SUNDAY 13 MARCH 2005 : Fifth Sunday in Lent
Five Foundations for a liberal / progressive Christian faith
5. A perspective on prayer
Something we could say with some confidence and little fear of contradiction is that the terms “liberal Christians” and “prayer” are not commonly found in the same sentence. We liberals, or progressives, are not generally known as people who pray. In fact prayer and praying might be a major distinction between conservative evangelical Christians on one hand, and liberals on the other – they are the ones who do it, and take it seriously; we are the ones who tend not to do it, and who don’t know quite what to think about it.
That is the appropriate starting point to reflect on prayer from a liberal or progressive viewpoint – we don’t quite know what to think about it. In particular, we don’t quite know what to think about those prayers called ‘prayers of petition’ – which is when we ask for something for ourselves, and ‘prayers of intercession’ – when we ask for something for another person, for a number of others, or for the world. While there are other kinds of prayer – praise, confession and thanksgiving are classically the other three that are linked with petition and intercession – it is these latter two that raise problems for many of us. Ironically, they are probably the most common forms of prayer. I have never had anyone ask me, for instance, to offer a prayer of confession on their behalf, nor a prayer of praise. Thanksgiving, such as gratitude for successful surgery, has cropped up on some occasions. But I am frequently in the position of being asked implicitly or explicitly to pray for someone, particularly if it is someone with a pressing need.
When it comes to intercessory prayer, many of us are quite uncomfortable about what feels like going to God with a ‘wish list’ of things we want done for others. To some of us it seems silly, childish even, and it suggests a magical notion of God – get the wording right, offer prayer in the right spirit, and an ‘out there’ interventionist God just might well answer the prayer. Many of us have moved on from an interventionist notion of a God who may or may not answer prayer according to some inscrutable divine purpose. Prayer, whether it is liturgical prayer in public worship or private prayer, is probably the place where our changing and changed understanding of God hits us most forcibly.
What does prayer mean? To whom (or what) does one pray? How does prayer work? These are the kinds of questions we might find ourselves asking as we move along the progressive Christianity path. The assumptions underlying such questions are that prayers consist of petitions and intercessions addressed to the deity, that the deity is external to this world, and that the deity can intervene to assist the one praying or the one who is prayed for. As such, prayer is a descendant of the endeavours of our earliest human ancestors to seek the aid of supernatural protectors against the forces that threatened them in their perilous existence in this unpredictable world. But as we grow into other, more mature, forms of faith, we realise how inadequate earlier understandings were. We now know we don’t have to cajole God, or beseech God, or somehow manipulate the deity into reversing actions already done or changing the course of something likely to happen, because we know the deity is not responsible for them – or for putting them right.
We know that sickness and tragedy are not divine punishments, but are simply facts of life. Viruses attack, wars kill, an earthquake creates a destructive tsunami, tumours form, blood vessels wear out and rupture and innocent people are killed by drunken drivers. In short, accidents happen. These are facts of existence. There is no external, theistic God directing these processes of cause and effect to whom we can appeal for help, or who we can persuade by the persistence and strength of our praying to change the course of things. There is no divine plan we must either seek to know or patiently await its unfolding. Despite the cutesiness of the song, God doesn’t hold the whole world in the divine hands. This is neither the way life is, nor the way God is.
If the whole world were held in God’s hands, then the notion of an interventionist God who can be appealed to in prayer becomes really problematic in respect of unanswered prayer. To suggest that God could have chosen to answer the millions of prayers for deliverance from the Holocaust, or for peace and safety in the middle of war, or all those prayers offered over all time for those who prayed for healing, but God chose not to do so, is to turn God into an unforgivable monster. A God who could have changed the course of events – in, say, the holocaust – but did not do so for some inscrutable divine reason, would be a God worthy only of contempt, not worship.
But that is not how a progressive Christian faith understands God. We have moved on from the interventionist, theistic God. Seeing God as “the one in whom we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17: 28) means that prayer is not about addressing a distant being who may or may not be there and who may or may not answer. Rather, seeing God as “right here” and “all around us”, seeing God as one with whom we are already in relationship, prayer becomes the primary individual means of consciously attending to and nurturing our relationship with God.
When I speak about prayer, I probably need to add clearly at this point, that I am not primarily referring to contemplative prayer or meditation. I am speaking of verbal prayer – spoken or unspoken, that is said aloud or said silently inside of one, whether in coherent sentences or in some personal shorthand form. Addressing God with words, either out loud or silently, means speaking to God as “You”, the Presence that is right here. Thus it is not the formal language of public worship that is used – although sometimes someone might use a well-known liturgical prayer as the vehicle for their praying. Rather, this private prayer is the simple language of conversation as one would talk with a lover, close friend, spouse or partner. And even though I do not believe in an interventionist God, petitionary or intercessory prayer is what tends to happen most between me and God.
