I want to share the first prayer I started saying regularly.

I started out an Atheist. I was raised by parents who (as far as I can tell) are Atheist scientists. But I was raised Unitarian-Universalist, and a core element of UU religious education is learning about other religions and cultivating religious tolerance, so I've always been aware of (other) religions and curious about them.

As a teenager, I was introduced to 80s era Neopaganism (Starhawk, Margot Adler) and to The Church of the Subgenius (into which I was ordained as a 16 year old) and began to mutate.

When I was a college student I had an... extreme initiation accident I guess is a way to describe it. Which demonstrated to me beyond doubt that... there is a phenomenon.

(This is extremely difficult to communicate successfully. I may try at some point in another Topic.)

I called this phenomenon God, because it there wasn't another word big enough for it and because if there were a God smaller than it, it would be false.

This God was not a person. It was just there.

I didn't pray to it. I just remembered it. And tried to integrate my knowledge of it into the rest of my life. The temptation to explain it away, to forget it was strong. The temptation to tame it with a story, something tidy, explainable was strong. I succeeded (at least partially) at resisting these compulsions.

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I didn't start praying regularly until I got a motorcycle. I was about 22. I learned to ride as an adult, on the street. I bought a new Yamaha Seca 2, a 600cc air-cooled standard. Kind of a heavy bike for an absolute beginner. No lessons. I had the bike delivered to my dorm and just got on it and tried to ride it.

I dropped it. A lot. And I learned how to pick up a 400 lb bike when you're kinda panicky with adrenaline and maybe a car is behind you at the stop sign. (You can't pull it up -- you must push with your legs from under it.)

I remember the first time I went on the highway. It was terrifying. I was so conscious of the terrible physics of traveling at 60 miles-per-hour, straddling a 400 lb chunk of hot metal, surrounded by speeding cars. Motorcycling is like scuba. You are in this intimate embrace with a piece of technology that allows you to enter a context that is near-instantly lethal, and where you are dependent on that device to return to a safe context¹.

I started to pray. I prayed every time I got on my bike.

please protect me
and those around me
from harm

It started as "please protect me from harm", but I was extremely aware of the danger to any passenger and I felt a deep responsibility for their safety. And then I was moved to include the other motorists who made up the traffic around me. A prayer for safe travel, for all of us, the traffic.

I didn't direct this prayer to anyone. It felt like I didn't want to presume anything about whom I was addressing. My God was and is apersonal. The gods and goddesses that have since emerged between me and It are masks. They are a language.

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Today I pray to gods and to angels -- but it's maybe more accurate to say I pray with them or through them. Always I am addressing God. I'm not confused about this. But the gods are a form of address. It feels like they are an epiphenomenon of the conversation between me and the World.

That conversation is what I call God.

The World and I are two halves of It.

The World and I, we have to be here.

The real miracle is that there is more than one person. That I am not alone in the World.

That you are reading this.

Thank you.