Who needs Prayer?
Ginny Wall is Spirituality Tutor at Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre, which features retreats and courses on prayer)
Who needs prayer? What’s the point of it?
In this first talk I will look at the first 2 of my questions:
Who needs prayer?
What’s the point of it?
Then in the 2nd talk, I’ll move on to my other 2 questions:
Is prayer still a precious habitation for 21st Century Friends?
How do we encounter Mystery today?
Well, first, I have to state the obvious – I am no expert in prayer. But then, if anyone tells you they are an expert in prayer, I suggest you run for your lives! So all I can do is share with you my musings and the questions that I wrestle with about prayer as well as my complete and abiding passion for it!
Then, who am I to speak about prayer? Well, actually, who am I not to? There is nothing more important. It cuts to the very heart of what it is to be human.
A quick potted biography of me reveals that:
I have Catholic roots, which I actively water these days
I’ve been a Quaker since my late 20s
I’ve explored and still benefit hugely from learning and practising with Buddhists
I’ve spent fruitful time exploring feminist theology, Goddess prayers and aboriginal traditions
This will give you a flavour of some of the places I come from & I hope you will bear with me if my approach isn’t yours! Perhaps some of what I say is a bit controversial among post-modern liberal Friends – even using the ‘prayer’ word feels a bit risky sometimes. But you asked me & I can only say what is true as I experience it.
I’ll use God language. I hope sensitively and inclusively but, for me, that’s a meaningful way to name the Mystery at the heart of life and beyond all words. On occasions, non-theist Friends have expressed to me a wish that we would stop using this language, but I confess that I cannot. That I can use God language at all is a gift of my time among Friends, as I was pretty allergic to it by the time I was in my mid 20s! Especially when speaking of prayer, it is the painfully reclaimed language of my heart. It allows me to speak of life, of what it is to be human, in terms of relationship with that mystery. I’m with our Friend Beth Allen when she said ‘Speaking of God as a person does not reduce God to being a person.’ (Ground and Spring p42)
So, who needs prayer? I do.
What’s the point of it? It saves my life.
I’d like to share with you something of what I mean!
We humans are both profoundly blessed and profoundly broken beings. We have the capacity to be one with All That Is, to experience profound Love and connection to people, animals, creation, God. Yet we also feel small, insecure, fearful. We are wounded and wrongheaded most of the time. This leads us to act in ways that hurt us and others as we spin in circles trying to make the fear go away, trying to be in control, trying to heal ourselves.
This is what the Christian tradition explains in the allegorical story of Adam and Eve and the ‘fall’: the original oneness with God; then Adam & Eve’s dawning consciousness – awareness of themselves, their appetite for knowledge; all this leading to a terrible sense of separation from God. Here we see the birth of what Thomas Merton, 20th Century monk and writer, called the ‘false self’ as compared to the ‘true self’ that remains in oneness with God. We might also think of it as the ego and the person that we truly are. It’s not to say that our self-consciousness and ego have not been necessary in our development as beings – they have – but that they are only useful up to a point, and then we have to get beyond them!
Well prayer is about going beyond the ego and becoming who we truly are, rooted in the Divine Reality. About letting go of the false self and living in our true self. That’s what Jesus did. That’s what Buddha found in enlightenment under the Bodhi Tree. That’s why it saves our lives.
17th Century Quaker Isaac Penington described beautifully what we must do in prayer:
Give over thine own willing, give over thine own running,
Give over thine own desiring to know or be anything,
And sink down to the seed which God sows in thy heart
And let that be in thee, and grow in thee,
And breathe in thee, and act in thee,
And thou shalt find by sweet experience
that the Lord knows that and loves and owns that,
And will lead it to the inheritance of life, which is God’s portion.
The hold of the false self is so strong that you’ll never be able to go beyond it without practice, perhaps a lifetime of practice! Unless you’re one of those few graced individuals who have sudden realisations of Oneness, for most of us it means constant, faithful practice. Because as soon as we let go a little bit, the ego hangs on somewhere else. It is, we are so full of fear. So even if we let go of our worldly desires, say for possessions, success, good health, knowledge, having our way, our ego will only attach to something else. How about superior objects of desire such as spiritual purity, peace making, being free of clutter, saving people or the planet, enlightenment even? For me, it’s saving the world! For you, it might be something different.