If God is not an interventionist, why pray for myself or for others? I think the first simple response is that it feels like the natural thing to do. It feels like a natural form of caring for someone else, or for myself, especially when there is little or nothing of a practical nature that I can do. Not to do it would seem uncaring. One writer expressed it like this: “From deep within, some plea or question or gladness geysers up to address a presence or power beyond our human limitations. There is an unadorned urgency, honesty and immediacy about it. It puts your heart in your mouth.” (1)
It is with ‘my heart in my mouth’ that most of these prayers come. I have to admit to few times of formal prayer, and find that it is usually when on my own in the car, and sometimes sitting at my office desk, that a concern or hope or fear for another person or myself wells up, and with my heart in my mouth I address God in usually very short phrases or snatches of sentences. I do it because it feels right so to do.
I also happen to think that prayers, such as prayers for healing, can have an effect. There has been quite a lot of interesting but inconclusive research on the effect of prayers for healing. But we do have to acknowledge that what we should perhaps call “paranormal” healings have happened throughout history and continue to happen today – and not only in charismatic, ‘happy-clappy’ churches – many of them involving prayer as a factor.
Marcus Borg, who comments on “paranormal” healings with prayer as a factor, says he refuses to explain them as divine intervention or as happening through psychosomatic factors. Some may well be psychosomatic – body and mind are related in ways we do not fully understand. But, he writes, “interventionism and psychosomatic explanation both claim to know too much. Both claim to know the ‘mechanism’ at work in the relation between prayer and healing. I myself have no clue what the explanatory mechanism is, and I am content not to.” (2)
This is an area where perhaps liberals / progressives are at their weakest and also their more arrogant. Because, we might think, we do not know and cannot imagine how prayer works, therefore it can’t work. And so we slip into the trap of intellectual pride. There is plenty we do in life without knowing how things work, increasingly so in this technological age; not knowing how it works doesn’t stop us making good use of modern technology. Why should not knowing how prayer works stop us from using it? I don’t think we can ever know enough to say that prayer doesn’t work or is just superstition, and so use that as an excuse not to pray.
Anyway, whether or not or to what extent our prayers of petition and intercession ‘work’ or not, they still serve the central purpose of prayer – intimacy with God. They give us, during the course of a day, a moment when God is a “You”, not an “It”; when we are directly paying attention to the relationship, it is spending time – even a very brief time, in the relationship. That can only be a good thing.
I am not very organised at doing prayer times on a regular basis. I have tried often over forty or fifty years, have sometimes established a routine and kept it for a while, but eventually it drifts again. But that does not mean I don’t pray; it does not mean I don’t take times to ‘pay attention’ to God, either with my concerns or with my happiness, or with my awareness of my shortfalls. I was delighted to discover that the Marcus Borg, who I clearly admire, does a lot of his praying, he says, in the car. And in case someone thinks that is dangerous and one should be concentrating on driving, it is no different from if a close friend or lover was in the passenger seat, and I chatted away while I drove.
And Marcus Borg, bless him, neatly expresses something I have been hazily aware of but haven’t taken seriously enough – that on the days when he remembers to ‘pay attention’ to God by talking to God, he usually feels more centred, more present, more open, more peaceful, and more appreciative. The reverse happens too – the days when attention is not paid to God are days his life has the opposite qualities. I know what he means. I can be thinking about God, as in thinking about a sermon or a service or whatever, quite often – but that doesn’t equate with ‘spending time’ with God. It is very easy for ministers to get the two confused – to think they are maintaining the relationship when they really are only thinking about the relationship.
I haven’t addressed that other form of prayer which is significant here at St Lukes, contemplative prayer, because I do not feel competent to do so and because it is the verbal form of prayer I am more interested in for this sermon. But I would say that being a practitioner of contemplative prayer does not rule out those petitionary and intercessionary forms of verbal prayer which may happen at other times of the day. Sometimes I find myself wondering if contemplative prayer can serve as a bit of a cop-out for liberals. We rightly dismiss the notion of an interventionist ‘Santa Claus’ kind of God, and therefore dismiss any form of prayer that looks like it is asking for an intervention. Contemplative prayer is recognised and held up as a more adult and ‘progressive’ way of attending to God, but it is also a much more demanding form of prayer – and so we end up not doing any praying at all.
I suggested at the outset that ‘liberal Christian’ and ‘prayer’ hardly ever appear together in the same sentence. Some might say ‘praying liberal Christian’ is an oxymoron. I would like to think that in this community we can be honest and mature about what prayer and God are and are not, can recognise the limitations of our understanding of prayer, and at the same time can be serious about wishing to maintain a relationship with God – for our own good and for the good of others. I would hope that St Lukes could be known as a place where liberal Christians take personal, private, verbal prayer really seriously, and where everybody found that it was making a difference.
(1) Ted Loader, My Heart in My Mouth: Prayers for our Lives, quoted in a review of the book on the website of the Centre for Progressive Christianity (www.tcpc.org)
(2) Marcus Borg. The Heart of Christianity. Harper San Francisco. 2004. p197