Five Easy Prayers for Pagans
1. O Karma, Dharma, pudding & pie, gimme a break before I die: grant me wisdom, will, & wit, purity, probity, pluck, & grit. Trustworthy, helpful, friendly, kind, gimme great abs and a steel-trap mind. And forgive, Ye Gods, some humble advice - these little blessings would suffice to beget an earthly paradise: make the bad people good and the good people nice, and before our world goes over the brink, teach the believers how to think. 2. O Venus, Cupid, Aphrodite, teach us Thy horsepower lingam, Thy firecracker yoni. Show us Thy hundreds of sacred & tingling positions, each orifice panting for every groping tumescence. O lead us into the back rooms of silky temptation and deliver us over to midnights of trembling desire. But before all the nectar & honey leak out of this planet, give us our passion in marble, commitment in granite. 3. O Shiva, relentless Spirit of Outrage: in this vale of tearful True Believers, teach us to repeat again and again: No, your Reverences, we will not serve your Gross National Voodoo, your Church Militant – we will not flatter the double faces of those who pray in the Temple of Incendiary Salvation. Gentle Preserver, preserve the pure irreverence of our stubborn minds. Target the priests, Implacable Destroyer – and hire a lawyer. 4. O Mammon, Thou who art daily dissed by everyone, yet boast more true disciples than all other gods together, Thou whose eerie sheen gleameth from Corporate Headquarters and Vatican Treasury alike, Thou whose glittering eye impales us in the X-ray vision of plastic surgeons, the golden leer of televangelists, the star-spangled gloat of politicos – O Mammon, come down to us in the form of Treasuries, Annuities, & High-Grade Bonds, yield unto us those Benedict Arnold Funds, those Quicksand Convertible Securities, even the wet Judas Kiss of Futures Contracts – for unto the least of these Thy supplicants art Thou welcome in all Thy many forms. But when Thou comest to say we’re finally in the gentry – use the service entry. 5. O flaky Goddess of Fortune, we beseech Thee: in the random thrust of Thy fluky favor, vector the luminous lasers of Thy shifty eyes down upon these, Thy needy & oh-so-deserving petitioners. Bend down to us the sexy curve of Thine indifferent ear, and hear our passionate invocation: let Thy lovely, lying lips murmur to us the news of all our true-false guesses A-OK, our firm & final offers come up rainbows, our hangnails & hang-ups & hangovers suddenly zapped, and then, O Goddess, give us your slippery word that the faithless Lady Luck will hang around in our faithful love, friendships less fickle than youth, and a steady view of our world in its barefoot truth.
Credit
Copyright © 1998 by Philip Appleman. Used by permission of the author. All rights reserved.
Date Published
01/01/1998