Our Prayer is as Important as Our Action

This blog post is the third in a series of three posts inspired by the most popular post from the archive of 99Brattle, “Do Progressive Christians Pray?” by Chris Glaser, published two years ago. The first installment was by Margaret Bullitt-Jonas ’88 and the second installment was written by Dr. Kwok Pui Lan. 

By Christi Humphrey '08

The line that stands out for me in the blog post, “Do Progressive Christians Pray?” is the following: "God brings justice and mercy into the world one person at a time."

Hidden within this line is the belief that God’s work was not completed in seven days, but rather, God continues to create in the world today. God works in and through each of us—as co-creators—and our individual transformation ripples out into the world. The foundation for this transformation is our own prayer mixed with God’s grace. 

Prayer comes in many forms. Some prayers are dear to us because of their familiarity, the memories and tradition associated with them. “Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be your name,” or “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.”

There are prayers offered in a worship service—corporate prayers offered for the Church and those in authority. Prayer for the welfare of the world and for those who suffer, are in any trouble or have died.

There are also spontaneous prayers offered throughout the day, for the need of a loved one or in confession. And there are those moments of silence and meditation when the prayer simple rests in the presence of the Divine, whether it is behind the wheel of a car, in response to a beautiful sunset, or on a meditation stool as part of a daily practice. 

All of these forms of prayer make up a conversation with God—a conversation as unique as we are and the basis for our transformation into the beings God intended us to be.  Through a dialogue with God—if we are open to it—we can learn about ourselves and our place in the world. 

For centuries, people of faith have stopped throughout the day to pray, to commune with God. The way we pray, what we pray for, and how often we pray, says something about how we understand our place in the world and who we believe God to be. 

If we are to be co-creators with God in realizing the dream God had for the world at its creation—a place of unity, mutuality, and beauty—we must know ourselves.  We must understand our gifts, talents, and passions, our shortcomings and our dark places. We must know God—God’s love, grace, strength, comfort, and encouragement. In the same way that we are in relationship with those we love, we must be in relationship with God, through prayer. 

George Herbert says the following in his poem “Prayer”:

“God’s breath in man returning to his birth, The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage. . .reversed thunder. . .A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear; Softness, and peace, and joy, and love and bliss,  . . . Heaven in ordinary man . . . the soul’s blood . . .” 

Do progressive Christians pray?  Yes, because our prayer informs our action. Our prayer is as important as our action.

Christi Humphrey ’08 is the Director of Alumni/ae and Constituent Engagement at Episcopal Divinity School and a certified spiritual director and ministry developer.

Why Progressive Christians Need to Pray

This blog post is the second in a series of three posts inspired by the most popular post from the archive of 99Brattle, “Do Progressive Christians Pray?” by Chris Glaser, published two years ago. The first installment was by Margaret Bullitt-Jonas ’88 and the third installment will be released next week.

By Dr. Kwok Pui Lan

Prayer, meditation, and contemplation are pathways to God. During these moments, we are less obsessed with ourselves and the world around us, as we dwell in the loving kindness of the one who creates us and calls us into being.

Progressive Christians have to learn to pray, so that we will not lose heart. The world’s suffering is immense and our human effort doesn’t seem to make a dent. Prayer is a discipline, through which we learn to cultivate our hearts and minds to believe in the impossible, to hold out for hope, and to listen to the voice from the whirlwind.

Over the years I have taught generations of students about the spiritual life. They have taught me about the vulnerability of the spirit, the weakness of the flesh, the restlessness of the soul, and the bottom pit of despair. From them I learn the importance of prayer, the solace of God’s healing, and the companionship we need to walk the spiritual path together.

Prayer is more than “asking God for something.” Prayer opens up a vista. The German mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg wrote, “It draws God who is great into a heart which is small.” Many spiritual teachers, past and present, have taught me how to pray and I would like to share some of the best advice I have received and invite readers to share theirs.

Prayer transforms us, not God. Chris Glaser has taught progressive Christians to pray and written a practical guide to prayer. He points out that the Desert Fathers and Mothers believed that prayer is about our transformation, not God’s. “When we pray for someone who is ill or in prison or mistreated, I do not believe God “fixes” these things, but that we become better caregivers, liberators, and advocates,” he writes.    

Jesus teaches about prayer beyond words. Franciscan priest and best-selling author Richard Rohr was the Kellogg Lecturer at the Episcopal Divinity School some years ago. I was so mesmerized by his lectures that I bought two of his books afterward. In Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, he says that Jesus has taught us to pray with words—the Lord’s Prayer. But many of us forget that Jesus also taught prayer beyond words: “praying in secret” (Matt. 6:5-6), “not babbling on as the pagans do” (Matt. 6:7), and the “predawn, lonely prayer of Jesus (Mark 1:35). These are pointers toward what we would call contemplation today.

Prayer for serenity. Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer is well-known: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.” While progressive Christians want to transform the world, Niebuhr’s Christian realism reminds us to accept with humility that there are things we can’t possibly change. Serenity comes when we know that it is ultimately not up to us, but God. In his original version of the prayer, Niebuhr included the Zen-like advice, “Living one day at a time. Enjoyment one moment at a time.”

