PRAYER FOR YOU
by Rob Breszney

This is a perfect moment. It's a perfect moment because I have been
inspired to say a gigantic prayer. I've been roused to unleash a divinely
greedy, apocalyptically healing prayer for each and every one of you— even those of you who don't believe in the power of prayer.

And so I am starting to pray right now to the God of Gods ... the God
beyond all Gods ... the Girlfriend of God ... the Teacher of God ... the
Goddess who invented God.


DEAR GODDESS, you who never kill but only change:

I pray that my exuberant, suave, and accidental words will move you to
shower ferocious blessings down on everyone who reads this benediction.

I pray that you will give them what they don't even know they need—not
just the boons they think they want but everything they've always been
afraid to even imagine or ask for.


DEAR GODDESS, you wealthy anarchist burning heaven to the ground:

Many of the divine chameleons out there don't even know that their souls
will live forever.

So please use your brash magic to help them see that they are all wildly
creative geniuses too big for their own personalities.

Guide them to realize that they are all completely different from what
they've been led to believe about themselves, and more exciting than
they can possibly imagine.

Make it illegal, immoral, irrelevant, unpatriotic, and totally tasteless for
them to be in love with anyone or anything that's no good for them.


O GODDESS, you who give us so much love and pain mixed together that
our morality is always on the verge of collapsing:

I beg you to cast a boisterous love spell that will nullify all the dumb
ideas, bad decisions, and nasty conditioning that have ever cursed the
wise and sexy virtuosos out there.

Remove, banish, annihilate, and laugh into oblivion any jinx that has clung
to them, no matter how long they've suffered from it, and even if they
have become accustomed or addicted to its ugly companionship.

Please conjure an aura of protection around them so that they will receive
an early warning if they are ever about to act in such a way as to bring
another hex or plague into their lives in the future.


DEAR GODDESS, sweet Goddess, you sly universal virus with no freaking
opinion:

Please help all the personal growth addicts out there to become
disciplined enough to go crazy in the name of creation, not destruction.

Teach them the difference between oppressive self-control and liberating
self-control.

Awaken in them the power to do the half-right thing when it is impossible
to do the totally right thing.

Arouse the Wild Woman within them—even if they're men.


DEAR GODDESS, you pregnant slut who scorns all mediocre longing:

I pray that you will inspire all the compassionate rascals communing with
this prayer to kick their own asses and wash their own brains.

Provoke them to throw away or give away all the things they own that
encourage them to believe that they are better than anyone else.

Show them how much fun it is to brag about what they cannot do and do
not have.

Give them bigger, better, more original sins and wilder, wetter, more
interesting problems.

Most of all, Goddess, brainwash them with your freedom so that they
never love their own pain more than anyone else's pain.


O GODDESS, you wildly disciplined, radically curious, shockingly friendly,
fanatically balanced, mysteriously truthful, teasingly healing, lyrically
logical master of rowdy bliss:

Cultivate in yourself a fervent yearning for the intimate companionship of
these budding messiahs. Play with them every day. Answer their
questions. Listen to their stories. Inspire them to love you so much they
lose all their hatred forever.


DEAR GODDESS, you psychedelic mushroom cloud at the center of all our
brains:

Bless the insanely poised creators out there with lucid dreams while they
are wide awake. Provide them with their own spin doctors, and vacuum
cleaners for their magic carpets, and solar-powered sex toys that work
even in the dark.

Give them a knack for avoiding other people's hells, and a thousand masks
that all represent their true feelings, and secret admirers who are not
psychotic stalkers.

Arrange for a racehorse to be named after them, or an underground river,
or a thousand-year-old storm on Saturn.

Teach them to be their own prophets and pray to themselves and right
their own wrongs and sing their own songs and be their own wives and
save their own lives.


DEAR GODDESS, you riotously tender, hauntingly reassuring, orgiastically
sacred feeling that is even now running through all of our soft, warm
animal bodies:

I pray that you provide all the original sinners out there with a license to
bend and even break all rules, laws, and traditions that keep them apart
from the things they love.

Show them how to purge the wishy-washy wishes that distract them from
their daring, dramatic, divine desires.

And teach them that they can have anything they want if they'll only ask
for it in an unselfish way.


And now dear God of Gods, God beyond all Gods, Girlfriend of God,
Teacher of God, Goddess who invented God, I bring this prayer to a close,
trusting that in these mysterious moments you have begun to change
everyone out there in the exact way they've needed to change in order to
become the gorgeous geniuses they were born to be. Amen. Awomen.


P.S. Goddess: And please also give them each an emerald green
parachute, ruby slippers, a canoe covered with jewels, a black-market
orchid and a bouquet of organic broccoli, a donkey clown piñata full of
crickets, a protective gargoyle lifted from the Chartres Cathedral, a guitar
string actually played by Jimi Hendrix, a strawberry chocolate cake baked
in the shape of a question mark, a human DNA map drawn up by the
Human Genome Project, fistfuls of sparklers, a bottle of holy water from
the River Jordan, photos of lightning on a giant poster, a refrigerator
magnet cast in the likeness of the Dalai Lama, and the key of life
accidentally placed inside a box of Cracker Jack