Lent 2009: The Lord's Prayer
Session 1: Introduction
Prayer has always had for me a magnetic attraction. I have never been without it, and yet I have also found myself unable to discuss it easily. At one and the same time I am drawn by its power and repelled by its form.
I live in the ambiguous contradiction of the priest called upon to pray in a myriad of circumstances, and yet I am not certain how I feel about the effectiveness of the words and forms of traditional prayer. This contradiction has always been a part of my life.
Whilst at theological college, I could be deeply moved by theology, biblical studies, and the power of that Christian community. Yet my attempts to develop a meaningful prayer life seemed always to come to nothing.
Indeed I was, as Bishop Robinson suggests in his book Honest to God, one who lived under the guilt of inadequacy when I compared the meaning I found in prayer with the meaning I felt I was supposed to find there.
I recall vividly that on those days set aside for meditation at theological
college, I found myself bored beyond endurance. Invariably, I would invariably
end those quiet days asleep in a chair. Later, in my attempts to overcome
this deficiency, I imposed upon myself every prayer discipline imaginable;
but none of them really worked for me. I read the devotional classics
of the ages; they never quite talked about my world. I continued to feel
the burden of what I call "prayer inadequacy" and, driven by
this burden, I went on reading every new book on the subject I could find.
Few of these books were of any help. They were either very religious,
presenting God in all of his transcendent power but without any connection
with my life, or they were folksy, the random thoughts of a man driving
on a freeway, quite unrelated to that Power I call the biblical God.
Furthermore, the very form of prayer presented by these religious-type books portrayed a kind of Christianity that was alien to my faith and the experiences of my life.
Neither were the new secular prayers of any help to me, for they seemed to eliminate the transcendent in their search for relevance. That kind of one-dimensional conversation with oneself did not do justice to the great experiences of reality that I have known inside the Christian faith.
To me they appeared to be a secular protest to an irrelevant Christianity, but one, which offered no alternative of substance. It was like the smile of the Cheshire cat that remained after the cat had disappeared.
Yet the ministry of the Christian Church thrilled and excited every fibre of my being. I felt the transforming power of God in all kinds of relationships.
In my pastoral contacts with many people facing serious crises, there was meaningful sharing that significantly expanded my life and, I hope, their lives. Time after time in such moments I found the words and symbols of the Christian faith illumining these experiences.
This was to me undeniable reality. Still, however, prayer in its traditional
form did not add a new dimension to these relationships; nor did it seem
to make contact with any experience in which I was discovering life or
meaning. It did not grip me or my world with interpretive power. Yet prayer
had been for so long a significant part of that religious heritage in
which I stand that I could not simply dismiss it.
I wanted to pray, but I wanted that prayer to be honest and real. No pattern
or form of prayer known to me allowed this combination of honesty and
meaning. So I remained and still am a seeker. I affirm with all my being
that this truth and reality is to be found in prayer despite my inability
to locate the key. This unresolved conflict has served to keep me passionately
interested in the subject of prayer.
The more deeply I probed this matter of prayer, the more I realized that
my primary problem rested with the traditional forms and was twofold:
first, the language of prayer baffled me; and second, the theological
concepts undergirding traditional prayer patterns were contrary to my
understanding of the Christian faith. Both aspects of the problem needed
to be dealt with before I could begin to discover prayer and its meaning.
When I refer to the language of prayer, I do not mean words, the simple problem of word changes over the centuries or even the "thee" and "thou" of Elizabethan English. As a matter of fact, I enjoy the Elizabethan "sounds of worship."
But I do mean, rather, the language of prayer that is at worst superstitious
and at best nonsensical. I needed to think rationally about the meaning
of many prayer phrases I had used uncomfortably for years, phrases such
as "Lord have mercy upon us," "Remember thy servant,"
"The Lord be with you," and many, many more.
What does it mean to beseech God to have mercy? Is it not the nature of
God to be merciful? Do our prayers make him more so? Is not the prayer
"Lord, have mercy," a case of our asking God to be what he already
is? But can he be less than what he is? Does not this prayer really intend
to ask that our lives might be kept open to the mercy of the God whose
name is Love? If that is our prayer, then why do our words say something
quite different?
