Praying: Maybe Not What We Think It Is...

            I have spent the better part of four decades leading Christian congregations on both coasts of the United States.   It has been a rich and rewarding privilege that I have relished and  loved.   Over the arc of these years I have, as you may imagine, devoted significant energy to prayer.   I have led prayer in groups and in worship.  I have prayed at bedsides and gravesides, in prayer groups, on picket lines and in family parlors.   I have used prayers from my denominational resources, I have improvised prayer from the heart.  I have even published a book of prayer (Words to the Silence: A Book of Uncommon Prayer; Educational Ministries Press).   Moreover, I have developed my own personal discipline of prayer and reflection which I practice regularly.   I have been engaged in prayer as a believer and as a leader for a long time.  

            The following comes with the keen awareness that all generalities are false.   Yet as I look back over my ministry it occurs to me that much of our prayer looks a lot like a religiously cloaked shopping list being presented to God.    “God, please heal so and so….”   God, please find me a job…..”   “God please find me a spouse….”   “God please walk with me through this time of struggle and pain….”  “God, please protect me from my enemies…..”   “God, please grow our church….”  We have all done this.   In fact, I would wager that this characterizes most of the time, energy and focus we spend on prayer.  The liturgically correct word for this is “petitionary prayer.”   That is, we are asking God for something.   And often, the ask is transactional.   The conversation with God goes something like this.  “God, if you get me this job, I’ll start going to church again….”    Or this.   “God, if you heal my Mom’s cancer I’ll start being nice to Uncle Morty again…”.    Not only do we want something from God, we want to cut a deal.

            Whether it’s just a simple request or some kind of bargain we try to make with the Creator, this approach makes some theological assumptions that need to be thought through with care.    

First, our shopping list prayers that ask the deity for things we want or need assume that God needs to be informed.    Really?     The all-powerful Creator of the Universe needs to be cued in on our particular circumstances?   Traditionally, our understanding of God suggests that God knows all.  God has numbered the hairs on your head (Luke 10:30) and incidentally, has your number too.  This God knew you before you were formed in the womb (Jeremiah 1:5).   This God called forth all of Creation from the void (Gen. 1:1-25).    So, informing God of our needs or desires seems, at the end of the day, not necessary.  God knows. 

Second is our sense that we might have something God wants as we scheme and dream up some cosmic quid pro.   After all, God is a very busy God.  Indeed, God is probably too busy to notice poor little me.   Hence, I  will try to sweeten the pot with something that might interest the Creator.    The image that comes to mind here is someone tugging at the Holy robe to get the attention of an over-functioning Executive God.  If we pray hard enough and long enough;  If we offer the right deal;  If we tug hard enough at God’s sleeve, we will finally be noticed and our wish will be granted.      I don’t know about you, but I am thinking prayer is, or ought to be, different than this.

            The question keeps coming at me.   What is prayer?    If it’s not presenting God with a wish list, or trying in vain to get God’s attention, what is it we’re doing when we pray?    What kind of holy hyper-consciousness are we trying to communicate with when we fall on our knees with our palms turned up toward the heavens?    These are significant questions on a number of levels, but it strikes me that how we understand and define God has everything to do with how we pray.   If, as we almost always do, we anthropomorphize God, or create “him” in our image, then of course we will be trying to have conversations with the deity that mirror the conversations we have with our human community.   We will be nice when things are going well.  Then we will plead and beg and whine when life takes a downward turn.  We will negotiate and bargain; cajole and wheedle.  Sometimes we will give praise and adoration.  In other moments we will get angry and shake a first.   Some folks will even get mad and walk away.   All this, though, assumes a consciousness like our own that somehow is participating in a dialogue with us, and it could be that this isn’t the case.  

            Let’s think about this.  What if God does not have a mind or process that mimics our own?    What if there is no consciousness as we understand that concept?   What if God is not some super-powered being, who plays puppet master with our lives?   What if, as Scripture claims,  “God is Love? (1^st John 4:16)?”   This is not a mere comparison that asserts that God is like love, or that God is loving.    No.  The claim here is that God  actually is love, and those who live in love, live in God (1^st John 4:16…again).    In this understanding God is not some other stronger personality with whom we need to connect or somehow mollify.     The mystical implication here is that if we love, we somehow inhabit the essence of God.   Participating in this love will, without question, have an impact on our prayer lives.   

