Before I started down this rabbit hole, I had imagined that any post or video about praying for a parking space would be a joke, or perhaps a spoof of obsessive Christianity. Maybe a satire, accompanied by a cute meme. That it would be posted by some testy scofflaw who ridicules religion with hyperbole and snark.

But I was wrong.

It’s not only real, but has sparked lengthy posts both in defence of it and debate about whether it’s the right thing for Christians to do. And there are posts suggesting the “proper” way to go about petitioning your deity for a spot to park your vehicle. I searched online, and did a few facepalms reading these pages, but then decided to share my thoughts here on the issue of prayer. After all, who doesn’t want to read what a cranky old atheist has to say about their bizarre beliefs and religious practices?

It was actually some time ago that I first read comments and watched videos about people praying for all sorts of minor things that can only be classified as personal and petty rather than for any common good; a sharpie, a new Playstation, tickets to an event, a lottery win, a car, a new house, money, a better job, better weather, good exam results, preferred election results, to find a lost or mislaid object, and a parking spot closer to the mall doors. Pretty much any- and everything could be prayed for. And when that mislaid sharpie was found or a parking spot miraculously opened up close to the mall entrance, it was god who made it happen! See: prayers work, they said.

Pardon my skepticism, but asking if a heavenly lost-and-found counter can please find your missing car keys doesn’t strike me as the work a divinity who is running the entire universe should be engaged in. Perhaps it gets outsourced to angels? Will they be replaced by AI chatbots in future?

These aren’t prayers for world peace, to end world hunger, to end war, cure cancer worldwide, stop a pandemic, end racial discrimination, lift everyone out of poverty, reverse climate change, end fatal childhood illnesses, or even end the growing misogyny of the toxic rightwing manosphere. They’re not about improving the common good or for the betterment of all humanity. Nope: these are just selfish, trivial, and often involve a deux-ex-machina solution to minor inconveniences such as having to walk a few extra metres to go shopping (apparently, god doesn’t want people to get more exercise in their lives).

At first, I wrongly thought that these were not prayers as such, but rally just people’s wishful thinking wrapped in a religious frame. But, again, I was wrong.

It seems many people actually pray for these things, as if their Magic Invisible Sky Man was working a gift shop counter somewhere in the sky and personally handed out every requested material bounty to his followers if they just ask nicely (and perhaps loudly) enough, and nothing was too trivial to ask for:

I come from a church, a tradition, and a family, who has historically prayed for everything. And I do mean everything. We pray for snow storms to stop and for cooler weather to come, for illnesses to leave or never arrive, for people we know and people we don’t, for graduations without rain, for a parking spot, for people dying of cancer and people with broken bones and people with colds and bloody noses and weird rashes. We pray to avoid meeting people and in hopes of seeing other people and in hopes of people changing, or God changing us.

Others turn to angels or saints for divine intervention for their parking needs because saints, it seems, have nothing better to do, and will always be “happy to help us from their posts in heaven.” like this:

Though there doesn’t seem to be any official patron saint of parking spaces, Mother Cabrini is often considered to be one, at least unofficially… Having lived in New York, she probably knew well the sorrow of finding a parking space. Some have used this prayer to great effect:
“Mother Cabrini, Mother Cabrini, please find a spot for my little machiney.”
The next time you find yourself going around in circles, you could call on her, too.

Here’s another approach that involves psychic projection to god ahead of arrival:

With a bit of distance between me and the destination, I picture the parking spot I want.
I ask the Divine for this spot joyfully, easily, yet confidently. Even if I have never seen the place before, I can imagine a parking space near or in front of the destination. If I don’t want to parallel park, I ask for a spot that is accessible easily and I often picture a spot at the beginning or end of a row of spaces.

And what if the Sky Man doesn’t answer those prayers and we have to park far from the mall doors? Pastors have the answer to that, too:

God’s intimate love for and knowledge of us also means we need to temper our expectations of how God responds to our prayers.
Whether it is a car park or cancer, help with a deadline or sharing our Christian faith, praying to God requires accepting we do not control his answer.

In other words, he can tell who’s been naughty or nice but rewards them with parking spaces arbitrarily (which makes me think they really should be praying to Santa Claus, the deity of gift-giving). But even if your prayer is ignored, the failure of prayer shows the prayee is reminded how they are “…thoroughly dependent upon him [god]” for everything. Everything, apparently, except when their god is feeling obstreperous and makes them walk further to the mall entrance.

Does god answer prayers in order order of receipt, first-in-first-out? So if I pray for a parking space before you do, do I get it granted first and you have to drive around in circles waiting your turn for god to force someone else to leave their spot? If it’s a choice between, say, someone with a physical disability who would benefit from the shorter walk, and someone just praying for the space, does god answer the latter’s prayer and say “screw the disabled person because they didn’t pray to me”? What if two people pray for a space at the same time but god only opens up one slot? Does god watch them fight it out, like some sort of UFC battle in a parking lot, or does he magically slow down one driver so the preferred one gets in first?

Does god zap someone who’s already in the mall, shopping, and implant a command for them to return to their car so the prayee can have the space? Like those boat rental places calling out, “Come back, number seven, your time is up!” Do these shoppers drop their groceries or shopping bags where they stand and hurry out to move their car? Or can they finish shopping and pay first? Or are they simply magically transported into their cars, keys in hand, ready to back up? Does he pick anyone in particular to move their car, or is it someone who broke a commandment like not eating shrimp or wearing clothes made of two different fibres?

