I stopped praying one month into college, at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, after discovering bohemian life slash early counterculture in October 1956, when I realized quitting the Catholic Church was an option. I didn’t pray again until the summer of 1966, when Antonia, my then-significant other, almost died from an asthma attack. I didn’t pray again until 22 years later, when I went to Alcoholics Anonymous in August of 1988. In AA, I was told to do everything I was told to do, no matter how corny or stupid it sounded, and to do it especially if it sounded corny or stupid. I was told to pray. In fact, I was told to follow what I felt to be a fundamentalist approach to prayer, as in, “Only do it this way, which is the only right way”. Specifically, the idea was I was only supposed to pray that I might follow God’s specific personal plan for me. This sort of praying seemed to have five basic premises:

1.) God is real.
2.) He/She/It gives an actual fuck about you.
3.) H/S/I, in fact, gives such an actual fuck about you that They have a specific and ideal personal plan/path for you to follow. Hypothetically, if you do so perfectly, you become the you-iest you that could ever possibly be.
4.) Only pray for this personal path to become clear, and that you follow it. Prayers directed anywhere else are wrong or improper, and will piss God off or something.
5.) The only exception to “proper prayer” done this way was to express gratitude.

My take was, that although all that was possibly bullshit, it’s an awfully pretty conceit, and I’m perfectly willing to play “Let’s Pretend”. I mean, I’m thinking, my life is a mess, I’m miserable, here I am in AA, asking for help, and this is what I’m being asked to do. It seemed easiest to go along with it, to act as if it might actually work. Meanwhile, I started reading up on prayer to see what others had to say about it.
Another AA “rule”, as I understood it, was to pray on your knees, because God is way mighty or something, and we are super puny or whatever. When I would say my Catholic prayers way back then, I would do them in bed under the covers due to Wisconsin’s winters and my cold attic room. I did them under the covers in summer, too, but that was because I was lazy. It seemed unlikely to me that God was so fussy that H/S/I demanded kneeling prayers. “Humph,” says God, “not on your knees, not gonna listen.” Hmmm. Then, I saw the movie Election (highly recommended) in which everybody who prayed did so in bed. “Ok,” I thought, “good enough for Hollywood, good enough for me.” I also really liked one of the praying parts in the movie, where the jock expressed gratitude for his big cock, because the girls liked it.
I found that “gimme” prayers were not recommended in AA, but I found others who said those are merely another variation––petitioning the Lord with prayer, as it’s formally called. Jim Morrison screamed you couldn’t do that, but I always thought he was a dick who wrote about a dozen good songs. His excellent “Unknown Soldier” seems to have been largely forgotten. I also found there were a whole bunch of “proper” praying positions. Anyway, over time I put together my personal prayer, which I’ve been doing for 35 years, occasionally tweaking it. I do the long version at night and a short version in the morning. The evening version:

Thank you for the day. Thank you for my life. Thank you for this really great bed. Thank you for Betsy and our family. Thank you for sobriety, ganja, qigong, sex and music. Thank you for all my swell instruments, and the people I get to play them with. Thank you for the songs and melodies, and sounds and kirking, and stoic jingles and soul jingles (and that my voice is getting better from an ongoing case of dysphonia). Thank you for our work, our world, our home, and our friends, and the glory, and the wonder, and every single thing that’s ever happened to me.
(For details on kirking see liner notes on the new Wildernauts album, Our Muse, on Don Giovanni Records. The liner notes available on peterstampfel.com.)

Then comes a prayer I was encouraged to do by my AA sponsor:

And now I am perfectly willing that You should have all of me, good and bad. I pray that you remove from me every single defect of character that stands in the way of my usefulness to you and my fellows (all of them, he or she or anyone different). Grant me strength, as I go on from here, to do Your bidding. Amen.

And then a few more of my own:

Please help me be a better father, husband, musician, and friend. Please help me to be Buddah-like to my family, my friends, the people I meet, and our critters (currently four cats). Please heal and protect our family, our friends and humanity.

Then I do another one I made up (Soul Jingles, track 10)

Please help me.
Please help my friends.
Please help my family.
Please help me help my family and my friends.
Please help them help me.
Please help me help everybody.
Please help everybody help me.
Please help us.
Please help our friends.
Please help our families.

This is followed by my version of the Prayer of Jabez. Rather than write it out again here, I’ll refer you to Soul Jingles, track 20.
I close my nighttime prayers with a rewrite of a prayer written by Mychal Judge, a Franciscan Friar who was a chaplain in the New York Fire Department. Mychal was killed by fallen debris in the North Tower on 9/11, possibly while delivering last rites to a fallen fireman. He is officially listed as the first victim of 9/11. He was born in Brooklyn in 1933, was openly gay and celibate, and had alcohol issues which were resolved when he joined AA. In the ‘80s, Mychal ministered to the LGBTQ, including those dying of AIDS, as well as the homeless and immigrants. This brought ire from the Catholic Church. He became a chaplain of the New York Fire Department in the ‘90s, where he was loved and respected. Many have called for his sainthood, and this may happen under a new category called “oblatio vitae”, introduced by Pope Francis in 1997, which applies to people who died while saving other people. I became aware of Mychal by way of a bulletin board at an AA meeting, where I saw this prayer, written by him, posted:

Lord, take me where you want me to go.
Let me meet who you want me to meet.
Tell me what you want me to say,
And keep me out of your way.

Now there, I thought, is one damn fine prayer, so I wrote it down.
Francis DeBerardo, the director of New Ways Ministry, a national movement guiding LBTGQ community Catholics, writes about Father Mychal’s spirituality: “What is unique about Mychal’s prayer is the last line: ‘Keep me out of your way.’ Although he was often valorized in his lifetime for his willingness to serve others, Mychal deflected such praise, knowing that he himself could often be the major obstruction to God’s will and mercy. For him, praying for God to show the way was not sufficient without also praying for the grace to avoid being the obstacle to God acting in the world.”

In my usual tweaking fashion, I altered his prayer for my personal use, closing out my evening prayers with:

God, take me where you want me to go. Let me see what you want me to see. Let me hear what you want me to hear. Let me meet who you want me to meet, and tell me what to say. Let me sing what you want me to sing. Let me play what you want me to play, and keep me out of your way. Amen

Sometimes I sing my prayers to myself, setting them to music. Other times I do them slow, just one line to a breath. Or, I do them in my head in funny voices, or having a different voice for each word. What the hell.
In the morning I just do three: And now I am perfectly willing, the first verse of the Prayer of Jabez, and my tweaked Mychal Judge prayer.
I’m sure you’ve all heard it alleged that expressing gratitude on a daily basis enhances mental health. If you have a problem with the idea of prayer, you can simply think gratitude at the world. It won’t kill ya.