It’s important at this point to clarify.   What is meant by the word ‘love,”  is a radically different understanding than what we normally consider when we talk about Christianity and love.  This has no relationship to the shallow sentimentality that so often gets ascribed to a Caucasian Jesus pictured with seven kids sitting on his lap.   No.  This is Agape Love, which refers to a deep self-giving love that is lived out in community.   It is not doctrinal or institutional.  It is relational.   This is not the highly privatized, individualistic kind of love, this is love in the trenches, love in the storm and stress of being together.   This is loving people you do not like.  It’s loving the lowest, the ones who cannot do anything for you.   It is coming back again and again to practice the fine arts of grace and forgiveness.  This is love that presumes a holy, sacred connectedness among people.   

This is one way to understand the Holy.   And as we step onto this terrain, we need to drop all of those conversations we have had with God while driving down the Interstate and come to grips with the notion that God isn’t listening in any way that we might commonly understand the concept.   Even in expressing this thought, one can hear the impudent rage emerging because we kind of suspected all along that God wasn’t listening.   We just didn’t want to admit it.    While we may need to consider the idea that there is no holy ear attending to our pleas, we will also need to consider that love does listen.  Agape love creates communal relationships where people listen closely and carefully to one another in both their joys and their sorrows.    Could it be that this might be where prayer actually begins?   Could it be that it’s not God who needs to know our cares and our needs, it’s our community that needs to know so that we might fully care for one another in the spirit of Agape love? 

This deep sharing, this different kind of prayer leads us closer to one another and to God as we learn how to give ourselves for one another.     When we entertain the possibility that God is love, we begin to give rise to the sense that God is the dynamic, ever shifting reality of self-giving love, offered and worked out in the context of community.    

Think about it. 

Self-giving love is the pure core metaphor of who we are as a people of faith.    Our story outlines this clearly as we strive to understand and follow a God who gave “himself” on the Cross in Christ Jesus so that we might be redeemed.   It is that overwhelming act of selflessness that affects redemption for us all.   No one really argues this assertion.  It is widely accepted.  However, it is accepted as doctrine, as an article of religious belief, and that’s where we go off the tracks.     The gift of God’s self on the cross in Christ isn’t doctrine or the sum total of all the questions asked of ordinands preparing for ministry.  It’s our marching orders.   This biblical epic of God’s gift on the cross is laid out for us so that we might see it as a model for our own lives.    God gave God’s self on the cross for our redemption.    The take away for us in this unfolding saga is that self-giving love redeems.   Having received this redemption by God’s act of self-giving love on the cross, it becomes our call to go and do likewise.   It becomes our common work to give ourselves for others so that redemption might spread.

 We have spent millennia creating crusted liturgies and dogma based on believing in the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ as God’s final act that doles out salvation to all who believe.  But what if this story doesn’t portray the final act, but indeed gives us the amazing and life-giving initiating act of salvation?    What if we receive this redemption through God’s self-giving love in Christ, not as dogma, but as the very beginning of our journey as ones who live in God as we share that self-giving love with others?   What if our work has little to do with convincing others to believe as we do, and everything to do with the holy work of redemption as we go about building communities rooted in self-giving love and grace?         

If we begin to get our hearts and our souls around this, we will have to stop elevating the people who actually practice self-giving love to Sainthood.   St. Francis of Assisi, Mother Theresa, Oscar Romero and countless others are not rare glimpses of lives we can never hope to imitate.   They are our role models.   Indeed, the word “Saint,” once simply referred to members of Christian community.   We are all Saints, called to the joyful, spirited and sometimes chaotic building of communities whose purpose is to practice the holy way of self-giving love.  

If all this pulls us into an ancient and new way of being together, what does prayer look like?   If all this has some inkling of merit, then what do our Christian communities need to look like?    

Let’s begin where we started.   Petitionary prayer will never go away, nor should it.  However, our petitions, our needs are shared in Christian community with the community.  You see, it’s not God who needs to know, it is our sisters and brothers in Christ who need to know our needs.     And as we listen, we able to respond in self-giving love as we learn live together in love and thereby live in God.

As we build Agape communities who are devoted to the way of self-giving love, there are all kinds of praying that can and will emerge.   The ancient practice of praying the Psalms (Lectio Divina) together can lead us to a deeper understanding, not only of the text, but of one another as we begin to share and understand what it means to “walk through the valley of the shadow of death” without fear (Psalm 23).  How can we be together in ways that banish the paralysis of fear even and especially when the days are dangerous?   How can we be there for and with one another in the moments when the shadows of death touch us?   

