Prayer: Winking and Working

(This essay was written in 2018: The original title was “Prayer: What Why and How?)

Prayer, in its many forms, styles, traditions and languages, has always been essentially a way for us to narrow the gap, ease the separation that we feel between ourselves and our Source—God or Divinity.  Yet when I was becoming an adult in the 1960s, many of us who were unhappy with the restrictive beliefs and practices of the pre-Vatican II Catholic Church were inclined to dismiss formal prayer as too self-centered.  We used phrases like “my life is my prayer” as we prepared to help social justice rain down on the oppressed.

Recently, I read a passage in the Science of Mind magazine’s “daily guide” that described prayer as (my paraphrase) stillness, surrender, inarticulate longing, and as something beyond reason. This was for me a newer, more comprehensive, psychological and mystical way of understanding prayer. Here prayer is quiet listening rather than asking.

Intrigued, I tried to remember the categories or “types” of prayer that I had learned in my Catholic youth. My memory, assisted by Google, came up with the following: Adoration (worship), Contrition (seeking forgiveness), Petition (seeking favors), and Thanksgiving (expressing gratitude).

The differences between these two understandings of prayer are striking. The first focuses on  the heart more than the head, feelings more than intellect and thus raises questions that trouble my brain. Just how does one acquire stillness, or effect a surrender, for example?

The second way of defining prayer suggests a more systematic classification into types. More important, each type can be addressed with a more or less precise protocol or set of actions. There are prescribed, formal ways of adoration, both in private prayers and in public liturgies (e.g. in the pre-Vatican II Catholic church—prayerful “adoration of the Blessed Sacrament”—the consecrated host in a window centered in a gold-plated stand called a “monstrance” on Holy Thursday).  There are standard ways of being contrite in a confessional or in a public, generalized “confession of sins”, and prayers of petition, as we know, can become quite as specific as a child’s Christmas letter to Santa. There is little room for “inarticulate longing” when we pray for help. We know what we want, at least when we engage in prayer of petition or intercessory prayer.

These two ways of viewing prayer pose a dilemma for me. Almost by definition, such Christians are suspicious of formal, mechanical or repetitious ways of approaching God. We see creeds and  lists of do’s and don’ts too often used to support power structures and the egos of those who run them; they also help us exclude those who are not members of our tribe, be that tribe a church or a political, social, cultural or economic grouping of some sort. Formal, institutional created prayer can strike us as a bit too “heady” or cerebral.

Yet progressive Christians take pride in following a God who wants us to use our brain power and God-given reason to critique and challenge things that just don’t make sense.  We are even called to challenge and even redeem those “fallen” Principalities and Powers (those necessary but often corrupt institutions) that govern us but also bring war, suffering, oppression, and injustice to our world. This requires organization and analysis and strength that may help us diminish the separation between us and our creative Source. How does prayer fit into this?

Worse yet, some of us who identify as progressive Christians find it difficult, due to temperament or just “the way our brain works,” to allow “inarticulate longing” to lead us to God.  It is not, speaking personally, that I don’t feel some of that longing, for I certainly do.  My problem, if it is a problem, is how to discover and master the meditative or contemplative “tools” necessary to follow my longing to a place where I can see the face of God and/or hear God’s voice.

And if I am unable to see that face or hear that voice, how will I find the peace and the energy and compassion that seem to be necessary if I am to do my part in creating a better world, the “Kingdom of God,” the world of truth, love, and hope that Jesus called us to help create on earth?  Were I not a person haunted by the need for transcendence, I could content myself with secular or non-transcendent efforts to make the world a better place. However I find that unsatisfying.

The question of how to see the face and hear the voice of God was placed in a new context for me by Walter Wink, in the chapter on “Prayer and the Powers” in his powerful Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (1992). For Wink, “the act of praying is itself one of the indispensable means by which we engage the Powers.”  By Powers he means those personal and institutional forces that both “sustain and subvert” human life. We need institutions—they are part of God’s creation and hence good—but they are easily corrupted (“fallen”) and thus can and must be “redeemed,” or so this challenging book argues.

