How is Worship Possible?

While trying, off and on over a period of more than a decade, to be a sincere believing Christian, I frequently ran up against the embarrassing fact that prayer is not only difficult but unnatural and even bizarre, at least for me. Not only did it feel odd to be addressing a deity who never talked back, but I could never be quite sure how seriously I could take petitionary prayer.

Just today I was listening to a local NPR program discussing Tim Tebow, and someone made the obligatory snarky remark that God really cares who wins this or that football game. That's emblematic of one problem: competing petitionary prayers. But there's also the problem of unanswered prayer, not helped by the stock Christian answer that "sometimes God's answer is "no."" Then there's the question of how your prayer you could, by itself, change God's mind, especially since God is eternal (outside of time) in traditional Christian theology.

Finally, there is the fact that although God is technically a "Person" in the Chalcedonian sense, he's not a person you can really relate to, the way you can to your best friend, at least in traditional Trinitarian Christianity. God might as well be an all-powerful hibiscus or Linux server. The incarnation of Christ was no help for me on this front.

I felt more comfortable around Catholicism and Orthodoxy, where praying to saints has a long history. Praying to saints (even if you are technically asking for their intercession with God) feels much more natural, for here are humans, albeit imaginary, with personalities like you're own, however saintly and exalted they may be. I suspect that is why that the cult of the saints is so prominent in traditional (pre-Reformation) Christianity; it is much more of a human, livable form of worship than the unapproachable, inhuman Deity.

Is Neopaganism any better on this front? Yes, I think so, because it allows a full gamut of beliefs about what constitutes the divine and individual divinities. From Jungian archetypes to literal polytheism, I feel that I can find the psychological space for worship. I haven't quite found my place yet, but I'm searching.