Not that any of these things is wrong or bad! But it’s our clinging to them, our attachment to them that cripples us, and keeps us in the hold of our false self. When we practise letting go in prayer, we gradually learn to let God be God, to let the Spirit move through us into the world in ways that are beyond our knowing or choosing. Hence the need to ‘give up thine own willing’ again…and again…and again.
It’s in the giving up our own willing that God has a chance! The chink in our armour, sometimes in moments of bliss but often in the broken places, is where the Light shines through. We get glimpses of our true self, the self that is in God, or One with All That Is. That’s what Jesus was on about when he said “On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.” (John 14:20). Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh calls it interbeing.
So, prayer opens us to the Light. John Main, a Benedictine monk who was a great 20th Century teacher of contemplative prayer in the form of Christian meditation, wrote:
The greatest difficulty is to begin, to take the first step and launch out into the depth reality of God… Once we have left the shore of our self we soon pick up the currents of reality that give us our direction and momentum. The more active and attentive we are, the more sensitively we respond to these currents. And so the more absolute and truly spiritual our faith becomes. By stillness in the spirit we move in the ocean of God. If we have the courage to push off from the shore we will not fail to find this direction and energy. The further out we travel the stronger the current becomes, and the deeper our faith. For a while faith is challenged by the paradox that the horizon of our destination seems to be always receding. Where are we going with this deeper faith? When will we arrive? Then gradually we recognize the meaning of the current that guides us and see that the ocean is infinite.
Perhaps that’s part of why we ask ‘What’s the point?’ We expect to arrive somewhere. We even hope to get good at this prayer business. When in fact we find ourselves exactly where we started. But gradually what dawns on us is that we are experiencing life with a profoundly changed awareness.
20th Century American Quaker Douglas Steere said:
In prayer it is a matter of being present where we are…..
To pray is to pay attention to the deepest thing that we know …
Prayer is the space in which we become truly human.
When we open ourselves to even the possibility of prayer, we open ourselves to a deep yearning we all have – a yearning for wholeness, for life in its fullest, for God. Thomas Merton wrote “Prayer then means yearning for the simple presence of God.” (Silence, Solitude, Simplicity p118). In the Christian tradition, this yearning, or desire, is central to our journey into Oneness:
Psalm 42:2-3
Like the deer that yearns
for running streams,
so my soul is yearning
for you, my God.
My soul is thirsting for God,
the God of my life;
when can I enter and see
the face of God?
or St Augustine: ‘My God, set me on fire’
The amazing thing about this yearning of ours is that it is already a response. The point is that prayer is not our action, our inititative (there goes that ego again!), but our response to the initiative of the Spirit, of grace. In fact 20th Century theologian Karl Rahner defined prayer as “ultimately the loving response – somehow made explicit – which accepts God’s will to love.” (Silence, Solitude, Simplicity p111)
This is why for me prayer is such a passion – it’s about giving time and attention to the Beloved, to Beauty, to Life. It’s about allowing Mystery to hold me in love, and about allowing myself to feel held.
Isaac Penington expresses the soul’s desire for life in these words:
And this my soul waits and cries after, even the full springing up of eternal love in my heart, and in the swallowing of me wholly into it, and the bringing of my soul wholly forth in it, that the life of God in its own perfect sweetness may fully run forth through this vessel (The Spirit of the Quakers p98)
Prayer changes us. It transforms us. It Christs us. Well, of course, this kind of deep transformation that leads us to Life is something that the ego or false self will resist at all costs, including at the cost of our very life in God. It feels the reins of supposed control slipping, and it is so scared of losing. It will tell us there’s no point in praying! Douglas Steere said “If to pray means to change, it is no wonder that men, even devoted men, hurry to fashion protective clothing, leaden aprons that resist all radiation, even beam-proof shelters within corporate religious exercises in order to elude the “beams of love” and stay as they are.” (Intro to The Climate of Monastic Prayer p13).
