Thor's Day: Prayer

Last week, as I went out one morning to check the trap I'd set the night before, I felt an impulse to pray, to pray that the trap would be empty. For, though I'd agreed with my wife that we would try to remove the rabbits from our back yard, I still hated the thought of their being made to leave their Eden. I especially hated to think that the first one trapped would be taken to a nearby wood and released alone, away from its family.
    The impulse to pray?
    I suppose it could have been an impulse, from when I was an infant and utterly dependent on a parent, primarily my mother, as for all human infants. Godlike, our mothers knew when we needed holding, feeding, changing. We hardly ever needed to actually pray. And, when we did, it always seemed to work, eventually. Or, at least I hope it did for you, too.
    If a human infant's first experience of "God" is in the form of its mother, then why is it God the Father?
    God the Father came later, when my natural impulse to believe and to pray were corrected, not only by Sunday School lessons but also by my mother, who had of course been corrected later in her time too. Prayer was to God the Father. (Unless you were Catholic, in which case you were permitted to pray to Mother Mary.)
    At that point, through correction, prayer became more of an instructed, ritualized habit than an impulse.

So maybe my involuntary thought, the morning I went out to check the trap, was prompted by the old habit of calling on a "higher power" in a moment of need or hope. I hoped the trap would be empty. I needed it to be empty to spare me the emotion of removing from "our" property another creature who, it seemed to me, deserved as much as I to enjoy the place.
    Oh, let the trap be empty.
    I also, from time to time, in moments of emotion, out of habit not yet expunged, say, "God! How can [fill in the blank]!" "God" there, of course, is not an address, but an interjection. I don't address God, I don't write letters anymore to something not there to hear, care, or respond.
     I don't pray, even though I occasionally suffer the impulse or the habit of starting to express a plea for assistance. In some way, I'm still—we're still—children.

In any case, the trap wasn't empty that morning.
    I gently lifted the wire cage out of the bushes alongside the fence and set it on a large towel. The frightened bunny moved about the cage, the sound of its scurrying tearing at my heart. I draped the towel over the cage, and the rabbit calmed and became quiet. And my heart slowed too.
    After carefully setting the draped cage in the trunk of our Honda and driving slowly to a wood half a mile away, I carried the cage, still draped, into the wood, set it down, and flipped the handle to open the door. The first sound the rabbit made since its initial frightened scurry was the hopeful scurry of its running out of the cage and quickly out of sight behind a tree and into some bushes.
    Good luck, little guy or gal. I hope to bring you a companion tomorrow.
    Next morning, another involuntary expression: Let there be another rabbit in the trap....
    Alas, no, the second hope in as many mornings unrealized.

Good luck, still, little guy or gal. Survive the loneliness, survive the hawk, the owl, the dog, the snake. If there really are any more rabbits in our back yard, I hope to bring them to you yet.
     ...If they haven't drowned or suffocated in their warren(s) in the back yard. Two-point-oh-one inches of rain four nights ago, one-point-ninety-five the next night.

In sum [added later], prayer doesn't do a thing in the way of enlisting aid, yet the impulse to pray is nevertheless widespread, even among people who are bent on actions that a good person can't condone.
    As I meant to suggest, I think that my own impulse that morning was nothing more than an expression of a wish to avoid an act that somehow went against the grain. If my wife and I were in any sense "playing god" by setting a trap (a humane trap, especially designed not to hurt the anmial), I was doing so reluctantly (because, as I said, I felt that the rabbits had as much right to enjoy our back yard as we do).
    I don't think it's particularly intriguing that jihadists and abortion-clinic bombers find a god to condone their acts, for they can't find any reason to condone them. When murderers and other destroyers' invoke some nonexistent god's approval, their act is utterly banal and contemptible.
    But equally banal (if not contemptible) is invoking a nonexistent god's approval to do good, especially a god such as that of the Old Testament, who was Himself ever ready to rape and murder. Good people need to learn to trust their own reason and conscience. Their continuing to invoke a nonexistent authority is counterproductive and only delays their maturity.
    Give me my own conscience every time, even if it sometimes, for a moment—out of some childish impulse or unextinguished habit—starts to express a hope in phrasing that used to signify a prayer.