I'm co-leading an adult group through “Unbinding Your Heart,” a book/process that focusses on evangelism and prayer. This morning, I encountered an arresting line in the book, “What's at the heart of life with God? A powerful relationship between each one of us and the Trinity.” The heart of our life with God is our relationship with an abstract theological construct? That's not the way people work. It struck me as an awkward, peculiarly mainline Protestant way of talking. And then, perhaps exceeding the author's attempt at elegant variation, a fruitful one.
To whom do we pray? Evangelicals pray directly to Jesus, who is to them the person of God. Catholics (at least, according my Lutheran catechetical instruction) pray to a favorite saint, as an intercessor between them and an God. Jews and Muslims pray directly to the one God, who Christians equate to the Father/Creator person of the Trinity. But for mainline Protestants, it's not so clear that there's such a consensus. My intuition is that they're lead in prayer to Jesus when they're very young, but that they don't often build a sense of a personal relationship. As they enter the teen years, when relationships with authority figures of all sorts are often strained, and reinforced by catechetical experiences that tend to be academic and theological, they drift into addressing such prayers as they offer to a de-personalized God, which mostly equates to the Father. Then, in late middle age, as what their life will be becomes more and more a function of the choices they've made than the choices they'll make, they rediscover Jesus in prayer.
Contemporary mainline Protestants often struggle with prayer. We sometimes seem to face a chasm between the prayer life we know, which may be infrequent and unsatisfying, and the vibrant life of prayer that we feel we should have, and which we sometimes witness (with both discomfort and envy) in our evangelical friends. How can we get from here to there? If we try to jump the chasm, will we fail the trial of faith?
One strategy is to enter into prayer through a conscious discipline. Pray a Psalm. Structure prayers as if they were Psalms, following a formula such as “adoration, supplication, thanksgiving, intercession, confession.” I think that this a productive strategy, and I'd like to build upon it by suggesting a supplementary discipline, inspired by that awkward notion of our relationship with the Trinity as the heart of our life with God. Let me suggest praying in turn to each of the persons of the Trinity. I think if we took this seriously, these prayers would be different. Our prayers to the Father might emphasize adoration, supplication, and thanksgiving. Our prayers to Jesus might emphasize confession and intercession. And our prayers to the Spirit? They would emphasize our desire to follow God's will, and for us and others to be inspired in love to do the work he's set out for us.
The advantage of being smaller in scope is that this kind of prayer would encourage us to go deeper. The advantage of rotation is that it gives our entire prayer life (if not each prayer individually) the breadth of the formulas. And it makes the point, the heart of our life with God isn't our relationship with the Trinity as an abstract theological construct, it is our relationship with the persons of the Trinity: with the Father, with the Son, and with the Holy Spirit. Now and forever, Amen.
Peace
9 comments:
Stu,
First of all, I find this to be a very interesting post. I've noticed the same difficulty that mainliners (or at least ELCA Lutherans) have in praying. And if prayer must be done, certainly in public, make it the Lord's Prayer.
I wonder if the reason for this isn't quite simple. In my experience, when I attended a charismatic church while wooing my wife-to-be, prayer was practiced. You had the chance to pray for others in small groups during worship with the sense that others weren't going over your words with a fine-toothed comb. This connects in my mind to the gospel reading from Ash Wednesday. "Beware that you do not practice your piety in order to be seen by others." It's possible that the kind of prayer I just referred to could come under this admonition, but I think of it more like this: people were practicing prayer not to be seen/heard, but because that is simply what one does. This practice made it much easier for me to pray. So perhaps we just need to practice!
I like your idea about prayer given trinitarian form. I've done this with prayers of the church, but not with the particular focus that you suggest. That opens up the potential for greater depth and I will have to try it that way.
WB,
This connects in my mind to the gospel reading from Ash Wednesday. "Beware that you do not practice your piety in order to be seen by others."
Let me suggest, gently, but I believe truthfully, that Lutheran laity use this verse sophistically as a justification for avoiding public leadership in worship, and it involves a material misreading. The verse you cite (Matthew 6:1) finds a more developed parallel in Luke 18:9-14:
He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”
Note that both the Pharisee and the tax collector offered what we would view as a private prayer in a public setting. Jesus's praise of the tax collector should be taken as evidence that it is not the public prayer, per se the is problematic. The prayers of the tax collector were intended for God, whereas the prayers of the Pharisee were intended for his fellow man. The tax collector humbled himself, the Pharisee praised himself. These are the meaningful distinctions. To God alone be glory.
