Open Veils · Answer
Can I pray to God for anything even bad things?
The esoteric and mystical record is unambiguous: authentic prayer is total speech, including darkness, rage, and imprecation. The Psalms contain explicit curses against enemies — the so-called 'imprecatory psalms' — treated by scholars like Walter Brueggemann as theologically legitimate cries. Censoring prayer is a post-Enlightenment domestication, not an ancient practice. The relationship between human and divine was always expected to include the full spectrum of human experience.
Evidence
- Psychoanalysts Ann and Barry Ulanov, in their foundational work on prayer as 'primary speech,' argue that authentic prayer must include fear, anger, bitterness, and jealousy — the unsanitary, unfiltered interior.
- The Hebrew Psalter is the esoteric community's primary exhibit.
- Mystic and theologian Meister Eckhart taught that God meets the soul at its most naked and unguarded point — not at its most composed.
- The Gnostic tradition, surfaced through the Nag Hammadi texts and examined by Elaine Pagels, treated the divine not as a distant sovereign requiring protocol but as an intimate presence addressed with radical candour.
- What the mystical record warns against is not dark content in prayer, but the fixation of will — using prayer as a mechanism to override another person's autonomy or to substitute for responsible action.