And in order for this deep transformation to take place, there will be challenges, pain even, as we let go of our attachments and old, engrained ways of being. Margaret Fell described how the Light will “rip you up, and lay you open” (To Be Broken & Tender p141). That’s not a comfortable experience, but it is part of the cleansing effect of prayer.
American Friend Parker J Palmer expresses it thus:
Contemplation may lead eventually to bliss, but first it will give us the pain of knowing that some of our dearest convictions are shallow, inadequate, wrong. Contemplation first deprives us of familiar comforts. Then it replaces them with an inner emptiness in which new truth, often alien and unsettling truth, can emerge. The contemplative journey from illusion to reality may have peace as its destination, but en route it usually passes through some fearsome places.
So who needs that?
Well, every last one of us, if we are not to remain blind, separate, ruled by the world and our ego. It’s exhausting and terrifying feeling like you’re in it alone, whether ‘it’ is the enormity of being alive on this lump of rock spinning silently in space or the specifics of getting yourself out of bed some mornings, coping with a difficult relationship, service on a committee, illness, family demands, or working to make the world a better place. Douglas Steere said “Prayer if it is real is an acknowledgement of our finitude, our need, our openness to be changed, our readiness to be surprised, yes astonished by the “beams of love.” (Intro to The Climate of Monastic Prayer p14). That acknowledgement is our opening to Life.
What’s the point?
It’ll save your life, your true life. Our prayer may be hopelessly distracted, or at times painful and challenging, even seem utterly pointless. But this is the way to freedom. If we stumble on faithfully, we will find gradually an awareness that we are being prayed, not praying. That we are being held, not holding on. How we express that experience in words matters very little, but the experience teaches all that we need to know to live, and live life abundantly.
When we allow the Spirit in through prayer, our walls, our sense of abandonment and separateness, our woundedness and wrongheadedness begin to lose their grip on us. We begin to find a deep, inexpressible joy in the ordinary, the everyday, the people around us, the life that we have. This freedom is expressed through us in loving, compassionate action in the world.
Is prayer still a precious habitation for 21st Century Friends? How do we encounter Mystery today?
By way of introduction, I should give you the quote from 18th Century American Friend John Woolman to which my first question refers:
The place of prayer is a precious habitation ….. I saw this habitation to be safe, to be inwardly quiet, when there were great stirrings and commotions in the world.
I’ll come back to that quote later on.
Well, in the first half of this evening we considered my first 2 questions, which related to prayer in a general way:
Who needs prayer?
What’s the point of it?
Now I’ll move on to my other 2 questions which are more specifically about what is going on with Quakers and prayer:
Is prayer still a precious habitation for 21st Century Friends?
How do we encounter Mystery today?
“Oh Lord help us, we’re in a fix.”
Those were the words uttered in ministry by Barrow Cadbury, an elderly British Friend, at a moment of impasse in the deliberations of the Friends World Conference in Oxford in 1952. Well, those words, quoted by Douglas Steere in something I was reading recently (Intro to The Climate of Monastic Prayer p22), really struck home with me as expressing the state of play with British Friends and prayer.
Oh Lord help us, we’re in a fix.
My sense from talking to Friends, leading courses at Woodbrooke and in meetings, and being part of the Becoming Friends online learning community is that ‘prayer’ has become a toxic word and, worse, a worrying notion in the minds of a significant number of British Quakers. Do you use the word ‘prayer’ without flinching or embarrassment? I can’t say that I do, even though I’m paid to talk about it! Why is this?
Well, I think it is in part about not wanting to look like a ‘superstitious fool’ in the eyes of the secular, unbelieving world. But also, I have come to realise that for many Friends there is an implied theology to the word ‘prayer’ that they have difficulty with. It seems to suggest to them the old-man-in-the-sky kind of deity which they have, understandably, rejected. Or that ‘prayer’ is all about praying for people or things, and we all know that that is not only pointless but implies an interventionist kind of God, whom we also reject as an outmoded and unhelpful idea some time ago.
