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Lately, I have been reading about Gestalt Therapy, which is an interesting form of mental health counseling. I’ve experienced a little bit of it before, when a previous therapist asked that I vent my frustrations at an empty chair as part of a counseling session. I was not on board, but that may have been because I didn’t understand the practice or approach at all. Gestalt is very preoccupied with the Here and Now, which is actually something I am preoccupied with myself these days. It’s similar to getting in touch with flow or mindfulness. The Gestalt practice asks us to tune into the now. 

While I am a big proponent of nowness, mindfulness, or flow, I am not a big proponent of overly complicated anything. I appreciate all the hard work of researchers, practitioners, priests, and popes, but humanity seems to happily make an overly complicated bureaucracy out of just about anything in the name of individual self-importance. 

We’ve even managed to make God remote and inaccessible, when as far as I can tell, God (or Good) is all around us, in every tree, bird, or blade of grass. God is in the air we breathe and the neurons firing in our brains. Good is the engine that drives us and in every thing we make, think, build, or do. We are all worthy of God’s good graces, and the fastest path to feeling worthy of them is to tell ourselves that we are, to just return to a willingness to believe as many times as we have to, but often there are too many rules or rituals that get in the way of that first step (in my humble opinion). 

I can’t tell you the number of churches or spiritual events I have gone to, hoping to connect with God, and getting overwhelmed by doing it right or the rituals or the seemingly endless, obtuse texts. I have nothing against history or ritual or faith if it works for other people, but I do think all the rigidity or rules can get in the way of the faithless finding faith.

It’s okay to start simple. It’s okay to just pray and to keep praying even if we have no idea what we’re doing, even if we feel like we’re doing it “wrong,” even if there are religions out there who think it should be done a certain way. We can get to all that later. The important part is allowing ourselves the opportunity to have faith in its simplest form, which is just to say a prayer no matter where we are, what we’re doing, right in the here and now when we need help.