When is Prayer Real?

When is Pray Real?
February 9, 2018
These thoughts were published as an appendix in my volume “With Our Feet on the Ground” (2011).The full book, including meditations following the pattern (but not content) of the Rosary is a free download from this earthedspirit site, also available on Kindle.

APPENDIX 1: WHEN IS PRAYER REAL?
“If you want to pray,” wrote Evagrius of Pontus more than 16 centuries ago, “you need God, who gives prayer. “
So the simple answer to the question in the above title has to be, “God alone knows!”

Prayer is understood here as the inner content of a real, mutual relationship between a person or group and the Infinite Other. So merely labeling a text or activity as “prayer” does not mean that it is any such thing. It may be as removed from true communion as masturbation is from lovemaking; perhaps harmless and pleasant, but not engaged in any movement toward ultimate truth and wholeness. On the other hand, there may be a great deal more true prayer going on in the involvement of God in the loved world than is often suggested.

Religious establishments and their dogmas may never have defined and controlled true faith at humanity’s grassroots as much as suggested in some nostalgic analyses of trends in spirituality within the culture and land. Indeed, as is the way of institutions, the establishments seem often to have deliberately declined to discern and empower unfettered, natural, grassroots prayer. Failing to entirely repudiate the false claim that they command a caste of sacerdotal people gifted to pray beyond a veil barring most ordinary people, the institutional elite may often be blind to much spiritual groping for answers to ultimate questions and much offering of grief and joy in prayer far from their sanctuaries.

Most adherents asked about their personal prayer lives at first express feelings of inadequacy, measuring themselves against conditioned, impossible and often childish standards, revealing forms of passive spiritual consumerism. But when people of diverse religious backgrounds (and especially those with little or none) are prayed with (not for) in times of crisis when those conditioned masks evaporate, many reveal vibrant and real faith exercised with little reference to religious traditions and authority. Meanwhile, in at least Western Christianity, the Church’s proclamation seems from the grassroots of faith and from the real world beyond the stained glass to have become confused, lacking in confidence; either strident with dodgy claims to offer exclusive salvation to the submissive as the many perish, or so dilute as to offer no distinct flavour or leaven at all.

In a confused world groping for meaning, justice and hope without blind faith in old, objective certainties that simply fail to make sense in post-modern culture, there remain the One who gives prayer and the many who seek to move in prayer toward the ultimate wholeness of communion involving person and all creation.

THE DIVINE INVOLVEMENT
If prayer is centered in the mystery of the relational reality embracing and transcending all the relationships constituting creation, and if I am in that presence by grace, I cannot act as if prayer is something I do (whether alone or in a congregation) – a self-motivated alternative to working in the garden or writing these words. I cannot at the same time envisage God as a remote object and claim to be engaged in prayer.
When young, living and working with land, I struggled to connect what was said and done as the local church gave its Sunday “nod to God” with what I experienced of the holy when alone, in “mountaintop” moments. My training in agriculture had suggested that creation is a machine; the sum of measurable objects that may be manipulated. The culture said to me that everything and everyone (including religion, God and myself) has a “place” and should jolly well stick to that place.

I was to slowly learn that the world is not a machine at all, that what is really real is to be found not in the positions of objects but in the processes of relationships in the messiness and vulnerability of freedom, and that some of my conditioned images of the Divine must be revised. Granting the certain, abject and sacrilegious failure of any attempt to define and circumscribe the Infinite Holy One, it may be helpful to name some characteristics that, in my view, cannot be attributed to God:

 God is NOT in the image of a male coloniser – hyperactive, dominant, inflexible, emotionally repressed, unresponsive, independent.
 God is NOT found in the exclusive apex of a hierarchical pyramid in which the next compartment down (one with on-demand access to the throne-room) is reserved for humans deemed to be “saved” then (in descending compartments) the rest of humanity, other species of life and (last and most base) inanimate creation.
 God is NOT the passionless, absolute, unmoved controller of all that is really real; rather, God is affected by, even surprised by, what happens in the gifted freedom of creation.
 God’s core business is NOT distribution of magical blessings and curses and sanctifying of the status quo in response to card-carrying supplicants.
 The ultimate reality embraced in God’s being is NOT scarily supernatural but joyously, disturbingly, natural

Prayer, in my experience, never gets easy. My encounters in prayer are much more likely to be with infinite silence than with a clearly discerned enlightener from whom I hear definite messages. Each encounter may reveal even less of God than the experience of a tiny wave lapping my toes at the beach reveals all the tumultuous depths and breadths and life of all the planet’s oceans. And yet (here’s the thing), you and I are invited again and again to go deep into prayer.

I believe the most needed facet of prayer in our time is the prayer of listening. I have a little mantra (borrowed in part from Augustine of Hippo) that helps me to persevere when the going is hard and dry:
My prayer cannot lift me closer to God.
Nor can my prayer draw God closer to me.
For, in Christ, God is always closer to me than I am to myself.

It follows, of course, that God is at least as close to everyone and everything else.

When, in dry times, I keep on praying on, there eventually comes fresh awareness that God is source, journey, context and goal; that the One who embodies all holiness is in no way reliant on our awareness and response but yet loves us, embraces us in the relationship that is prayer; that I, we, this whole, desperate world are lost outside that embrace.

COMMUNICATION
The word communication has Latin roots to do with a mutual process of sharing. An autocrat – whether a political dictator or the idea of a god perceived as an unmoved mover – cannot by definition be so vulnerable as to enter a mutual process of sharing. Nor can a person harassed into emotional dependency.

