An atheist or an agnostic might cringe at the idea of prayer, simply because it so easily evokes the idea of a god, or some object or recipient who hears and answers the prayer.  Even in its intransitive sense, the word “pray” connotes an exterior point of focus clearly set apart from the prayer’s interior point of origin.

"We pray to the same God," people sometimes say in attempts at theological conciliation.  Sometimes, they accuse others of praying to the devil or some unholy spirit.  But, usually, the idea of prayer implies some sort of externality, a being separated from the supplicant by an unmistakable boundary.  So you either pray to an external object, or you don’t pray.

This false choice cannot satisfy creative spirits untouched by fundamentalist theology and equally free of militant atheism.  An artist prays, but not the way a devout believer prays to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, or to the God of Jesus Christ or Joseph Smith.  An artist expresses his own truth, not a pre-existing dogma.  A true artist prays the way Jesus himself prayed, the way Moses negotiated with his God.

Artists and religious zealots resemble each other in some ways.  Both character types envision themselves in the service of something greater.  Both gladly serve as vessels for the manifestation of a higher truth.  Both welcome opportunities to sacrifice the temporal for the timeless, the concrete for the infinite, the comfortable illusion for the cold truth.

Of course, the artist is a superior being compared to the religious zealot.  The artist hears the subtle sounds of his own truth, and he externalizes this awareness through his creative work, which aids the expansion of the universe and the human mind.  A religious zealot inverts (or perverts) this sacred process.  Instead of discovering his own truth -- instead of externalizing it in his own authentic way -- he finds a pre-existing and inherently formless externality, and he projects onto this non-being the unmediated sound of his own unconscious.  The religious zealot is a plagiarist fearful of praying in his own voice.

To an artist, prayer is meditation, and meditation is prayer.  To a religious zealot, prayer is bargaining.  He bargains, because he imagines himself in a dialog with a transcendent omnipotent being.  But an artist merely struggles to understand his own mind, to nurture and follow his own imagination.  He denies neither reality nor transcendence, nor the reality of transcendence -- neither omniscience nor omnipotence. But he recognizes all these ideas as figments or game pieces in his own artistic vision.