Similarly, the phrase "The Lord be with you," which is so familiar
in our worship tradition, is also filled with difficulty. This phrase
seems to assume that there are times when God is not with us so that we
need to request his presence.
But certainly the Christian revelation portrays an omnipresent power of
life and love we call by the holy name, God. We may not always be aware
of his presence, but it is his nature to be ever present. What, then,
do the words of our prayer mean? Are we trying to say "The Lord is
with you" in order to call people's lives and minds to a conscious
awareness of the Source of their life and being? If that is our intent,
then why does not the language of prayer reflect it?
How often do we hear priests beseech God, "Remember thy servant?"
One gets the impression that many of us fear that God has amnesia and
that his memory is not trustworthy. Yet is this not at heart a petition
that we be assured that we are not alone in the vastness of the universe,
but that our lives are grounded in that which transcends our finite minds?
Then why cannot our words say what we mean?
The more I analyzed the traditional words of our worship, the more the
language presented a barrier to me, and the more I began to understand
why I felt so ill at ease with the classic forms of prayer. This led me
to define clearly what meaningful prayer is not. It is not an attempt
to call God to his duties. Our situation in prayer is not one of a child
asking an authority for a favour, or of a beggar on his knees beseeching
a master for a crumb. Yet time after time, in our attitudes and, indeed,
even in our posture, we portray this image. It is no wonder that this
form of prayer is abandoned today by so many or that prayer has become
for numerous modern men and women a veritable "forgotten language."
Yet I know that many well-meaning, religious people who hear or read these things will suggest that I am destroying the very justification of and need for prayer. When I say that no prayer of ours can change God's will, his life, or his nature, many will misunderstand me and assume that I am saying that prayer is ineffective, and hence we need to pray no longer. But is our problem with prayer located in God, or is it, rather, in our lives and world, which have moved so far from God's intention for creation? If God's will is perfection, it can only be changed by making it less than perfect. Is it our desire in prayer to destroy God by bending his will to ours? Sometimes our prayers seem to say just that.
But suppose the focus of prayer is not God at all, but the one who is
praying. Suppose prayer is the means whereby we open this broken and distorted
world with its specific broken and hurting lives to the perfect and healing
will of God.
Suppose our prayers offer God a channel through which to work that might
not otherwise be open to him. Suppose the act of prayer is one way, in
God's grace, that we participate in the divine work of creation and redemption.
Then perhaps we will grasp the enormous necessity of prayer. Prayer does not "work" on God. If it did, we should have little or no praying to do. Prayer "works" on the one who prays, the one for whom they pray, and the world for which they pray.
It could be, then, that the traditional language of prayer has the order exactly backward. Prayer is the activity through which God reaches us and not the activity through which we reach God. I believe this must have been St. Paul's insight when he wrote: "The Spirit in us utters things too deep for words" (Romans 8:26).
When I turn from the language to the theological problem, I find the difficulties of prayer only heightened. The monastic movement shaped the form of prayer, which has dominated Christian history. This movement expressed a life-denying, otherworldly mentality that is quite foreign to the Bible. The monks of the early church were much imbued with a dualistic Neo-Platonism that caused them to divide reality into two realms.
The physical or material realm they saw as evil. The nonphysical, or "spiritual," realm they viewed as good.
Hence their prayers tended to be escapist, rather sanctimonious, and increasingly unreal. So divorced from real life was the discipline of prayer that the ordinary Christians of the Middle Ages were quite content to let the monks do his praying for them.
They would tip their hats in recognition of the need for prayer by occasionally going on a retreat or a pilgrimage, but they did not think real prayer was, or could be, their personal vocation. The medieval prayer pattern was built on the assumption that God was found beyond life.
Prayer thought of as an approach to God, became through the example of the monastic communities an attempt to escape life, time, and the world, since God could not be found in these spheres. The monastic mode of prayer was to turn away from life, to shut out the world, to soar to the realm of the spirit. The final reward of prayer was not a transformed world, but a beatific vision. When one reads the traditional books on prayer, one finds this their basic attitude.