In relationships, communication does not happen when a mouth is opened, an email sent, a homily delivered, a propaganda campaign launched or a smoothly pious intercession offered in a church. True communication takes root and grows in the subsequent cycles of listening and feedback until we have two or more participants with more common understanding of what’s going on; with something alive and real happening in the content of their relationship. .

In my spasmodic search, I have learned most about communication from the life of land and from marriage.

In the life of land, untold millions of creatures – most unseen, but not excluding the arrogantly powerful human species – are inter-relating, living and dying in any patch of earth at any moment. In that moment, life is never static. There is always a movement of the whole, either toward a vibrant wholeness of life or toward desolating death. It helps to pause, and in stillness be gratefully aware that this little sample of life and all life on earth, consciously or not, is integrated with my life.

I once had cause to consider the broader context of continuing creation when digging a hole for a fencepost. My crowbar struck a rock too large and hard to be moved or penetrated. The rock was Pliocene – not notably ancient in the life of the planet but occupying that spot for around two million years: 1, 998, 000 years before Jesus was born; 199, 000 years before the first human feet walked this land; 1, 999, 850 years before immigrants from Europe claimed dominion. So that rock spoke to me of my impatience and self-centeredness – my temptation to seek self-justifying fulfilment in one pathetic hour or year or lifetime I was claiming for myself within the immensity of all God’s indwelt time and space. It had something to say to me about the wholeness of the web of all creation. It had something to say to me about prayer.

Marriage can for some be a dreadfully inappropriate model for communication. For me, our half-century-and-counting journey in marriage teaches me that I may fool some people some of the time, myself occasionally, Lesley (and God) never! We understand that what makes marriage marriage is neither a ceremony nor a legal certificate; it is a mutual, constantly renewed commitment to partnership all the way, each giving priority not to the object self or the object partner but to the subject content of our relationship. That relationship is either alive, with real communication within it, or our marriage is diseased; bogged.

Much of the time our partnership is plain, happily ordinary. Occasionally, there is a superabundance of joy. Occasionally, too, there is a painful reminder that true marriage is built not on pheromones but on mutually listening, humbly questing hearts; strengthened not so much by sentimentality as by acknowledging and resolving conflict. I know there are times when one of us is silently crying out for the other to listen – really listen – and nothing happens. I know that if I become so disengaged as to take Lesley for granted – treat her as an object, however valued – I am not only crucifying her unique personhood but also breathing death into the holy ground in the between of us.

The marriage metaphor can be taken much too far. But it helps toward understanding that personal prayer involves listening, is at least as much about being than doing, sharing ordinariness as well as celebrations, cross-purposes as well as lovemaking reconciliation.

And, of course, it is about change. When communication happens, people change. In prayer and in marriage I change in realisation of who I am and what I’m about, and in my realisation of God and neighbour and marriage partner and God’s indwelt world. Might God change? This is a dangerous question. Yet I am sure that God cannot be immovably absolute. If God were not a focused, responsive listener, why would we attempt prayer? Perhaps we cannot tell God anything God doesn’t already know. But I like to think that we can surprise God (hopefully with delight but all too often with disappointment) with our perceptions and actions: I hadn’t thought of it like that!

Early Christians worried much about the injunction to pray constantly. To biblical literalists it seemed to preclude sleep, work and anything else not overtly prayerful. The answer was to practise awareness that the Spirit of God was involved in their being at all times, awake or asleep. The whole of life, then, became prayerful. This means, of course, that God’s listening heart is tuned in to all of our being and doing; not merely to moments of intentional piety. My husbanding in home and garden is not separate from my daily set-aside prayer times or from corporate worship.

It is helpful, I think, to give priority in prayer to adoration and thanksgiving. The divine ear must surely ache, hearing self-centred outpourings of woe and shopping-list prayers reflecting superstition rather than integrated faith.

TRADITION HERE AND NOW
Religious institutions and individuals are pretty good at hiding spiritual poverty behind public smokescreens of busy piety and rhetoric. That may be true of some expressions of Christianity that look superficially strong as others struggle for footholds in a world moved on. There is always a market for nostalgic religion. There is always a market for religion that insists the only questions that matter are those to which it has black-and-white answers built into an authoritarian structure. But these may not give sustainable life in a world where the understandings and language shaped by Reformation, Counter-Reformation, Enlightenment and industrial revolution in Europe, and in the pre-European and colonial cultures of Aotearoa New Zealand, are mere fading echoes.

Authentic spirituality in this rapidly lurching culture must engage the here and now of life on earth. As post-modern generations fail to find answers built mechanically into traditional religious structures of place and programme to their searching questions, people of faith must be all the more attentive to God who is involved in the whole milieu of life here, now and through to at least the children’s children.

I am sure that religious traditions that humbly practise this attentiveness will be called through a scarily narrow gate from which they will emerge with much less baggage. In Western Christianity, this will mean expressions of church quite unlike those deemed successful from around the sixth to the 20th centuries: vulnerable, even weak, open, questing, hurting, serving, celebrating, witnessing and above all listening in the world at the most intimate, natural, feet-on-ground level, because that’s where God is involved.

At least most who seek to deepen their prayer lives need to journey within a stream of a living, religious tradition. The appropriate tradition for many searchers in the emerging era may look singularly unimpressive by the measure of worldly success, be nakedly honest in struggling with the critical issues looming over life on the planet, be made up entirely of fellow searchers in community, practice a great deal of silence when gathered. There is, of course, no perfect religion or local church: if there was, says an old saying, it wouldn’t have room for me!