Yet, the prayers you referred to were different still. They were group prayers, led by an individual. We need to be better at that.
Pastors are often called upon to be professional prayers, de facto intercessors for the community they are called to serve. If you think about it in these terms, could anything be less Lutheran? Have we demoted the saints, only to place our clergy in the same role? I've loved my Pastors, but on my judgement day, I want the Son of the Judge as my advocate! It is best to develop that relationship now.
See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. (1 John 3:1a)
Stu,
I'm convinced that Lutheran laity, speaking broadly, are happy to use any excuse at hand to avoid public prayer. My point in bringing up Matthew 6 is not to give them cover, but to point to the idea of "practice." Charismatics practice public prayer while we avoid it. Not surprisingly they are more comfortable doing it than us. We are the poorer for it whatever our excuses might be.
I think one thing public prayer does for a Christian of whatever type is to give him/her the opportunity to confess the faith. Doing so forces thought, "How do I express what I believe?" While traveling, I've been listening to a series of lectures from Covenant Seminary (PCUSA) about early Church history. One of the professor's recurring points is that controversies in the Church gave them the opportunity to more clearly express what they believed with regard to the trinity, the two natures of Christ, grace, etc... It's not that the controversy forced them to come up with something new, but that it necessitated a struggle for correct expression. We could use more of that!
WB,
Charismatics practice public prayer while we avoid it. Not surprisingly they are more comfortable doing it than us. We are the poorer for it whatever our excuses might be.
You'll get no argument from me on this! Confidence and even comfort come with practice.
One of the professor's recurring points is that controversies in the Church gave them the opportunity to more clearly express what they believed with regard to the trinity, the two natures of Christ, grace, etc... It's not that the controversy forced them to come up with something new, but that it necessitated a struggle for correct expression.
Yup.
I'll tell you a little story. A few years ago, I went through the Diakonia program. It was my very great privilege to have Phil Hefner as my teacher for a five week x three hours/week session on Christian Theology. He made the point that the Creeds were all outgrowths of controversy— they served just as much to define who was outside of the orthodox consensus, as they did to define who was within it.
Whereas, I'd thought of the creeds as principled, reflective statements of faith. They are that, but more than that, they're battle standards.
My favorite book on prayer:
Essence of Prayer
by Ruth Burrows
What about praying
to the persons of the Trinity
in ensemble
seeing prayer as an entrance
into their loving community
rather than as a relationship
with each of them individually?
Sally,
What about praying
to the persons of the Trinity
in ensemble
An interesting thought, although I'm not sure how it work out in practice. There has to be something that's less abstract than "Trinity," but more respectful than "Holy Three-in-One Dude." Hmm...
I suppose I'm thinking not so much of verbal prayers, but of putting one's self in the presence of that outgoing love that springs from the ecstatic communion between Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
The word "Trinity" is abstract, but what it signifies is not. A number of years ago I read a beautiful article on the Trinity by Kallistos Ware. (I hope my memory of the authorship is accurate). Ever since then, the concept of the Trinity no longer seems abstract to me.
I find myself continuing to think about this.
A classic Trinitarian prayer is:
"Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning is now and will be forever."
Perhaps that comes across as overly formal, but the routine of speaking that prayer out loud everyday in the company of dozens of Catholic monks this past spring was meaningful to me. In particular the last half of it was like an anchor for me in a time of flux in my life, reminding me that this new venture of mine into Catholicism was really not something foreign, but a continuation of my relationship with the God who has directed my life "in the beginning", now and onwards into the future.
Another Trinitarian prayer that I like was suggested by a retreat leader at St. Andrew's Abbey:
"Father, in the name of your Son, send your Holy Spirit."
Sally,
The second prayer seems more along the lines of what I've been thinking about, in that it assigns different roles, somewhat different understandings to the three persons of the trinity. In the first, they are not only indivisible, they're indistinguishable.
I think that part of what gives strength to the Trinity is that the three persons are distinguishable. Each is God, but the full extent of God is revealed only through the three distinct persons of the Trinity.
Post a Comment