But this attitude is deeply incompatible with the Christian faith I have been taught and to which I am committed. To the biblical mind, God was the Creator of his world, the Power of history, the inescapable Presence of life. When the Hebrews looked for God, they did not try to shut out the world, but instead they found God in life and in history. By medieval, or even modern standards, it is quite difficult to find a pietistic otherworldly Hebrew.
God, to the biblical mind, was a Force with which to reckon, a Power to be engaged, a Reality to be experienced. To have faith, for the Hebrew, was not to do some mental activity like believing; it was, rather, to possess the ability to enter life expectantly, it was rather, to possess the ability to enter life expectantly, confident that God was there to be found. . To be open to God's revelation for the Hebrew was to have faith, and this faith produced in one the courage to be.
Nowhere is this better seen than in the cycle of Abraham stories (Genesis 12-25). These stories come chiefly from the pen of the Yahwist writer who wrote near the end of the reign of Solomon. He created his saga about the founding father of Israel from fragments of history, myth, and folklore. Inevitably, he portrayed in Abraham the qualities that he felt marked the Hebrew nation. Abraham was a wanderer, a stranger, called by God out of the security of his past into an unknown future, an unknown tomorrow. He left his ties with family, clan, and home to set out in a new direction, trusting only the promise of God, which was twofold: that he was to possess a promised land and that he was to be the father of a great people. In the Abraham story that promise is threatened time after time. The land which he was promised was held by the Canaanites; and the wife through whom the child of promise was to come was barren. Yet still Abraham trusted. Still he walked forward into tomorrow and entered life expectantly: "By faith Abraham obeyed . ". . and he went out not knowing where he was to go" (Hebrews 11:8).
Biblical prayer reveals this life-centred assumption time and again.
Biblically, if one wanted to search for God, one had to turn toward life,
toward history. To walk before God was to walk into the future of the
world. Examine the prayers of Jeremiah or Job. Penetrate the substance
of prayer in the Book of Psalms. Biblical prayer was engagement with life,
not disengagement from life. Holiness was found in life, not outside life.
The world was the creature of God, not the realm of evil materialism.
History was the arena in which revelation was received, and it must be
entered to find God. Prayer must be an approach to life if it is to be
an approach to God.
It was only when Christianity left its Hebrew origins and began to think
in the Neo-platonic concepts of the ancient world that this other-worldly
confusion began to affect the Christian prayer experience, for the Neo-Platonists
had separated the realm of God from the realm of the world. When this
dualistic assumption of the Neo-platonic mind became the dominant concept
of Christian theology, the monastic prayer pattern was possible. Thus
Christian prayer came to be defined by dualistic-thinking mystics, holy
men, and spiritualists. They are the ones who began to write prayer manuals,
prayer rules of life, and prayer disciplines, all of which were designed
to help us escape the evils of our world and become "spiritual."
This is what has created for us the classic form of prayer. But as a Christian
I cannot make these assumptions nor can I practice these prayer forms
with their retreats, quiet days, and prayer disciplines, which are based
upon these assumptions.
I am not alone in this experience.
As long as people were convinced that this realm of the spirit was both real and important, this monastic pattern of prayer survived. Those who continue to find meaning in these patterns today do so because the realm of the spirit still has reality for them. I do not criticize them so much as I envy them. But let us admit that this old-fashioned certainty is a luxury that few people in our age can enjoy. The realm of the "spirit" is quite suspect today. This is not the late Middle-Ages, although many religious writers seem to wish it were.
The "spiritual" world was the dominant reality until the thirteenth
or fourteenth century. Life in this world was robbed of its meaning, and
all attention was focused on the life to come. All art was religious art,
for no other subject was of sufficient worth to merit artistic talent.
All music was church music, basically plainsong with its haunting melodies
reflecting the struggle of the soul to escape life here for life there.
Human life was defined as an immortal soul incarcerated in a fleshly,
and therefore evil, body of which someday it would be free. Any study
of physical reality was deemed unworthy of a Christian mind; hence there
was little scientific endeavour, and whenever there was, the church tended
to frown upon it. Any attempt at social reform was considered a waste
of time, for this world was so insignificant that it did not merit reform.
People were taught to accept their status "and to do my duty in
whatever state it shall please God to call me" (Offices of Instruction,
Book of Common Prayer). Moreover, there was no passion to prolong life.
The status of the medical doctor was quite low, for no great value was
laid on saving life when so great a home as heaven awaited Christians.
Here on this earth human beings were strangers or pilgrims.
Heaven was their destiny, their true dwelling place, and prayer was the
means through which they kept contact with that spiritual realm. Life
was to be punctuated by meditations designed to transport the Christian
heavenward. Prayer life could range from long periods of retreat to momentary
flights of "arrow prayers" that Christians hurled heavenward
in order to keep touch with that which they conceived alone to be real.
But these thought forms are not part of pure contemporary life. It is easy to trace how our dilemma developed. Neo-platonic thought separated God from his world, the spiritual from the material. Then, on the basis of that pattern, the medieval church identified its life and gospel almost exclusively with the realm of the spiritual. As the church increased its dominance over life, the spiritual realm robbed the earth-bound and physical of any importance. God was taken out of life and isolated in an otherworldly sphere.
This development reached its zenith in the thirteenth century, when in
the thought of theology, God and the world seemed totally separate from
each other. Once God is so assigned to a specific domain, he is inexorably
tied to the fate of that domain.
Since the thirteenth century, the other-worldly realm of the spirit has
shrunk in importance and influence until today it is all but dead. Nothing
will revive it. The God identified so exclusively with that realm is dead.
The prayer pattern that seeks to transport us to that realm is dead. In
this lies, I believe, the faith crisis of our time.
Copernicus knocked us off our pristine pedestal at the centre of the universe.
Darwin destroyed our arrogance that caused us to think of ourselves in
the analogy of "a little lower than the angels," instead of
a little higher than the animals. Freud delved into our inner life and
caused us to doubt the reality of every noble thought, every heavenly
vision. Marx suggested that any vision which diverted power or energy
from the struggle for human justice here and now was a vile delusion or
a deliberate opiate. With these modifications of outlook we entered the
twentieth century.
Our day can be characterized as a thirteenth century-in-reverse. Today
this world is the all-encompassing, powerful reality. Heaven is considered
a pleasant illusion. Science is king! Theology is thought of as being
for those who "like that sort of thing." Today this life is
so important and so final that social reform for now, not tomorrow is
a passion. The modern man or woman is this-world centred, life-centred,
pragmatic, and scientifically oriented. He or she does not understand
or respond to the escapism of medieval spirituality.
Yet the church still presents the matter of prayer in a medieval guise.
In the main we are urged to turn in prayer to the realm of the spirit.
Most do not turn. The man or woman who does finds little or no meaning
there. The words of religious ritual have a phony ring in our ears when
we seriously scrutinize them with our minds.
Since no other prayer pattern is presented, it is no wonder that contemporary
people cease to pray. It is obvious that when we cease to pray or when
prayers become empty forms and meaningless words, God grows dim and that
we as humans feel increasingly alone in the universe. If such a person
wants to continue his church affiliation, they carefully avoid thinking
or raising questions about prayer, or they persist in childhood prayer
patterns because of the warm emotional feelings associated with the familiar
"Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep," for instance.
Traditional Christianity does not offer the modern person a very meaningful alternative. they can follow the monastic prayer pattern and become, inevitably, a pietist, an escapist; or they can refuse to accept that pattern and become a materialist. If they find no meaning except in the here and now, they will either "live it up" and become a hedonist, or battle the threat of despair and become a disciplined stoic. If the despair becomes too intense, they might even opt out of life in one of the many forms of self-negation from alcohol and drugs to suicide.
But I believe that the Christian faith must offer and does offer an exciting alternative to this gloomy picture, and it is to point to that new possibility that I write these words.
