Monday, May 08, 2006
Prayer by any other name
Posted by at 3:25 PM
It would be unfair to describe my relationship with prayer as love/hate. It's been pretty much hate/hate for most of my life.
I was raised in an Evangelical church where one of the principle foci of life was the question: "Are you yet alive in Christ?" Our church espoused the idea that the idea of Christianity was to live a life that was dynamically filled with the presence of Jesus (the more precise might say the Holy Spirit). Prayer and daily devotions and quiet time with God were the prescriptions for life, and "worship" was touted as one of the highest goods.
What this amounted to was that the Christian life in its best form starts to sound like it's mainly an emotional experience--the kind of spiritually orgasmic elation that everyone should want and strive for. "Are you doing all you can to follow Christ?" "Are you really making Christ #1?"
There was also advice for what to do if one was trying one's best and still not "feeling the presence of God". Start listening to those impulses, those inner thoughts--learn to pay attention to how God may be leading you.
Well: I think it's bull.
Most of what I was taught in regard to worship and in regard to prayer was a way of relabeling separate experiences. Rename meditation interaction with God, rename the joy of singing worship, rename the benefits of spending time in quiet and study "being renewed by the Holy Spirit". Pray about something enough and you get to call whatever you decide "the direction of God". If it doesn't turn out, you can always say you were wrong--it's only God when it's right, after all.
I believe abstractly in the merit of prayer, but I almost never find that the prayer my fellow Christians talk about to be even potentially legitimate. Instead, I find constant evidence that the institution of prayer (and, Lord, we won't even touch miracles) is primarily a vehicle for superstition. Even at its best, the language of the church tends to be imprecise and amorphous, so that those with more trenchant understanding can understand its correctness but so that the masses can have their delusions reinforced. Because, after all, we can't have division in the church.
P.S. This post is deliberately more provocative than precise--at this point I'd rather interest someone enough to reply than be particularly accurate on any one of these issues I've so brazenly bandied about. I hope my dear readers will understand this and accord me corresponding charity.
I was raised in an Evangelical church where one of the principle foci of life was the question: "Are you yet alive in Christ?" Our church espoused the idea that the idea of Christianity was to live a life that was dynamically filled with the presence of Jesus (the more precise might say the Holy Spirit). Prayer and daily devotions and quiet time with God were the prescriptions for life, and "worship" was touted as one of the highest goods.
What this amounted to was that the Christian life in its best form starts to sound like it's mainly an emotional experience--the kind of spiritually orgasmic elation that everyone should want and strive for. "Are you doing all you can to follow Christ?" "Are you really making Christ #1?"
There was also advice for what to do if one was trying one's best and still not "feeling the presence of God". Start listening to those impulses, those inner thoughts--learn to pay attention to how God may be leading you.
Well: I think it's bull.
Most of what I was taught in regard to worship and in regard to prayer was a way of relabeling separate experiences. Rename meditation interaction with God, rename the joy of singing worship, rename the benefits of spending time in quiet and study "being renewed by the Holy Spirit". Pray about something enough and you get to call whatever you decide "the direction of God". If it doesn't turn out, you can always say you were wrong--it's only God when it's right, after all.
I believe abstractly in the merit of prayer, but I almost never find that the prayer my fellow Christians talk about to be even potentially legitimate. Instead, I find constant evidence that the institution of prayer (and, Lord, we won't even touch miracles) is primarily a vehicle for superstition. Even at its best, the language of the church tends to be imprecise and amorphous, so that those with more trenchant understanding can understand its correctness but so that the masses can have their delusions reinforced. Because, after all, we can't have division in the church.
P.S. This post is deliberately more provocative than precise--at this point I'd rather interest someone enough to reply than be particularly accurate on any one of these issues I've so brazenly bandied about. I hope my dear readers will understand this and accord me corresponding charity.
I think Jesus (and the prophets of the OT) instructed prayer primarily because it changes us, disposing us to be good. And becoming more good makes everything that befalls us better, since Socrates is as right as rain about how impossible it is for true harm to touch the righteous.
I think it's the other way around, friend. "Worship" and "being renewed by the Holy Spirit" are not new monikers. They are very, very old terms (Worship from the ancient Hebrew "ah-vode" and "Renewal by the Holy Spirit" at least goes back to A.D.65 when Paul wrote his young friend Titus; "...He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit..."- Titus 3:5(NIV) (by the way, you might read over that passage, as it reminds us particularly NOT to try and turn that renewal into some nice little righteous thing we do). Perhaps your teachers as a young man strove to put the Worship in a bottle or pre-package the renewal of the Holy Spirit for the mass market or easy digestion, but don't let someone else's attempt to put God in a box lead you to do the same thing by saying it's all just superstition!
