AU Wackerlin Center for Faith and Action

Monthly Musings

February 2007

A Sense of Direction…

I recently invited some friends and colleagues from the Interfaith Youth Core to Aurora University for a planning meeting. Before the meeting, one of these friends, a Muslim woman, asked if she could perform her evening prayer in my office. Naturally I obliged, and pointed her toward Mecca. As I left her and walked back into the Lowry Chapel to be with the other meeting participants, someone asked me if we had squared away the prayer situation. I replied in the affirmative and added, “I just hope I got the direction correct, because you know what happens when you pray in the wrong direction, right?” It was a quick joke, and we laughed a bit, but it made me think more about the idea.

A professor brought me to her freshman class to follow up on a trip that we took to the local Hindu temple. As I answered questions from the students, one of the “stickier” points was the concept of statuary in the Hindu tradition. The objections were part anti-idolatry and part confusion. We know it’s not idolatry, no more than praying toward a cross or circling the Kaaba, but the students didn’t seem to understand all the extra things in the faith of South Asia that make their gods so human.

Statues of the gods get regular baths, they are “fed,” offered money and flowers and jewels for beautification, taken for parades, and are even put to bed and woken up according to a set schedule. It must be nice to have someone take such good care of you! In the Dharmic tradition, the stories of the gods match up with our old Greco-Roman pantheon in the ways that they get married, cheat on each other, fight and steal and generally be just like us. The statues, with some obvious exceptions, look human.

I explained to the class that such a thing was very practical, as it was easier to focus one’s prayers on something that they could see. I suppose it is far more simple to seek comfort from a god that resembles (mostly; I’m thinking of Ganesh and the proclivity toward extra arms) other people. In short, it was better to have something concrete to concentrate one’s supplications towards.

Religious symbols like statues in Hindu temples, crosses in Christian churches, and even the direction of prayer in Islam connect us more closely to the object of our prayers. If those prayers are a vehicle to carry us closer to our concept of Ultimate Reality, we can think of such symbols as the roadway and the signposts that will lead us there. Is it better to concentrate on a visible form when we pray, or to just send our love out to an infinite, unknowable something? What is the right direction for us to pray? This is a matter of personal interpretation, I hope.

But I’ve never seen a “ Wrong Way” sign on the road of prayer.

Tim Brauhn