Ecstasy in prayer. No one has described their prayerful and spiritual life in more ecstatic and joyful language than the mystics. Too often we think of prayer in terms of meekness of the soul and restrained emotions. But the mystics open a window to a spiritual life full of passion and buoyed with love. Mechthild of Magdeburg prayed, “Lord, you are my lover, my longing, my flowing stream, my sun, and I am your reflection.” Catherine of Siena prayed to the Holy Spirit, “come into my heart; draw it to Thee by Thy power, O my God, and grant me charity with filial fear. Preserve me, O ineffable Love, from every evil thought; warm me, inflame me with Thy dear love.”

Prayer as blessing. The Irish philosopher and poet John O’Donohue draws on Celtic spiritual tradition and blends elegant, poetic language with spiritual insights. One of his many books has the loving title, To Bless the Space Between Us. He observes, “A blessing evokes a privileged intimacy. . . A blessing is not a sentiment or a question; it is a gracious invocation where the human heart pleads with the divine heart.” In one of the blessings, he invokes:

            May we discover

            Beneath our fear

Embers of anger

To kindle justice.

The universe responds. Alice Walker grew up in Georgia attending church with her family. Later, she became interested in Native American spirituality and Buddhist meditation. In The Same River Twice, she talks about honoring the difficult and records a trying moment in her professional life and separation from her lover. Toward the end of the book, she says we may pray to God and the divine with many names. For her, the intention is not to have God answer prayers, but to beseech the universe to respond.

Kwok Pui Lan is the William F. Cole Professor of Christian Theology and Spirituality at the Episcopal Divinity School and her most recent book  Occupy Religion: Theology of the Multitude is published by Rowman and Littlefield.

Do Progressive Christians Pray?

By Chris Glaser

Jesus told his disciples “a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.” It was the story of a widow seeking justice from an unjust judge, a judge who cared neither for God nor people. For awhile the judge refuses, but finally concludes, “Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming” (Luke 18:4-5). Jesus’ point is that no one should feel discouraged in praying, because God is all the more swift to grant justice.

The first Christian contemplatives took the notion of “praying always” to heart, and went out into the desert to pray, to preserve the “edge” of Christian faith even as church and state colluded in the fourth century. As Thomas Merton explained in The Wisdom of the Desert,

“The Coptic hermits who left the world as though escaping from a [ship]wreck did not merely intend to save themselves. They knew that they were helpless to do any good for others as long as they floundered about in the wreckage. But once they got a foothold on solid ground, things were different. Then they had not only the power but even the obligation to pull the whole world to safety after them.”

The Desert Fathers and Mothers believed prayer was not about changing God’s mind or heart, but about their own transformation. God brings justice and mercy into the world one person at a time.

Prayer and meditation serve as grounding for those of us who seek the transformation of the world. This passion for transformation is one aspect of progressive Christianity. Another aspect is that we use our minds, our critical faculties, to approach our faith—texts, tradition, history, present, and future. But in the use of our minds we must not lose heart. We are not spiteful children who run around proclaiming “There is no Santa Claus!” to innocents. We are faithful people who affirm spiritual truths without literalist trappings. It is true that much progressive Christianity is about de-mythologizing and deconstruction. But in so doing, our hope is to recover the ancient meanings of the stories of our faith tradition, as well as their meaning for today.

One way of recovering those ancient meanings is through prayer and reflection. To participate in the biblical dialogue about God, meaning, virtue, and so on with our hearts as well as our minds is to be an authentic and integral part of an ancient tradition that was diverse in its viewpoints, heterodox in its theologies, and multiple in its expressions.

A third aspect of progressive Christianity is that we plumb the depths of our faith even as we value other faiths, including agnosticism and atheism. Our multicultural world—not as different from the ancient world in its diversity as is often thought—offers opportunities for dialogue, not only across religious and cultural boundaries, but across disciplinary boundaries as well. Science, for example, is not an adversary, but an aid in understanding the world, religion, and spirituality itself. The way of art and literature is another.

Just as some Christians seem to have lost their minds, progressive Christians cannot lose our hearts. As Jesus said, “What benefit is there if, in gaining the whole world, we lose our soul?” We are not modern-day Gnostics who believe our “secret wisdom” will save us. Rather, we believe that knowledge frees us from superstition, sentimentality, and the “elemental spirits” that the apostle Paul confronted in Galatians. Our faith is not stupid, nor is it heartless. Prayer and meditation afford us the opportunity, as the Desert Mothers and Fathers taught, for words to descend from our minds to our hearts.

We may be dismayed at traditions that seem to have buried Jesus once more or distanced God. Scholars appropriately question and debate the authenticity of these accounts. Contemplatives discover their inspiration for the present.

* Someone in publishing recently told me that there is no market for devotional materials among progressive Christians. I was told the same thing when I began writing prayers and meditations for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer community, but have since published four such books that have enjoyed multiple printings, two of which have been translated into Spanish. Last month I began writing a contemplative blog entitled Progressive Christian Reflections (http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com).

** Chris Glaser, a minister of the Metropolitan Community Church, is the author of As My Own Soul: The Blessing of Same-Gender Marriage (Seabury, 2009) and The Final Deadline: What Death Has Taught Me about Life (Morehouse, 2010). Visit www.chrisglaser.com - Copyright © 2011 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved.