Sunday, December 17, 2006
Emerging Prayer & Faith
I have been reflecting over the difficulties many of us emerging church type Christians have with prayer, and making all sorts of connections with what we have been learning from Trinitarian theology – in terms of joining in with what God is already doing.A huge connection was made for me when Gareth and I discussed through our rhythm of life with Moot's Bishop Richard. Wisely he talked about Moot’s mission to assist people to find God and so become citizens of the Kingdom, and then the need to become Christian contemplatives to discern God in complex times as well as to sustain a deeply Christian Spiritual life – reflected in our rhythm.
So for me, being Christian, becoming more human, is about having a committed and deep spiritual life that lies behind my and I would say Moot’s calling to go deeper with God in what we do. An act of head and heart, a pursuit of thinking and feeling – a pursuit that is relational, creative, artistic and emotional long before it is rational.
I immediately hear the dissenting voices, ‘I don’t believe in prayer’, ‘It’s too transactional’, ‘Its too much about projection’. I do agree that many of us have experienced plainly wrong forms of prayer, which are not about relationship with God, not about encountering God, but purely functional expressions of want.
I heard this through Jane Williams through some lecturing I partook in last week. I have found it deeply helpful and connects with this sense of us needing to rethink prayer – as we have said before – in refinding ancient forms of contemplative prayer reframed for being postmoderm pilgrims.
I quote:
‘Why do we pray? God already knows everything, so isn’t it presumptuous to think we could somehow “get” God to do something? Is prayer just between us and God, with us as pitiful creatures abject before the Almighty, hoping to wring some little concession from the divine mercy? Certainly, we have more than a few clues that this is a false picture indeed. Jesus taught the disciples that the first words to say in prayer are “Our Father”, so our prayer must be something we do in fellowship with Jesus, namely talking with his Father and ours. In turn, that means we are talking not to an anonymous and inscrutable deity but to someone Jesus knows intimately and whom we are being invited to know in him. We have Paul’s numerous references to the role of the Holy Spirit in our prayer, particularly in his letter to the Romans. “For we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words” (Romans 8.26). Paul suggests that we better give up the idea that we are the ones praying at all…If God is God because of the loving communion of the Trinity, then when we pray we are invited more deeply into this exchange of love. Prayer is really God happening in us, you could say, or – more accurately – our coming into fuller being as we pray in the divine communion. So when we ask for things in prayer, we are not trying to coax God into doing something God has never thought of until we happened along with the bright idea. Instead, God is trying to renew our minds and hearts in the likeness of the divine yearning.”
(Mark McIntosh, Mysteries of Faith, Cowley Press, 2000, pp.45-7)The outcome of this type of prayer is a deep spirituality that encourages us to become co-lovers of others and our world with God. So that we move from being selfish consumers to generous givers, we move from myworld to Gods world, we move from cynicism to hope bringers, from inner desert to inner oasis and so on.
So unlike Judaism, Islam and all the the faiths – Christianity is unique in this God who is both paradoxically transcendent and imminent to and with us, beckons us to follow this way of love and passion – even for our enemies. So at this time of the festival of the incarnation of the God made flesh – let us re-enter a time of second innocence – to put aside our doubts and catch up with God who resides beyond the captivation of our hypotheses, and therefore find a spiritual centredness to our lives.
So unlike Judaism, Islam and all the the faiths – Christianity is unique in this God who is both paradoxically transcendent and imminent to and with us, beckons us to follow this way of love and passion – even for our enemies. So at this time of the festival of the incarnation of the God made flesh – let us re-enter a time of second innocence – to put aside our doubts and catch up with God who resides beyond the captivation of our hypotheses, and therefore find a spiritual centredness to our lives.
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