Peter Himmelman Substack
I try to stay in shape. I work out for health and, admittedly, for vanity. I know exactly what the results will be, based on the frequency and intensity of my workouts. I know that when I do cardio, my lung capacity increases and my heart gets healthier. When I lift weights and hit a certain point of muscle exertion, muscle tissue breaks down and, because of that, it rebuilds itself. I become stronger and leaner. All of this is predictable.
I also pray three times a day, sometimes more. I pray for my family, for my friends, for a world in the midst of turbulence. The difference is that I can’t quantify the results of the time I spend in prayer the way I can with my workouts. The difficulty arises, of course, from the fact that my body, like all things of a temporal nature, is empirically provable, while prayer, clearly a spiritual act, resists empiricism.
But after nearly four decades of daily prayer, something has happened. Something has created a noticeable change in me. Has it made me happier? Less anxious? Luckier? No, I don’t think so. All the hours and effort spent observing 3,500-year-old rituals; why do I persist? I ask myself this not because I’m thinking of throwing in the towel, but to better understand my own motivations.
I often question why it is I do many things: what my underlying motivations are, whether I’m sincere in pursuing them, whether they are worth the effort. Why, for example, do I continue to make music? Why do I write so frequently? Why do I work so hard to maintain my friendships? Why do I value my marriage and my children as deeply as I do? What do I “get” out of all this? I don’t see my muscles getting bigger. That’s for sure.
The truth is I don’t “see” anything at all. But I feel something. That’s what’s important.
Taking a left turn here: I have a strong preference for songs, films, and books whose “purpose” is unclear, whose essence is ambiguity rather than certainty; clearly not anything that hits me over the head with a narrow point of view. I prefer works that allow me to feel something akin to the sensations I get when I pray. Which is to say: ideas and feelings beyond calculation or measurement—music, images, words that carry me past what is observable.
So when it comes to regular, consistent prayer, I venture to say that while nothing is provable, I gain something of tremendous value, even if I can’t adequately describe it. I suspect it stems from immersing myself in a daily, sometimes moment-to-moment endeavor which occasionally leads me beyond the rote. Call it a stretching of imagination, an expansion of boundaries: the ones society has set for me, and those I have set for myself. Call it, for lack of a better term, a "relationship” with God.
None of this is new for me. And I would guess it isn’t new for many of us, who as children had a similar experience, albeit without the language to describe it. Our imaginations were wide then, unbounded by a profusion of words. Only later did we become fenced in by language itself, trapped, as Wittgenstein said, by its limits. Prayer, music, love, devotion—pulls us back toward that original, childlike freedom.
There is much to think about this Thanksgiving. Not only football and turkey. There is also the breadth, the truth of gratitude itself—an outward expression that, like prayer, feels to me like the most human of all human capacities.
Blessings for a happy, healthy Thanksgiving, and for a long life of giving thanks for the good you will surely find—in yourself, your family, and the world.
