Amen

What Prayer Can Mean in a World Beyond Belief

Gretta Vosper

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781554686483
• eBook ISBN:
  9781443411219
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

For many people, prayer is an essential part of daily life, connecting them with God, a force or the universe, bringing them, among other things, assistance and protection. Others cannot imagine being so dependent upon a concept they can neither justify nor comprehend.

In Amen, Gretta Vosper, United Church minister and author of the controversial bestseller With or Without God, offers us her deeply felt examination of worship beyond conventional prayer, and a call to a new tradition that can survive beyond the beliefs that divide.

PART ONE

IN A WORLD OF BELIEFS

1
TROUBLE AT THE CORE

They reach for strings of beads. They spin colourful wheels. They light candles. They raise their arms. They hold one another’s hands. They wave smoke toward their faces and over their bodies. They bow their heads. They hang flags on string and leave them to fade into the wind. They stand before a community and open their hearts. They dance. They set lights afloat on murky waters.

People of faith the world over assume such positions, enter into such actions, begin such rituals, and without a word of explanation, any who see them know that they are moving into what is for them a sacred moment. Despite the variety of postures, the task is the same: to engage in the ancient practice of prayer, which encircles the globe in many difference guises. Within what are often termed the “Abrahamic traditions,” it is characterized by a desire to be in communion with the god, God, or Allah, an otherworldly being that Jews, Christians, Muslims, Baha’is, and Unitarians recognize. Followers of Eastern traditions base their practice on theistic beliefs similar to those of the above-noted Abrahamic ones, with a particular god or gods as their focus; on temporal virtues such as non-violence; or on spiritual practices that lead to detachment or enlightenment. Aboriginal spiritual practices are predominantly pantheistic, with followers seeking guidance from gods they believe infuse the whole of the natural world. New Age devotees pray to “spirit” or the universe and seek connection with these or with otherwise latent residual powers within natural objects. Over the millennia, prayer has evolved in much the same way as birds, fish, and mammals—whatever led to greater stability, harmony, or victory in each particular context won out over other forms. So it is that we see different kinds of prayer practised in different sects, cults, religions, and geographic areas.

Whenever individuals engage in prayer, regardless of what other things they are attempting to achieve, they are identified as religious people within a particular religious tradition. Prayer is often recognized as the practice that defines whether someone is religious or not. Ludwig Feuerbach, a nineteenth-century German theologian who revealed an atheistic perspective in his later writings, wrote in his essay “The Mystery of Prayer” that “the ultimate essence of religion is revealed by the simplest act of religion—prayer.”¹ Friedrich Heiler, also a German theologian as well as a historian, used the opening paragraph of his book Prayer: A Study in the History and Psychology of Prayer, published in the early twentieth century, to emphasize that many theologians argue prayer is the defining element of religion. He quotes several to undergird his positioning of prayer as “the central phenomenon of religion, the very hearthstone of all piety.”² And in the opening section to his mid-twentieth-century collection, The Prayers of Man, the Italian anthropologist and religious historian Alfonso DiNola goes so far as to state that “the history of prayer is the history of the religious development of mankind…. Prayer is the heart, the centermost point of religion. It is not in dogmas, institutions, rites or in moral ideas that we are permitted to perceive the substance of religious life, but in prayer. Prayer is the individual and collective reaction of the religious soul when confronted with the cosmos.”³

So What Is Going On?

Okay. So it’s big. But have all the words on the subject managed to get at what is going on? It’s doubtful. While perspectives on what prayer is and does can be gleaned from the words uttered and the stance taken on the subject over the course of history, there is great discrepancy among its practitioners. Indeed, an individual might use prayer on one occasion to find shelter and on another to rail against the same deity.

The Psalms, that great poetic centre section of the Bible, offer us glimpses into the prayer lives of the ancient forebears of the Judaic, Christian, and Muslim faiths.

While I kept silence, my body wasted away

through my groaning all day long.

For day and night your hand was heavy upon me;

my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.

Selah

Then I acknowledged my sin to you,

and I did not hide my iniquity;

I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,”

and you forgave the guilt of my sin.

Selah

Therefore let all who are faithful

offer prayer to you;

at a time of distress, the rush of mighty waters

shall not reach them.

You are a hiding-place for me;

you preserve me from trouble;

you surround me with glad cries of deliverance.

Selah

Prayer, for this particular psalmist (there were several of them), was a way of lamenting the distance he’d kept from God and reaffirming his allegiance to him. God, three thousand years ago, is described as a hiding place, the shelter into which the psalmist can curl and take respite from the world. Prayer was an act of reconciliation and healing, of reclaiming that shelter.

