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.