When Prayer is Incarnational

After referring to Harold Kushner’s famous book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People (1981) in several recent posts on this blog, I decided it might be time to recheck this classic I first read decades ago.  

The central point is clear and familiar by now to people who to ask questions about how “God” should be understood. Rabbi Kushner’s understanding of God and “bad things” (or evil) has been incorporated into what some call “Progressive” or “Incarnational” (my term) Christianity.

For Kushner, God doesn’t cause evil, nor does he attribute “bad things” to the Original Sin of Adam and Eve, as do many Christians. Rather, the unfortunate things that happen to innocent people are neither sent by God nor caused by sins committed by humans.  Bad things are just part of creation. We live in a world in which “everything belongs,” to use the title of a book by Richard Rohr. This includes natural disasters and evil murderers like Adolf Hitler. These things are “are not the will of God, but represent that aspect of reality which stands independent of His will, and which angers God even as it angers and saddens us,” Kushner wrote.

That new God so shocked me that I went for coffee with my then pastor, who reassured me that God was all-powerful (omniscient) and that Kushner’s view of God was wrong.  This calmed me for a few years, until I grew tired of hearing things like. “It was God’s will that Officer Bill die in that car crash,” even though his passenger, a convicted serial killer, survived.” Since Bill’s family may not have seen things that way, I could see why they might no longer believe in a good and just God. Besides, this defines God as a Giant Arbitrary Person, something in which I no longer believed.

A friend whose husband died in a crash got upset when people tried to comfort her by saying things like “it was just his time,” or “God took him in a way that didn’t cause suffering.”  No, she would tell them, “he was just driving way too fast!” She was mature enough to not blame God and continued to believe in a God of love.  Many like her do not.

In a key chapter, “God Leaves Us Room To Be Human,” Kushner calls the tree of Good and Evil in the book of Genesis a symbol of what distinguishes us from animals: our ability to make moral choices. This  is how, he believes, we are “made in the image and likeness of God.” Our bad choices are one reason bad things happen to good people. And even though humans don’t create hurricanes, they do too often choose to live in their probable paths. In that sense storm destruction is not punishment from God but “painful consequences” of human decisions. What insurance companies like to call acts of God are no such thing, but only the workings of a universe we just don’t understand—yet.

All this, finally, brings me to the question of prayer. (Thank you for your patience.)  Prayer has probably driven more people away from God and spiritual growth than we will ever know. This happens because most of our prayers are requests of God and when they are not answered to our satisfaction, we are told that it is because we offended God (see the Book of Job in the Old Testament), or because we didn’t pray correctly or hard enough, or that God know best what you need—and it isn’t what you want!  

Kushner’s primary question about prayer is the following: “If we believe in God, but we do not hold God responsible for life’s tragedies, if we believe that God wants justice and fairness but cannot always arrange for them, what are we doing when we pray to God for a favorable outcome to a crisis in our life?”

This question is answered in the discussion that follows in the chapter entitled “God Can’t Do Everything, But He Can Do Some Important Things.” [forgive the gendered language—this is an old book!]. Kushner’s answer, his rejection of the traditional view of God as “the man upstairs” makes sense to me now when it did not forty years ago when I still believed in the God of the GAP (Great Arbitrary Person).

Kushner uses the Jewish Talmud, an ancient rabbinical interpretive work, to identify what rabbis considered bad or improper prayers.  We should not, for example, pray to change things that are already set in place, like praying for a boy or a girl when a women gets pregnant.  That is already decided. We should also not ask God to “change the laws of nature for our benefit,” such as asking for the restoration of health when a person is already dying.  And, of course, we should not pray that harm come to our enemies—despite what parts of the Jewish Bible might suggest.

But most important to me is Kushner’s statement that we should not “ask God in prayer to do something which is within our power, so as to spare us the chore of doing it.”  He reinforces this by including a prayer by a twentieth century Jewish theologian, Jack Riemer:

We cannot merely pray to you, O God, to end war;

For we know that you have made the world in a way

That man must find his own path to peace

Within himself and with his neighbor.

We cannot merely pray to you, O God, to end starvation;

For you have given us the resources

With which to feed the entire world

If we would only use them wisely.

We cannot merely pray to You, O God,

To root out prejudice;

For you have already given us eyes

With which to see the good in all men

If we would only use them rightly

We cannot merely pray to You, O God, to end despair,

For you have already given us the power

To clear away slums and to give hope

If we would only use our power justly.

We cannot merely pray to You, O God, to end disease,

For you have already given us great minds with which

To search out cures and healing,

If we would only use them constructively.

Therefore, we pray to You instead, O God,

For strength, determination, and willpower,

To do instead of just to pray,

To become instead of merely to wish.

This prayer not only lies at the heart of “why bad things happen to good people,” but also at the heart of the religion of Jesus which I call “incarnational,” a term not likely to please Rabbi Kushner. God incarnates within us and it is that God that requires us to complete the work of salvation that we have been assigned by virtue of our humanity, a humanity that is God-infused with a reflection of divinity that we  too often deny or reject in our daily lives.

To accept our assignment to serve God by loving others and creation at large unconditionally (as much as possible) we must rely on others—other humans in community, and not rely on isolated individual prayers to a God “out there” who we often want to recruit to do our will instead of God’s. God is incarnate within us, and that too is where our salvation must begin. And that is progressive or incarnational religion, whatever one’s spiritual tribe