Ethical Prayer

What do you do when someone you care about asks you to pray a prayer you don’t feel good about?

Many of us have been in rituals where someone offered a prayer like one of these:

• Please pray that [natural consequence of recent actions] doesn’t happen to me.
• Please pray that [candidate you don’t support] wins the election.
• Please pray that [name] dies.

What do you do? You care about this person. You don’t want to break the flow of the ritual any further than it’s already been broken by hearing this prayer that feels wrong. Or if it’s outside of ritual, you just want to stay on good terms. But you can’t support them in prayer the way they are asking you to.

What do you want for the person who has asked this of you?

It’s someone you care about. If this happens in ritual, you’re sharing sacred space with them, worshiping together, and you still have the obligation of being present in perfect love and perfect trust as you pledged when you entered the circle, even if they’ve pushed (or broken) that boundary. If it’s outside of ritual, you may simply want to stay on good terms.

Sometimes we’re unable to support a specific prayer because we don’t feel comfortable with the desire expressed in the prayer, and we understand that what we need to experience and what we want to experience can be very different things.

A high priestess I know used to offer this prayer: “May you experience your best outcome, in a good way, for the good of all and with harm to none.”

We are not wise enough to know what others need, and this is never more true than when we feel that they’re praying for the wrong thing. But it is always ethical to pray that those we care about receive what they need.