Do Christians get parking preference over Jews and Muslims? What if a Hindu prays for a parking space? Does it get passed along to a lesser deity? “Hey, Ganesh! Prayer for you on line two! Make ’em wait. The Christian gets the parking spot!”

Does the prayee have to promise something in return to get a closer parking space? Maybe promise not to break one of more of the 613 commandments? “Dear lord, if you will grant me a space within 200 metres, I’ll give up bacon for a week. If you can make it 100 metres, I’ll give up bacon and lobster! Make it 50 and I’ll even leave the gleanings for the poor!”

God, it seems, will also see to it that supply chain management is working to fulfill your prayers because what’s more important in the current world than your kid getting a gaming console when the local store has sold out:

In the summer, my daughter wanted a nintendo switch. We surrendered her request to Jesus and asked for His will/His plan to be done. Then it was sold out everywhere but a week or so later, it was back in stock and she got it! Answered prayers, whatever they may be, help build up our faith to believe God for other things.

As Janis Joplin once sang,

Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a color TV?
Dialing For Dollars is trying to find me
I wait for delivery each day until three
So, oh Lord, won’t you buy me a color TV?

Janis Joplin, I might note, was never gifted a Mercedes Benz by her god. She had to buy her own Porsche. I don’t know if a colour TV magically appeared in her home, though.

Maybe god doesn’t like Mercedes Benz cars. Maybe it’s German engineering that’s in disfavour. Do you think god would respond if someone prays instead for a reasonably-priced EV with a battery that lasted more than a decade? Or if I prayed for someone to send me a Blu-ray copy of Godzilla vs Biollante for my upcoming birthday (it’s the last one I need to complete my collection… surely god feels my pain)?

To be fair, there are those who criticize such prayers, warning that “the God who provides good parking is the God that Satan tempted Jesus to be in the wilderness” which baffles me somewhat. Does that mean Satan (another deity) controls distribution of parking spaces? Or that being offered a parking space is an evil temptation and the prayee should continue to circle the block or the parking lot?

But as supplication goes, praying for parking is, for those who pray, a mark of shame. It’s on par with praying that The Gap has the right size jeans or that your TiVo’s hard drive doesn’t crash during “Grey’s Anatomy.” It’s a prayer of tedium—for those too bored to pray for things that matter. It’s a prayer of luxury—for that blessed 1% whose wealth can put them in a car and give them cause to drive to the tony shopping district where parking is the only scarcity.

I’m not convinced that any of the 1% is driving around the mall parking lot praying for spaces. Their chauffeurs can just drop off at the entrance. But the same writer admits he, too, has prayed for parking spaces, and suggests that his god is “compassionate enough and incredible enough to be concerned about the minutia of our lives.” But he’s not praying for parking now, because he has his own parking spot at home. He ends his piece with:

Not without fail, but often, I utter a prayer of thanks. Thank you, God, for this driveway. I love parking here.

His god was, apparently, helped the guys laying the asphalt in the subdivision. Nothing is too trivial for the Magic Guy who made the universe and then killed 99.999999999999999% of its people and animals in a flood because some of those folk annoyed him. After all, as another writer says,

Whether we are on welfare, or get a nice paycheck, or bake the bread ourselves, it is God who provides it… Unfortunately, Christians get into the habit of speaking as if everything just happens naturally, instead of supernaturally… Parking spots shouldn’t be the only thing we pray for, but a in a life characterized by dependent prayer, we need not hesitate to ask our heavenly Father for anything.

Anything? I’m still waiting for my Godzilla Blu-ray, Jesus. Well, okay, I didn’t exactly pray for it, but it’s on my Amazon wishlist and you’re all-seeing and all-knowing, so surely you checked it and ordered a copy to prove to me you exist. Don’t need to bother with the gift wrapping, though. I’ll know who it came from.**

I can’t help but wonder why these pastors and believers are not telling their followers to pray for world peace or the end of world poverty before parking spaces. Why not wipe pray to out malaria or Ebola? Why encourage the selfish pettiness of parking lot prayers when large crises loom, and many serious problems remain unsolved? Do they ever wonder about the larger moral and ethical questions about a god that will find a parking space for a shopper, or find their lost sharpie, but allows children to die in poverty and of curable illnesses?*

While I can’t find anything to suggest this sort of prayer is spread across other religions outside Christianity, online it seems to be mostly a Christian thing. Perhaps every believer prays like this, but it seems to me to put the inanity into Christianity.

It’s difficult for someone like me who has no belief in anything supernatural or magical, not to see the these prayers as superstitious medieval leftovers and not a little selfish and trivial. Just one more reason not to have religious belief.

Notes:

*From the discussion on Beliefnet comes a relevant question:

In Philip Yancey’s new book on prayer, he quotes a philosophy professor on the subject: “If God can influence the course of events, then a God who is willing to cure colds and provide parking spaces but is not willing to prevent Auschwitz and Hiroshima is morally repugnant.“

** Apparently the justification for asking for trivial things is in scripture and it’s not petty at all. In fact, prayees should do more of it, like annoying children always demanding of their parents:

In this same passage on prayer Jesus asks “What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion?” (Luke 11:11-12).  Now, if one of my children were to ask me for a fish, it would sound something like this: “can I have a fish, can I have a fish, can I have a fish, can I have a fish?”  Then he or she might ask me for an egg, then a banana, then to read a book to him or her, then to play legos, and then, and then…. you get the idea.  Young children never tire of asking, and they are unashamedly in need of help.  We are to approach our heavenly father in the same way.  Jesus continues: “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” (Luke 11:13).

So I’d better not get a serpent in my Amazon package instead of that Godzilla Blu-ray…

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