When the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray, he responded by giving them the words of the Lord's Prayer. I believe, therefore, that this must be our starting place for any new discussion on prayer. Here in this most basic of all prayers for the Christian faith, we find in our Lord's own words some answers to our questions or at the least a new doorway through which to enter the prayer experience. But before beginning to plough that exciting and fertile field, it seems imperative that I state positively where I am in my personal quest for prayer's meaning. It is not enough merely to analyze or to be critical.
I must begin by making a simple distinction. There is in my mind a difference between "prayer" and "saying prayers." First, I define prayer in a rather traditional way. It is a human attempt to make contact with God. But God for me is found in life, not beyond life. I do not mean to state that God is not beyond life, only that we do not find him there. This is a crucial difference. For after we find him, we know that no limit can be placed on his Infinite Being. Therefore, if prayer is our attempt to discover God, prayer must be an approach to life.
The life of prayer is thus for me the responsibility to open myself in love to the transcendent in everyone I meet. It is to meet life with all that I have and all that I am. It is to be ready to encounter people, to participate in events, to live in relationships. To live the life of prayer is thus to be vulnerable. It is to run the risk of being hurt in order to love. It is to live with courage and honest involvement with my world. It is to love life as my meeting place with the Holy, my meeting place with God. Real prayer is meeting, I am suggesting. This, I understand, is what the New Testament means when it says, "Pray without ceasing" (i Thessalonians 5:17). Obviously, it is not referring to a ritual act; but on the contrary, to an entire way of life.
If this is prayer, what then is the meaning of saying prayers? Perhaps you ask if I engage in this activity. Let me assure you that I do, daily and specifically. I pray for those who are living in a time of stress, in sickness, death, fear. I feel that to say prayers is to unleash power, though I am not sure how it works. But I hasten to add that "saying prayers" is not a substitute for me for a human relationship. I do not go to a sick room or to the home of parishioners or even to a public meeting to say words to an uninvolved deity with uninvolved people. I go to share life with its pain, its love, its fear, its joy. I go to be what I am, a child of God. I go to call another into being what he or she is, a child of God, no matter what the present circumstances of life might be. I resent it when people will not allow me to be real and human, when I am forced to role play the praying preacher and to say "a little prayer," as they call it. I resist the expectation level that demands that I be "religious" and do the expected thing.
Saying a prayer in a shared relationship is deeply meaningful to me;
but only because I have met another as a person and we have shared and
touched and experienced the Holy together. Then prayer makes that plain
and obvious and real.
I pray in private daily, but these are not for me the most holy moments
in an otherwise secular life. I do not use such time of prayer to have
my batteries recharged or to achieve the tranquillity or peace to be found
only in retreat or withdrawal from life. Indeed, it is in what we call
the secular life that I experience the Holy. My peace and tranquillity
come in my involvement with life and people. It is in life—in living,
being, sharing, loving, and in honest meeting with another— that
I am recharged and find peace and experience the holy God. "Saying
prayers" is important in that it prepares me to meet life, to discern
the Holy in life as I live. To live, for me, is to know and to be known,
to love and to be loved, to forgive and to be forgiven. These are my moments
of meaning. These are my times of communion with him whom I believe to
be the Source of Life. These are the holy times of prayer for me. Saying
prayers prepares me for this level of life, for this state of readiness
and openness and expectancy. It prepares me to know the holy God when
I meet him in life as I know, care, love, and share with another.
I think Jesus was talking about saying prayers when he said, "Watch ye for ye know not the day or the hour when the Son of Man comes" (Matthew 25:13).
I say prayers so that when I turn to life, I will experience and recognize the holy God in life, for I believe he is revealed in relationships in his world. I want my life to be lived in such an open way that it is a "prayer without ceasing." I want my prayers to be so honest that they proclaim the presence of the Source of Life and point my life toward his world where he is found. In this way, I believe that even for the non- monastic, non-spiritual, but this-world-oriented modern man, prayer can be as rich and as full an experience as it has ever been in our Christian history.
From this point of view, I turn now to the prayer Jesus taught his disciples with the hope that we might learn anew to pray with honesty and say "Our Father" in this secular age.
© Fr Michael Fuller: March 2009