Tuesday, October 1, 2019

A PRAYER FOR YOU ~ by Rob Brezsny (repost)

Rob Brezsny is an aspiring master of curiosity, perpetrator of sacred uproar, and founder of the Beauty and Truth Lab. He writes "Free Will Astrology," a syndicated weekly column that appears in over a hundred other publications and on the Web.

His latest book is called Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How All of Creation Is Conspiring To Shower You with Blessings.

As much a storyteller and prophet as astrologer, Brezsny brings a literate, myth-savvy perspective to his work. When Utne Reader named him a "Culture Hero," it observed: "With a blend of spontaneous poetry, feisty politics, and fanciful put-on, Brezsny breathes new life into the tabloid mummy of zodiac advice columns."

In its profile of Brezsny, the New York Times quoted a reader who compared his writing to that of the novelist Tom Robbins. The horoscopes "are like little valentines, buoyant and spilling over with mischievousness. They're a soul prognosis."

Brezsny's docufiction memoir, THE TELEVISIONARY ORACLE, was published in 2000. Coincidentally, Tom Robbins had this to say about the book: "I've seen the future of American literature and its name is Rob Brezsny."

Before The Televisionary Oracle Brezsny's enduring artistic artifacts were music albums, one created as a solo artist and three with the "Jungian beatnik funk" band WORLD ENTERTAINMENT WAR.

Burning Man festival 2001, Oregon
In 2000, after years as a rock musician, Brezsny branched out to develop "Sacred Uproar," a pagan revival show featuring uproarious prayers, chaotic meditations, ritual antics, and musical elixirs.

Burning Man 2001 core group
In one of Sacred Uproar's signature performance art pieces, Brezsny offers revelers the chance to get married to themselves. "Let's all just admit," he says early on in the wedding ceremony, "that none of us is ever likely to find our perfect partner or create the juicy romance we deserve until we first master the art of loving ourselves with great ingenuity."

Working with three freaky collaborators, Brezsny married hundreds of people to themselves at the Plastic Chapel during the Burning Man festival in the summer of 2001. The ecstatic ritual culminated just an hour before the Man himself was burned on Saturday night, September 1st. As the moon rose over the black rocks, the desert air shivered with the sounds of hundreds of blissed-out rapture hounds shouting out the vow "I am a fucking genius" as per Brezsny's instruction.

Believe it or else, beauty and truth fans, it's time for a prayer for YOU.

A prayer to end all prayers. A prayer for everything you've never asked for before, because you weren't sure you deserved it. A special, no-nonsense, hype-free prayer exclusively for you ~ in the most unselfish tone of voice I've ever mustered. Ready?

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, and what I pray is:

Oh Goddess Who Never Kills But Only Changes: I pray that my exuberant, suave, and accidental words might move You to unleash ferocious blessings on all the beauty and truth fans who've tuned in.

I pray that You'll grant them what they don't even know they want. Not just the boons they think they need but everything they've been afraid to even imagine or wish for.

Oh Goddess, You Wealthy Anarchist Burning Heaven to the Ground:

The divine chameleons out there in sacred space don't even know they're crazy. Please use Your blinding magic to help them see they're all wildly creative geniuses too big for their own bodies. Guide them to realize that they're all completely different from what they think they are and more exciting than they can possibly imagine. And make it immoral, illegal, irrelevant, unpatriotic and totally tasteless for them to be in love with anyone or anything that's no good for them.

Oh Goddess You Sly Universal Virus with No Opinion:

I beg that You help all the personal growth-addicts that are reading this prayer to be disciplined enough to go crazy in the name of creation not destruction. I pray that You teach them the difference between self-destructive self-control and liberating self-control. Awaken in them the power to do the half-right thing when it's impossible to do the totally right thing. Arouse the Wild Woman within them ~ even if they're men. Give them bigger, better, more original sins and wilder, wetter, more interesting problems.

And, oh Goddess, You Pregnant Criminal Who Scorns All Mediocre Longing:

Inspire all the original sinners out there to love their enemies in case their friends turn out to be jerks. Provoke them to throw away things that make them believe they're better than everyone else. Show them how much fun it is to brag about what they can't do and don't have. Most of all, brainwash them with Your freedom, so that they never love their own pain more than anyone else's pain.

Oh Goddess, you Psychedelic Mushroom Cloud at the Center of All Our Brains:

These budding Demeters and Inannas and Buddhas and Christs deserve everything they need and much much more. Please arrange for a racehorse to be named after them, or a boulevard or river or thousand-year-old storm on another planet.

Help them win the battle against time, and learn to talk the language of the most scientific angels, and master the zen of temper tantrums, and get a fabulous mommy and daddy in their next incarnation.

Teach them to push their own buttons and unbreak their own hearts and right their own wrongs and sing their own songs and be their own wives and save their own lives.

Bless them with lucid dreams while they're wide awake and solar energy-operated sex toys that work in the dark and a vacuum cleaner for their magic carpet and a knack for avoiding other people's hells [!] and a secret admirer who's not a psychotic stalker and a thousand masks that all fit their face perfectly and their own 900 number so that everyone has to pay to talk to them.

Oh Goddess, you Dumb, Fast, Infinitely Wide River of Electricity, You Smart Slow Smoldering Lump of Angel Fat Left Over from the Big Bang, You Ghostly Snake Who Loves Inventive Tragedy and Sophisticated Superstition, You Cool Furnace That Incinerates the Props of Our Nightmares Much Too Slowly, You Creator of Happy Purgatories Where Impeccably Unironic Apocalypse Salesmen Preach Christian Satanism and Rosicrucian Baseball Players from the Middle Ages Dream Politically Cracked Dreams That Reveal the News in More Exact Metaphors Than Any Newspaper:


I pray that You provide all the global village idiots that are reading this prayer with a license to bend all laws, rules, and traditions that keep them apart from the things they love. Show them how to purge themselves of the wishy-washy wishes that keep them distracted from their divine desires. And teach them that they can have anything they want if they'll only ask for it in an unselfish tone of voice.

Oh Goddess Who Gives Us So Much Love and Pain Together That Our Morality is Always on the Verge of Collapsing:

I beg You to cast a spell to nullify all bad spells that have ever been cast on all the beautiful love geniuses 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've grown accustomed or addicted to its ugly companionship. Conjure an aura of protection around them so that they will receive an early warning if they're ever about to act in such a way that would attract another hex or plague or voodoo into their lives.

And now, dear God of Gods, God Beyond All Gods, Sister Lover of God, Mother of God, Goddess who invented God:

I bring this prayer to a close, trusting that in these mysterious moments You have impregnated the dream glands of all the beauty and truth fans out there with the most compassionate lust and smartest love You can imagine. And if there is anything I've forgotten which will help their cause, please flash it into my imagination in the coming days and months and decades, and motivate me to perform any tricks or carry out any project that will encourage an abundance of sweaty creativity to flow through them, inspiring them to become more wildly disciplined, erotically feminist, aggressively sensitive, demonically compassionate, ironically sincere, lyrically logical, insanely poised, orgiastically lucid, macho feminist.

Amen. Awomen. Ommmmmmm and halle-fucking-lujah.
There you have it, beauty and truth fans. A personalized prayer just for you. A prayer that'll probably come true simply because you didn't even ask for it.

You may now kiss yourself on your own lips.

[First posted 10 October 2007, reposted 20 July 2016]