#2: It's hard for me to get around the foolishness of the way we talk about Holy Spirit renewal and worship experiences when attempting to look honestly at the experiences of non-Christians. Many Evangelicals I knew relied upon the conviction that no non-Christians actually were happy people. Most Evangelicals I know insist that worship and prayer in other religions is a shallower experience than it is in Christianity.
It's principally the bundling of things that are part of the existence of all humans with a superstitious attribution of these things to the more arbitrary prayer-conventions associated with the particularities of modern Christianity that I object to.
P.S. Who or what is a "fundie"?
Us Fundamentalists are a funny bunch. We're very simple.
We read about King David's singing, and we read his songs, and we see how excited and emotional he gets - So we do that. He talks about how there are musical instruments involved in these songs - So we use musical instruments.
We read about Paul addressing crowds of people to explain the truth to them. He takes passages of O.T. scripture and expounds on them and explains them - So we gather together in big crowds and have somebody do that.
Basically, we do as we read.
This may be a product of my upbringing, but: I do not recall any OT or NT mention of responsive readings or prayers set down to be memorized and recited. I do recall NT mention of speaking in tongues. We do the latter, not the former. If my impression is incorrect in this I would love to be corrected by a Bible verse or two.
Regarding Birthday-Wish prayers, we read things like "Pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests", and "Is any one of you in trouble? He should pray.", and "Ask and it will be given to you". So we do.
However, I have to agree with Nate's paragraph starting "Most of what I was taught..." I particularly detest the doctrine that states that if you pray enough God will tell you the right thing to do by inclining your heart toward the right path. "I just felt like God was leading me to..." (This doctrine seems to my simple mind to have roots in The Persistent Widow and The Still Small Voice).
My heart is wicked all the time! I almost NEVER want/desire/feel inclined towards doing the right thing. It's ALWAYS inclining in all sorts of directions, and 80% of them are straight-up evil. This is evident not only from direct experience but from scripture.
Sir Robert expressed my personal doctrine best: Don't follow your heart. Follow your God.
So I guess I would say that I think the forms of Evangelical/Protestant/Fundamentalist life are sound but that a cult of emotion-worship is trying to infiltrate it.
By the way, you may not know this Nate and Rhonda, but I love you guys. Especially Rhonda - I have always appreciated your willingness to disagree with a room full of fundies.
That's awesome, Matt. Hey, I'm just flattered you remember who I am. Thanks for your thoughts!
Sir Robert expressed my personal doctrine best: Don't follow your heart. Follow your God.
I'm just too much of a Kantian to believe this. God may be an objective reality (in fact: I believe he is) but that does not mean that anything he does will not be completely conditioned by your faculties of perception. No miraculous communication can reveal itself except as some kind of perception. This means you can't just leap past the difficulties of a fallen heart: you're left with the difficult task of using wisdom and understanding to attempt to discern God within your heart.
Rhonda: congratulations on posting a comment vastly more interesting (and coherent) than the post it was in response to.
Certainly your apology for the idea of prayer as something learned strikes all sorts of chords with me. I often think about the role of language in life, and how layers of metaphor and meaning (in things like books, music, history, etc.) are vital to allow us to understand ourselves. The idea that prayer stripped of this sophistication would naturally be something less sincere and less meaningful makes a lot of sense.
(Though, as you say in part later on, even modern Protestants have much tradition, we just attempt to cut out about 1600 years of recent tradition.)
The problem for me, though, is that other people's words have never taught me in this regard. (It could be pointed out that I've only learned prescriptive prayers from Evangelicals, though.) Only study has brought me the kind of experience other people describe as worship. Reading Plotinus, talking about Plato, working out passages of Paul in Greek... those experiences are what bring me to a better understanding of myself and to a better understanding of God, and only that has ever allowed me to feel like some sort of genuine communication was going on.
You, Rhonda, seem to be a good argument that Catholics are teaching these prayers in a way that pairs understanding and reciting. But I worry that it lacks an essential aspect from learning from a teacher of philosophy: the freedom to test everything said and either accept it or push it away.
(This last criticism is, of course, as applicable to the many Protestant churches that claim to be sola scriptura yet demand oaths of belief about heavily interpreted and extremely tradition-informed concepts like the Trinity.)