In the seventh century CE, St. John Climacus, known as St. John of the Ladder, described the reconciliation forged through prayer less as a blessing and more as a spiritual responsibility. In Step 28 of his Ladder of Divine Ascent, he refers to prayer as “a dialogue and a union with God. Its effect is to hold the world together and to achieve a reconciliation with God.”⁴

Reformer Martin Luther, who wrote an extended letter on prayer to a barber friend, agreed. Using the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, the creeds, and the Psalter to pray, he describes a four-stranded discipline: instruction, thanksgiving, confession, prayer.⁵ Prayers of eighteenth-century French writer and philosopher Voltaire reflect the humanitarian ideals of the Enlightenment: “Thou hast not given us a heart that we may hate one another, nor hands that we may strangle one another, but that we may help each other to bear the burden of a wearisome and transitory life.”⁶

Mid-twentieth-century theologian Paul Tillich examined prayer in the context of providence (what God brings about in the world), calling it “God’s directing creativity.”⁷

Australian author Michael Morwood, silenced by the Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne in 1998 following the banning of his book Tomorrow’s Catholic, worked with Australian Christians for over thirty years and speaks about prayer as no longer to an elsewhere God but to an everywhere God. Morwood remains focused on the traditional teaching that “prayer [is] concerned with raising the mind and heart to God,” but the “raising” is to that idea of God being everywhere—an awareness of the sacred in the midst of the ordinary.⁸

Episcopal pastor and best-selling author Timothy Jones writes, in The Art of Prayer, of a friend who refers to prayer as “our ache for cosmic specialness.”⁹

Prayer, in each of these pursuits, connects humanity to the god, God. In each, it is a central element of life.

2
STRETCHING BEYOND THE CORE NARRATIVE

Lying just beneath the surface of everything humans do, choose, eat, wear, and believe are stories or narratives that, when we need them, supply the answers to our “why” questions. They identify us and help us identify one another.

We sometimes refer to these stories as myths. Myth, in this sense, is something far beyond a simple story concocted to explain a particular quirk of human behaviour or experience.¹ Instead, it’s something that carries what we believe are the foundational truths supporting our understanding of reality. For most of us, myths are stories handed to us, created by our ancestors and cultures, reinforced or tarnished by experience, tuned to or made dissonant with circumstance.

The stories that define us—the ones through which we view the world—are our core, or root, the belief systems that order not only our personal behaviour but also what we do as a group. They are a way for us to represent the ideals for which mundane words are inadequate, and in both nuanced and straightforward manner, they inform the way we live, our habitual behaviours, the reasons behind our relationships. Our stories keep us in line by laying out for us what is acceptable and what is not, positively reinforcing behaviours and norms that strengthen society and condemning those that do not.

Think about that for a moment: a core narrative moulds systems that mould human behaviour in response to them. In other words, control the core narrative and you control the people. Those who control the core narrative have the greatest power within the system. For significant portions of human history, in all parts of the world, that responsibility has been held by religious groups.

Our religious traditions have served in the past as custodians of our culture, vehicles that have carried our understanding of the universe, life, and the way we should live—our core narrative, in other words. Religion helped us make sense of the world and set our moral standards—based on the core narrative—to carefully protect us by guiding how we should behave. The core narrative that underlies a religious system helps individuals make choices by offering a lens through which to view reality. Often, those individuals are unaware of the imperceptible distortions the lens makes, and so they are unaware of the impact their core narrative has on their lives.

A religious tradition offers a lens through which believers not only see the world but also view themselves as actors in the root narrative. If their role in the narrative is as individuals who are inherently good, they will act and pray very differently than if they see themselves as inherently bad. It matters if we see ourselves as blessed or cursed, as perfect or flawed, as isolated and alone, or as connected to everything in the universe that has gone before or ever will be. Religion has over millennia laid out a root narrative that has helped us make our moral choices, find our place in community, and recognize those who share that narrative with us.

CORE DIFFERENCES

Of course, we all know that considerable variety has developed within the overall religious root narrative. For instance, we may believe that there is a benevolent being who set the world in order but no longer alters that world or engages us. If so, we may move through our lives recognizing the wonder around us, appreciating its beauty, and praising its maker, while also cursing the laws of entropy, gravity, Gumperson,* and any others that seem to drag us down at every turn. But we will neither wait for nor expect things to be changed by some supernatural force.

On the other hand, if our core narrative had that deity able to intervene in the world on a grand scale, sending us signs of his or her intentions from time to time, we might live with a higher confidence that, were things to get really bad, our god, God, would care enough about us to pluck us from the jaws of destruction. We’d live our lives lulled by the sense of our ultimate security.