But I suspect that we have become so keen to move on from outmoded notions of prayer and God, that we’ve thrown the baby out with the bath water. I worry that our collective ego is convincing us that Meeting for Worship is enough. That being a good person and living by the testimonies is enough. That we don’t need prayer. That we don’t need our lives to be saved! You see, we flinch at the word ‘salvation’ too – but what if it’s about the kind of being saved that we talked about earlier on this evening, the kind of salvation that means our lives being saved by letting go of the false self and living in our true self?
Hugh Valentine (quoted by Brenda Heales & Chris Cook in their Swarthmore Lecture Images and Silence p41) said:
It is as though there is a deep resistance within us to the very idea of encounter with God…Do we resist and take refuge in notions?
I am certainly painfully aware of my tendency to take refuge in notions, either of God, or of who I am, who you are, what is real, what language is acceptable to me. I see this among Friends too, particularly when our experience of God is being discussed and matters of theism/non-theism raise their heads. These are very tender issues for us at the moment.
When I work with a group of Friends on retreat, there is often a tendency to break into discussion mode, to bring in our intellectual, seeking-refuge-in-notions behaviour, rather than stay with an opening to something that cannot be put into words. For people who say we like silence, we also seem to like to talk about ineffable things an awful lot!
It’s not just individual prayer that we’re having difficulty with. Not surprising, the other aspect of prayer that is tricky for us is anything involving words in a shared setting. How often have you experienced someone uttering words of prayer as ministry in meeting for worship, or other gathering of British Friends in recent years? I suspect not very often if at all. If verbal prayer of this kind has taken place, how often has it been addressed to God in the second person as ‘you’, rather than the perhaps safer third person as in ‘I pray that there will be an end to all war or that so-and-so will be better soon’?
In British Quaker circles, God is referenced in the third person, if at all, thereby being relegated once more to the distance, perhaps to being distant ‘sky god’ whom we mostly agree we hope to have outgrown. So how can we, or do we, experience the ‘Presence in the Midst’ when we gather as a community? We seem to have lost the ‘Thou’ of God, described by Martin Buber as part of an essential I-Thou relationship between each of us and the Divine. I resonated with our Friend Felicity Kaal’s conclusion in her recent Friends Quarterly Competition essay about the need to reclaim this ‘second person’ God. She stated that post-modern British Friends have embraced the internalised ‘1st person’ God experienced within oneself as our deepest truth, higher self or soul and the 3rd person God experienced as present in the web of life, but have rejected the second person God experienced as a person or being to whom we surrender in love. If this is the case, and I agree with Felicity that this is a crucial issue for us, then what impact does this have for our prayer life? She says that “the danger of having no 2nd person God is that it encourages the ego inflation…that is so prevalent in postmodern culture.” (FQ 2010 #2 p73)
And deflating or going beyond the ego, as we discussed earlier on, is at the very heart of prayer. No wonder it isn’t always a very comfortable habitation for us!
I am sorry to say that I find myself bemoaning this state of affairs sometimes. But I am reminded of the wise words of Barbara Taylor Bradford:
When someone asks us where we want to be in our lives, the last thing that occurs to us is to look down at our feet and say, ‘Here, I guess, since this is where I am.’ (An Altar in the World p56)
Here we are then. Like Moses, Elijah and those others before us who stopped and listened to the still, small voice of God in their very circumstances, exactly where they were – be it by a burning bush or hiding in a cave. Maybe this place with all our difficulties about prayer and God language is exactly where we British Friends need to be right now. Maybe we should be taking off our shoes, as this is holy ground. The Spirit is at work among us right here, right now. This time of brokenness could be just one of those places where the Light can enter our lives, if we let it happen.
I was struck forcibly by this quote from early Friend Mary Penington, whose experience as an individual in the 1600s seems to speak to our 21st Century Quaker condition:
O, the distress I felt at this time! Having never dared to kneel down to pray for years, because I could not in truth call God father, and dared not mock or be formal in the thing. Sometimes I should be melted into tears, and feel inexpressibly tenderness; and then, not knowing from whence it proceeded, and being ready to judge all religion, I thought it was some influence from the planets…; but dared not to own anything in me to be of God, or that I felt any influence of his good spirit upon my heart; but I was like the parched heath, and the hunted hart for water, so great was my thirst after that which I did not believe was near me. (The Spirit of the Quakers p119)
We are not alone! Others before us have experienced this place of turmoil and resistance to the encounter with God. The good news is that resistance to letting go into God, into our true self, into depth reality is as old as the hills! There are ways through this impasse. The Spirit always finds one.