We pray, Wink asserts, “simply because the struggle to be human in the face of supra-human Powers requires it.” It is our humanity that requires us to pray, not our need to please God.  It is by “sinking into our humanity,” by being fully human, as one sermon I heard put it, that we are able to connect with the divinity that resides within us.*

We also pray, Wink believes, to “believe the future into being.” Prayer gives us hope and can actually change the world, not because the traditional “God out there” will intervene with lightning bolts and miracles if we pray hard or correctly enough, but because “even a small number of people, firmly committed to the new inevitability on which they have fixed their imaginations, can decisively affect the shape the future takes.”

He quotes the delightful twentieth-century Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis: “I believe in a world which does not exist, but by believing in it, I create it.”  The Franciscan teacher and mystic Richard Rohr once said that “we pray not to change God’s mind, but to change our minds.”

These forms of positive thinking have been scorned as naïve and even cruelly manipulative by some intellectuals—and they can be these things when misused by charlatans seeking your money with false promises.  Yet positive thinking  is part of a tradition of creative hope that goes back (in American history) to Ralph Waldo Emerson and those metaphysical healers that followed him, and is central to modern “spiritual” groups such as Unity and Centers for Spiritual Living (formerly Religious Science) that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  These often are found under the label “New Thought” or “metaphysical religions” in Wikipedia and other sources.   

Wink’s belief that “thoughts are things” is clear in this comment on intercessory prayer: “In our intercessions we fix our wills on the divine possibility latent in the present moment, and then find ourselves caught up in the whirlwind of God’s struggle to actualize it” Somehow, it seems, in my relationship with the higher power that prayer implies, we become more fully human (sink into our humanity) and able to accept divine grace to act as God would wish us to do as co-creators.

Therefore, we don’t pray to get rid of evil, but to learn how to live with it (the fallen “Powers” which are personal and institutional) and to transform or redeem evil.  Indeed, one of the most interesting points Wink makes about prayer and evil is that early followers of Jesus would never have said “Why do bad things happen to good people?,” the title of a book by Harold Kushner popular in the 1980s. “The early Christians expected to be assaulted by the Powers,” Wink reminds us. They understood evil as part of creation and were willing to die if necessary as part of their attempt to “actualize” the kingdom—instead of merely paying it lip service it as many of us tend to do

So, as it happens, the Roman Catholic reform-minded activists that were my spiritual companions in the 1960s were perhaps correct after all in saying that their life was their prayer, however incomplete that notion of prayer might be.  We need to go within ourselves in prayerful meditation to find “inner renewal, else the wells of love run dry,” in Walter Wink’s words. This is something I will continue to pursue. Yet, any understanding of the Powers must also result in social action and a continuing push for justice in our fallen world.

“We must,” Wink tells me, “act as if the world can be transformed, without guarantees that it can be or objective evidence that we are succeeding.”  That requires prayerful action undertaken trusting that God’s kingdom will ultimately prevail—with our help.  Here faith is an active verb: “Faith does not wait for God’s sovereignty to be established on earth; it behaves as if that sovereignty already holds full sway.”

And if all those Wink words seem too abstractly theological, let me give the last word on this to the perennial critic of dogmatic Theism (“the God out there”) to John Shelby Spong, from his book Unbelievable (2018): “Prayer does not create miracles to which we can testify publicly. . . .Prayer to me is the practice of the presence of God, the act of embracing transcendence and the discipline of sharing with another the gifts of living, loving and being. . . .Can that understanding of prayer, so free of miracle and magic, make any real difference in our world? I believe it can, it does and it will.”

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*It is that divinity, the “God within” that is demonstrated in the life of Jesus, and is said by the mystical writers to encompass all creation, that makes the term “incarnational” better than “progressive” in defining this new way to understand and practice Christianity.