Confessional prayer remains critical for us all.   But we are not confessing our sins as though we are in a holy police station with a God who shines a flashlight in our eyes demanding that we admit our crimes; insisting that we confess.  No.   Confession really has more to do with truth telling than it does with recrimination and humiliation at the wrong we have done.   When we confess, when we tell truth in a community of self-giving love, healing  and forgiveness can begin where wounds and hurt may have been caused.   When are able to say the truth about who we really are in the context of loving community, then our community can love as us we are and begin to journey with us in ways that authentic and gracious.  

Silent, personal prayer also will continue to be significant for us in this reality.    When we go apart from others to pray we often go to have that private conversation with God, right?   If that’s useful and meaningful, no one is suggesting that it be stopped.  However, it could that our alone time could benefit from understanding ourselves as focusing on the Love that is God.   If we are “in God,” as it suggests in 1^st John 4, then how are we loving to increase our connection with that essence?   In this way we can grow deeper in our knowledge of ourselves and our understanding of Love as we offer it, love as we receive it, love as we create community with and through it.  Perhaps most significantly here is that in this time of personal, private prayer, we might grow more deeply into partnership with the love that is God.

We could go on for some time listing the kinds and types of prayer, but we would soon discover that they prayers themselves are quite similar to what many of us already do on a daily or hourly basis.   What can change in this, is our focus away from a God that we have created in our own image and to a God whose very substance is love; a God who is love and calls us to inhabit the Holy space of love as we build community, offer ourselves in love, and grow together in wonder and delight as true children of the God who actually is love.

Magic Fear Puts the World at your Command: Sleeping Through the Bifurcation of America

Nearly twenty-five years ago when my wife and I learned we were about to have (gulp) twins, we quickly started looking for ways to economize.   The list was pretty easily put together.  Fewer of those treasured evenings at our favorite Greenwich Village restaurant.   Longer time between purchases of new clothing for either of us, and more time at the local thrift shop.  We quit food shopping at our favorite shops and planned meals, shopping at the local grocery store.   There were a host of other things we added to our savings list as time passed.  However, the one “no-brainer” was cancelling cable television.   It was clearly a luxury we could walk away from with little regret.   So with one quick phone call it was done.  We cut the cable.  That was in 1994.

In the quarter century that has passed since we unplugged, we have never re-connected.    Occasionally, of course, I would get to thinking how nice it would be to have all those movies and TV shows at my fingertips.   Then my work would take me out of town and I would find myself in some hotel with the remote in my eager hands.  “At last,”  I would say to myself.  “A couple of nights of cable television!”    Pointing my device at the television I would rotate through show after show that I didn’t really care to see.   Instead of the paltry four or five channels of junk I got at home, my hotel television spewed forth over a hundred channels of junk.  It felt like being hip deep in some ooze that would not easily let me escape.   And with each sojourn to weary late night hotel rooms with cable,  the question would inevitably come.  “Why would I pay for this?”   And so it was that we remained unplugged for a quarter century.

Flash forward to the summer of 2018.   I went to visit some friends who have cable television, and have ridden the tumultuous tv wave through the Reagan, Clinton, Bush, and Obama years and now into the apocalyptic haze of the Trump regime.    They did not, like us, unplug.     Sitting at the kitchen table watching the tv on the wall, my dear friend was mesmerized by the spectacle.  Talking about it later, he shared with me how he simply couldn’t seem to turn it off.  It was, he remarked, “like watching a train wreck in slow motion.”   I had to agree.   I couldn’t stop watching either.  It was almost impossible to ignore the liberal “news”  station  bleating in a non-stop vituperative wave of hysteria,  all of which was condemnatory, divisive, and designed  carefully to make the viewer afraid; very afraid.      In the interests of full disclosure, I need to say that I agreed with many, if not most of the views articulated on this alleged “news” outlet.   Yet it wasn’t concurrence that was my issue.  It was the screechingly panicked tone of it all that caught me.  It was as though a button was being pushed inside me;  a button that switched off my capacity for logic and reason and turned on my reactionary, fearful, panicked self.   Indeed, it caught me so completely that I found my adrenaline rising to the level of what could only be called a panic attack.   I googled it just to be sure, and indeed I had all the symptoms.   My only choice was to leave the room as my chest was pounding and I winced at the acrid taste in my mouth.