So, what is the Spirit up to among Friends in Britain? Who knows? I have an awful lot to learn about letting go and letting God get on with it. But I do know that the way I try to deal with this tendency of my ego to hang on tight is to pray. To practice letting go, to allow myself to experience feeling held, feeling loved, feeling the ground of my being holding me up. What about praying as Friends together? I don’t mean meeting for worship where we wait for ministry, so we’re in a different place spiritually, and where I think we are sometimes stuck in the shallows. But praying together, whether it be shared meditation, contemplative prayer, embodied or creative practices, that really leads us into letting go.
My very favourite quote from Quaker Faith & Practice ( 27.43) is that lovely one from A Barratt Brown where he says:
In particular, we need to ask ourselves whether we are endeavouring to make all the daily happenings and doings of life which we call ‘secular’ minister to the spiritual. It is a bold and colossal claim that we put forward – that the whole of life is sacramental, that there are innumerable ‘means of grace’ by which God is revealed and communicated
Well, this seems to me to ask for prayer! To develop a regular practice of deliberately opening ourselves to the Mystery at the heart of life is the clearest channel to this experience of grace in all things. God is always pouring out grace into the world, boldly and colossally. But what folly if we don’t take the steps necessary to experience it!
As Quakers, we say that “the point is not whether you believe in God, but whether you encounter the Divine. And if so, how?” These are the words of Geoffrey Durham (‘The Spirit of the Quakers’ p4). Yes indeed. The encounter with the Divine is where the love affair takes place, where we can be consumed with passion, learn to surrender to love and be transformed utterly. Without this deep encounter with Mystery, we are horribly prey to our ego and its illusions of spiritual ‘progress’ or ‘notions’ of God.
How shall we do it? Any way that opens us to the Light. On our own and with others. Using words sometimes, and learning to rejoice in one another’s truths and translate one another’s words. This can be our strength. The other side of the coin of our present weakness over words about God.
How shall we speak of it? I don’t know, but I am certain that we must speak to one another about our encounter with Mystery. For if the whole of life is sacred, then it is all God language!
Simone Weil, 20th Century mystic, said “absolutely unmixed attention is prayer” (Thomas Merton: master of attention p2). We must pay this kind of loving attention to our everyday lives and activities, other people, our own thoughts and illusions. We may find mindfulness or contemplative practices helpful in doing this. In fact, those prayer practices of deep loving attention are doing exactly what Barbara Taylor Bradford spoke of in that quote earlier – looking down at our feet (or breath, or hands etc), noticing the holiness of the ground we’re already standing on, learning to say ‘here is where I want to be with all my heart, since here is where I am’. I would add – and here is the only place to encounter the Divine.
Someone once said that “prayer is to religion what original research is to science” (P T Forsythe – Climate of Monastic Prayer p18). Without this kind of cutting edge prayer, which we talk to one another about in a spirit of loving tenderness, we Quakers are in a fix!
The funny thing is that the quote from John Woolman at the start of this talk is usually quoted with a big bit missing from the middle. I’d like to tell you what was missing now:
The place of prayer is a precious habitation; for I now saw that the prayers of the saints were precious incense; and a trumpet was given to me that I might sound forth this language; that the children might hear it and be invited together to this precious habitation, where the prayers of saints, as sweet incense, arise before the throne of God and the Lamb. I saw this habitation to be safe, to be inwardly quiet, when there were great stirrings and commotions in the world. (‘The Spirit of the Quakers’ p37)
We are all those saints whose prayers arise like incense to the holy places. And we can all play that trumpet like John (!) to invite one another to this precious habitation. It’s not just a place of quiet withdrawal, but an experience that leads you to joyful interaction with the world, to communication of what you have discovered, to interrelatedness. To freedom in God.
Ginny Wall, 22 June 2011