Although my own personal sense that God may be the sum of all souls could turn out to be unfounded, conventional Christianity itself has been conceiving of him as the sum of multiple components or essences down through the centuries—ever since the positing of a Holy Trinity consisting of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

At least in my mind, this opens up the possibility that even if the great mass of humanity will never qualify to become one with this plural divinity, Jesus might not be the only eternal spirit who once existed in physical, mortal human form.

From what I can see, additional ones might well include the Buddha (whose teachings some scholars believe Jesus may have known about and drawn upon), as well as the Prophet Muhammed (who, as far as I know, conceived of his own teachings simply as further elaborations on the original/Judaic and new/Christian testaments).

It also makes sense to me that there may well be others whose names and messages I just don’t currently know enough about to wonder whether they could be among this number.

Interestingly, though, from my earlier exposures to the Bible, I can’t recall a single instance of Jesus ever asking anyone to pray to him.  I’ll have to ask a Muslim friend for confirmation on whether Muhammed ever did so, but on the basis of what I do know about him, it seems highly unlikely.  And it’s beyond my wildest imaginings to envision the Buddha’s behavior having any taint of self-aggrandizement.

In the light of all this, plus whatever other pieces of the cosmic puzzle my experiences may have enabled me to stumble upon—in addition to longstanding Catholic practice—I’ve come to at least the intellectual conclusion that it should be perfectly acceptable to pray to someone other than just God the Father.

Yet I can’t recall ever having prayed directly to Jesus—despite the fact that for centuries, a variety of Christian denominations have urged their followers to do precisely this.

It’s only recently occurred to me that maybe my experiences with my birth family have rendered this form of behavior problematic for me, in the same way that for a long time, I conflated God the Father with my (often rather stupendously) imperfect human father.

By the logic of Jesus’ own words, when he talks about Our Father rather than just his own, he’s telling us he’s a sibling of ours.  Not just any sibling, of course, but an extremely wise and caring older one who would be willing to—and did—give up his own life for the benefit of his far less developed and capable younger sibs.

Unfortunately, my own experience with an older sibling for most of the years we shared a roof was...ah...quite a bit less warmly supportive.  Our relationship was laced with something that went far beyond normal sibling rivalry.  I was subjected to unending verbal abuse from him, which had no other objective than to demolish my self-esteem.

I was lucky that for as far back as I can remember, I was significantly stronger than him. If I hadn’t been, the abuse could also have been of a physical nature.

I was additionally fortunate that later on, after our parents divorced and the stress of our father’s, uh, unusual parenting methods was gone, my brother became quite a bit nicer to me.  But even then, sometimes the “guidance”he gave me turned out to be nothing more than deliberate sabotage of my social and romantic life.

The sum of these experiences made it almost impossible for me to envision a big brother without being profoundly distrustful of anyone in that role.

Even Jesus himself.

Now that I’m aware of this, and all the evidence available to me indicates that God the Father wouldn’t mind in the slightest my soliciting the guidance of his more advanced son (and would more likely be delighted with such a turn of events), it will be interesting to see what may develop in my ongoing spiritual life.

If I’m honest with myself, I have to admit that I’m still wary of what might happen if I were to pray directly to Jesus. Could I get a response so overwhelming that I’d lose all rational judgment, and start annoying everyone I know with unwanted holy roller-type “witnessing,” or whatever?

But then again, is it really reasonable to expect that Jesus would be so ham-handed as to do this to me?  If St. Erlembaldo gave me guidance in a more subdued manner that I could handle, why should I fear that Jesus himself—with all the deep insights into human nature he displayed two thousand years ago—would suddenly do something tone deaf, oafish, or (shudder) even self-serving when communicating with me?

I still hesitate to do it, though.  And in the meantime, oddly, it would somehow make me feel a bit more comfortable with the arrangement if I could do something first for Jesus.  So here’s something I’ve come up with that might fill the bill.

I’ve tried to rephrase Jesus’ most widely known message, the Lord’s Prayer, in terms that reflect my own more modern experiences, and might be clearer to people today—while still (I hope) sticking to the essence of what he conveyed more than two thousand years ago.  For whatever it’s worth, here it is:

Loving and beloved spiritual parent of us all,

Please provide us with the sustenance and guidance
we’ll need in the coming day.

Help us avoid falling into the base actions and
ways of thinking we’re all too capable of,

And keep seeing in us
not only the flawed beings we’ve been and still are,

But also the better people we aspire to be—
more truly reflecting your own essence— 

While we do the same for others.

To be frank, I’m not entirely sure I’m comfortable with it myself.  This is at least partly because I haven’t memorized it yet, so when I say it, I have to put on my glasses and read it aloud from a piece of paper.

It could also be interpreted as an unwitting but nevertheless obscenely audacious form of sibling rivalry on my part (a thought that only occurred to me as I was writing this).

But I’m also inherently reluctant to tamper in any way with such an important, foundational artifact that’s said to reflect the words of Jesus himself—even though it’s undergone so many translations to reach us in its current form that it’s only natural that it would have become garbled to some degree.

At the moment, I’m compromising by saying the traditional words, but thinking of them in terms of the concepts I believe they originally conveyed, as restated above.

There’s one thing I’m pretty confident of even if my attempt at clarification doesn’t exactly capture what Jesus had in mind:

If we just ask sincerely for the things I’ve described above, we’ll get positive results.

Because of what we'll have changed within ourselves.