.
When we pray instead of acting, we avoid responsibility. "Thoughts and prayers" becomes a substitute for gun control, for immigration reform, for examining what our nation actually does in the world. We get to feel religious, feel like we're contributing, without the hard work of changing systems or confronting our complicity.
Prayer lets us keep our tribal identity intact. We don't have to examine whether our country is actually the liberator we want to believe it is. We don't have to face the gap between our mythology and our actions. We just... ask God to handle it. And when God doesn't? Well, mysterious ways. Not our fault. We prayed.
This is magical thinking serving as a coping mechanism. And coping mechanisms that require us to lie about reality eventually fail us - often catastrophically.
So what's the alternative?
Face it. Face the reality that we're small, mortal creatures in an indifferent universe. Face the fact that no cosmic parent is monitoring our needs and intervening on our behalf. Face our actual powerlessness over vast swaths of existence.
And then discover our actual power.
Because here's what's true: we can't control the cosmos, but we can control our own actions. We can't petition reality to change, but we can align ourselves with what's actually real. We can't make God fix our problems, but we can take responsibility for the problems we're creating.
This is why we call it Focus, not prayer.
Prayer is a petition - asking reality to be different than what it is. Focus is alignment - examining what is and orienting ourselves toward coherence with it. Prayer talks at God. Focus pays attention to the patterns that actually govern existence.
When we praxis Focus, we're not asking for intervention. We're sensitizing ourselves to what's real. We're directing our consciousness toward agape-gratia, toward service to Life, toward the welfare of the Earth and everything on it. Not because someone's listening and might reward us, but because this is how conscious beings participate in the continuity of coherence.
Focus puts the responsibility on us. There's no cosmic backup. No parent-God to appeal to. No escape from examining our own actions and their consequences. Just us, conscious and capable, facing what's real and choosing how to respond.
Focus doesn't soothe our terror of powerlessness. It names our actual power: the capacity to see clearly, choose wisely, and act coherently in service of what actually sustains life.
We can stop talking to the ceiling and start looking at each other. At the actual world. At what we're actually doing and what we could actually change.
That's harder than prayer. It offers no comfort, no sense of cosmic backup, no reassurance that someone's in control. It requires us to be grown-ups in a universe that doesn't care whether we survive or not.
But it's real. And reality, however harsh, is the only foundation upon which we can build anything that lasts.
The ceiling isn't listening. It never was. But we are. We're here, conscious, capable of examining truth and acting on it. That's not as comforting as an all-powerful parent-God.
But it's what we actually have. And it might be enough - if we're willing to use it.