Just to be clear, the equally alleged “news” of the folks at Fox and elsewhere employ exactly similar ranting, accusatory, divisive rhetorical style.   Indeed it could be argued that the right is better and more adroit at lying than the left, but they have both sunk to verbal trench warfare without a thought to the unity of nation or culture.     The soulless banlality of evil unfolds, less within the current of ideological rigidity, though that is certainly the script, but more with the deliberately stimulated fear that lives in our deeply primal reality.    Our people are kept at constant levels of fearfulness which renders them powerless.     Regardless of the level of lying, which is admittedly pervasive, all sides of this morass trade in a constant level of fear mongering that has rendered a whole people inert as the nation is systematically dismantled.   There is a line attributed to Bertolt Brecht which seems apt here.  “Magic fear puts the world at your command.”   

As I went for a walk to try to detach from my own raw sense of panic it dawned on me that I had  inadvertently missed the bifurcation of America by not having access to the pervasive and overwhelming presence of cable television.    In my cable-free quarter of a century,  television screens have becomes ubiquitous.   Not only do 85% of American homes pay ridiculous prices for the privilege of being propagandized and controlled,  television screens are now everywhere.   From a day when there may have been one fuzzy old tv at the end of the local bar, with denizens catching the football game, there are now usually ten, twenty or more screens in many bars and restaurants.   And they are loud.    They are on buildings and gas pumps, super market aisles and fast food drive through lanes.   Giant screens are even replacing bill boards along our highways.   Big Brother has arrived, and the results of his presence are not pretty.

During my stroll through the bucolic country-side where my friend lived I continued to  process all this.   I recalled that some years back, television networks were required to provide what reasonably passed for journalistic news as part of the price for using the public airwaves.    The “news” of those days was not permitted to be a profit center for the corporate giants.   They actually had to put in an effort to tell the truth.    Now, were they always truthful?   No.  Of course not.  But these were the days of  Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Barbara Walters, Morey Safer and others.   These were moments when there was an articulated  commonly held value in having a well-educated well-informed public.   But sometime during the Reagan years the powers that be started dealing from the bottom of the deck, and it quietly became legal for networks to make a profit from television news.   Suddenly the “news” was no longer about providing information.  It was about gathering an audience, and to gather an audience one has to “entertain.”      And nothing, dear friends, entertains like conflict.   And in the stormy stew of conflict and the accompanying paralysis of fear are the rewards of profit profit profit.

And so the allegedly polarized nation in which we live today is the creation of a profit-motivated media who has pandered to the fears and insecurities of people who may have once had liberal or conservative leanings but were still united as Americans.     These were people who tuned in to actual political debates moderated by the League of Women Voters.  Those have been disposed of quietly.    Today, debates are replaced with  hour long mash ups of sound-bytes and hook lines.   You see,  the truth of the matter is that our unity is not actually rooted in whether or not we agree on everything.   We won’t.  We can’t.  We shouldn’t.   The wonder of a functioning democracy is that in our disagreement and engaged conversation, we forge a way forward as a people.    We are not hobbled by disagreements but, in fact strengthened by them.  Even in my baby-boomer days of protest and anti-war activism, my commitment came through as an American who wanted the nation to live into its stated values.   The same was true of my Republican Uncle, with whom I would spend hours engaged in discussion and debate.   The conversations created depth, closeness and served to educate us both.  More than that, it fostered respect.     But today the shrill invective that plays to our worst inclinations is force fed to us through a cable tv system that we have been convinced is important enough for us fork over $100 a month on average.   Friends, we are paying for our own demise as talking heads purse their lips and point their fingers.   We are writing the checks as our democracy is dismantled in favor of a neo-tribalism.  

So the questions comes.  What to do?   Are we stuck in this paralysis of fear and panic?   Do we need to watch the train wreck in slow motion?     No, and no.   The first thing that comes to  my mind is that we are not powerless.   We are never powerless.  We do not need to be wallowing in the swamps of our fear. We do have a choice.    If we disengage from the propaganda whirlwind and shut off the cable tv we will gradually feel the manipulation of fear subside.  As we consciously pursue competent sources of news that have journalistic integrity we can be informed in the way democratic people need to be informed.   And, as rationality and reason return, we can claim the reality that our unity is not based in agreement on issues of one sort or another, but on mutual commitment to and for one another.    

I am an unrepentant fan of singer-songwriter John Prine.  And I close this brief missive with the chorus of a song he wrote called, “Spanish Pipedream.”   

Blow up your TV throw away your paper
Go to the country, build you a home
Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches
Try and find Jesus on your own

I don’t think explosives are necessary, but a quick call to your cable company could sever the collar and leash of media control.   Not only can you cast off the net of manipulation, you could, I’m sure, find better things to do with the $100 a month that you’re shelling to pay people to manipulate you.

Wishing everyone stimulating disagreements and ever closer commitments to mutual care and compassion.

sr