Include in God’s repertoire of powers the ability to intervene not just in cosmic events but in our personal affairs, and you’ll find that we spend a lot of time trying to figure out which things really get her or his attention as we seek to gain favour or avoid disaster. Now tack on to our narrative a little afterword about the afterlife. Include in it the concept of a judgment day, at which time we’re going to have to account for the choices we made throughout our lives. Or build into it the concept of karma or reincarnation, either of which will make sure we get repaid in a manner appropriate to the choices we make while alive. What’s important, then, is figuring out which choices are good and which are bad. If we can’t distinguish what we should do from what we shouldn’t, how will we ever prepare ourselves for the coming of that day?

Every great religious tradition has argued that special documents, available for use down through the millennia, are able to clear up that little problem by identifying just what is true and what is false, what is right and what is wrong. When the issues become complex or when clarity within the sacred documents obscures, those same traditions have had trained and able religious officials willing to interpret the intentions of the deity for us. That there have been staggering discrepancies between what one religious official and the next has said, rather than causing us to pause and question the validity of the perspective, has only reinforced the strength of our choices, our preferences, our prejudices. We rarely question, though we always choose.

CORE MELTDOWN

Now, of course, this raises the question “If our religious documents told us that murder was okay, would we raise it up as a virtue rather than a sin?” You might think no comes as a natural answer, but it doesn’t. The answer is sometimes yes and sometimes no.

Think about it for a minute. Almost all of us have seen smeared across our TV screens the scattered remains of vehicles, restaurants, and communities hit by suicide bombers. You may have even seen footage of the bombers’ farewell videos, in which they have spoken about how excited they are to be doing the will of their god. That’s an example of upholding the divine command as a virtue, even when that command is to murder.

It’s easy to point fingers at “other” religious systems and identify in their texts dangerous images, outrageous commands, and shameful conditions espoused by their gods and prophets. Indeed, it was just that distrust of the writings of Mohammed, sacred to the people of Islam, that sent Terry Jones over the edge in the summer of 2010. The pastor of a tiny church in Gainesville, Florida, Jones caught international attention when his plan to burn the Koran on the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center was publicized by an Islamophobia watchdog.

A few days before September 11 of that year, I began writing an article addressing the issues raised by the congregation in Florida. I hoped, at the time, that nothing would come of Jones’ threat, that he would decide against going ahead with his plan to “honour” the 9/11 victims by putting the sacred writings of Islam’s prophet to the torch. The day passed. The fire was not lit. But demonstrations around the world ended in deaths and injuries, and brought to the fore the destructive force of vitriolic religious debate.

As members of the Florida congregation gathered tinder for their incendiary gesture, religious and spiritual progressives, such as those in the Network of Spiritual Progressives, of which I am a member, decided upon their own gesture—agreeing to gather together to read from one another’s holy books. The action was intended to symbolize what the three Abrahamic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—have in common, to highlight respect and tolerance, and to expose Pastor Jones’ threats as the intolerant rant of a dangerous fundamentalist religious mind—something most, I think, already knew.

But let’s take a look at some of what could have been read from those same books at the Saturday gatherings of such interfaith heroes as Michael Lerner of the Network of Spiritual Progressives. If the following passages had been read, people gathered to hear what Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have in common might have been quite shocked.

From the Tanakh:

If you hear it said about one of the towns the Lord your God is giving you to live in that troublemakers have arisen among you and have led the people of their town astray, saying, “Let us go and worship other gods” (gods you have not known), then you must inquire, probe and investigate it thoroughly. And if it is true and it has been proved that this detestable thing has been done among you, you must certainly put to the sword all who live in that town. You must destroy it completely, both its people and its livestock. You are to gather all the plunder of the town into the middle of the public square and completely burn the town and all its plunder as a whole burnt offering to the Lord your God. That town is to remain a ruin forever, never to be rebuilt, and none of the condemned things are to be found in your hands. (Deut. 13:12-17a)

From the Christian Bible:

Then the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? Whe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION WHAT ABOUT PRAYER?
• PART ONE: IN A WORLD OF BELIEFS
• PART TWO: IN A WORLD STILL TIED TO BELIEFS
• PART THREE: IN A WORLD OF EXPOSED BELIEFS
• PART FOUR: IN A WORLD BEYOND BELIEF
• PART FIVE: IN A WORLD IN NEED
• EPILOGUE
• NOTES
• INDEX
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• About the Author
• Advance Praise for Amen
• Copyright
• About the Publisher