Читать книгу Disciplined Hope - Shannon Craigo-Snell - Страница 7

This is an account of an experiment, during a time of political chaos, in the first year Donald Trump held the office of President of the United States. It offers a record of prayerful resistance in a time of regular outrages. It also offers a theology of prayer as a political act.

The Experiment

On the morning of November 9, 2016, I was in a state of confusion and panic. Confusion that the people of the United States had—with all appropriate caveats about popular vote versus electoral college—elected a person who was openly sexist, racist, dishonest, and completely unqualified for the office of the presidency. And yet, millions of Americans voted for him.

As a professor who studies issues of social justice, I considered myself clear-sighted and realistic about the United States. But I was most unsettled by the exit polls that revealed the majority of white, female voters chose Trump. As a white, middle-aged, Christian woman, I felt betrayed and displaced. In public settings near where I live in Kentucky, I began to view anyone who looked like me with suspicion. The “we” that I was part of by virtue of being a white woman had proven itself to be harmful to the “we” of my loves and commitments.

The rhetoric of the incoming administration did not threaten me directly. However, everyone I love and the common world we inhabit seemed radically vulnerable: friends and family members of different races, religions, sexual orientations, and gender identities. Looming over all of this was dire concern for our environment. In the face of international consensus on the facts of climate change, the incoming administration promised to abdicate responsibility and roll back regulations designed to protect the earth.

My panic took me into new territory. In keeping with Gen-X stereotypes, I’ve never considered myself particularly attached to institutions of any kind. However, after November 2016 I realized there were institutions I took for granted that I value greatly. Institutions like public schools, the social safety net, checks and balances within the democratic process, the rule of law, the free press, and on and on.

After decades of being comfortable as a political lefty, I realized I am invested in conserving many institutions, ideals, and aspirations of the United States.

The early days after the election had a steep learning curve. My confusion slowly gave way to recognition that I had been naïve. One day I was walking across campus, looking distressed, when Alexis, an African-American, female student, came up and hugged me tight. She said, “I know you are surprised and you don’t know how we are going to survive this. But what is happening now is not something new. Things that have always been wrong with America are being uncovered.” She reminded me that God is—and always has been—with us in the struggle for a better world.

Alicia’s comment did not allay my fears in that moment, but I suspect it laid the groundwork for the idea that emerged on January 24. I had spent over two weeks prior to that day in a constant state of emotional turmoil and rational recoil at the illogical plans and dishonest words of the incoming administration. I oscillated between anger and fear, outrage and anxiety. This was no way to live. Furthermore, I was convinced it was exactly how the new administration wanted people like myself to feel. No one is more easily manipulated than those who are fearful. Outrage expends a lot of energy, often undirected.

My anxious state was evident in my prayer life. Christian faith involves prayer, which takes many forms. My prayers during that time of turmoil centered on asking God to protect the people, places, and institutions that seemed under attack. In both verbal and non-verbal ways, I poured out my fear, anger, and longing for a better world. Yet even these prayers were monochromatic, in that they responded to perceived danger. I was in a defensive stance in my prayer life. And yet, the Bible says “Do not fear” (Isaiah 41:10). Repeatedly (Isaiah 35:4, 40:9, 41:10, and many others). I needed to do something to force myself out of a fear-based posture, at least a little bit.

I decided that every day, I would lift up a person or group that was actively resisting the fear and hate that dominated our national politics. This was intended as a personal discipline—something that I set out to do for my own benefit. Because disciplines can be difficult to stick to, I decided to post my plan, and my prayers, on Facebook, as a form of communal accountability. So I began, every day, to seek out news stories of people working for the common good and posting a brief prayer for them.

The response was surprising. I received consistent feedback that these small prayers were useful to those who read them. The prayers were helpful reminders of the good efforts underway, tiny rejoinders to the onslaught of bad news. A community began to form. It was geographically, racially, and socio-economically diverse, and it included people with multiple religious backgrounds and spiritual commitments. People began to send me prayer requests, identifying resisters to lift up. For many, it became a daily devotion.

I confess that some days I was sick, or traveling, or too tired from other commitments to post a prayer. By then end of the year, I also found the necessary amount of news reading onerous. I needed to skip a day or two of reading three newspapers to find positive examples. By January 23, 2018, I was grateful to pass the torch of daily prayers for resisters to Rev. Joanna Hipp, a friend and former student.

Each of the prayers was topical, sparked by an event of the day. In this way, they serve as a record of sorts—what happened in the first year of the Trump administration, seen through the lens of how we resisted. More importantly, this year of public, political prayer is an opportunity to reflect on prayer itself.

Theology

Even our most esoteric theological concepts begin with what actual people do in their lives of faith. For example, the doctrine of the Trinity—that God is three in one—developed out of attempts to articulate why early Christians baptized “in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” The lived practices of the faithful come first (sometimes called first-order theology) and then theologians reflect on these and articulate something of their meaning (sometimes called second-order theology). Sometimes, theological reflections lead to new insights, questions, or challenges for the community in whose practices they began.

The theology that follows is a reflection on the practices of prayer in the midst of political turmoil. While my own faith is located within the traditions of Christianity, and therefore these are the resources upon which I draw, the community that prayed together in 2017 included many who live within other religious traditions or do not identify with any religious tradition. It is my hope that this theology of prayer can similarly be of use in expansive contexts.

Prayer as Relating

Prayer takes many forms, including focused contemplation, silent listening for the Holy, participating in political demonstrations, styles of reading sacred texts, ways of dancing and music-making, ritual actions, the communal recitation of traditional prayers in liturgy, and the desperate plea for help. Yet within this diversity there is a common thread of seeking connection with the Holy.

Theologian Marilyn McCord Adams frames all types of prayer in terms of relationship with God, writing, “prayer is simply a way of being in the world with God.”1 The lens of relationship allows McCord Adams to draw analogies between children and parents or romantic partners. We build relationships with one another through “wordless presence,” “carnal knowledge,” “articulate speech,” and “joint activities.”2

Being in the world with God person-to-person is just as multifaceted as children’s growing up in their parents’ home and life partners’ sharing a household. Here below, togetherness sometimes takes the form of wordless presence (as with mother and child, or lovers staring into one another’s eyes) and carnal knowledge (as with a mother nursing her baby or the lover’s invasive and enfolding touch). Other times, the medium of exchange is articulate speech—from greetings and compliments to trading information (what needs to be fetched from the store, which parts of the house or car need repair), from vigorous debates and deliberative conversations and angry quarrels to make-up apologies. Still other times, life together takes the form of joint activities: digging the garden and planting the flowers, raking leaves and cleaning the gutters, hiking in the woods, throwing a party, organizing with others for political action. Life together builds a history of shared memories that constitute the narrative of who we are.3

McCord Adams’s analogies honor the significance of many different ways of praying. The category of wordless presence has room for meditation, centering prayer, attending to nature, and many other practices. Carnal knowledge makes space for liturgical practices such as the Eucharist, rituals, and the many ways we relate to God in the bodily relations of care, passion, and compassion that we have with other human beings. It could also include the feeling of sun on one’s skin or the routine of swimming every morning.

The category of articulate speech might seem more limited, as it does presume a person is speaking directly to God (or the saints, in some traditions). However, it is still expansive. Much corporate prayer—prayers of a whole group together—is articulate speech, such as hymns, prayers written out in the church bulletin, and memorized prayers recited together (such as The Lord’s Prayer or The Serenity Prayer). Articulate prayer can also be individual, from saying the Rosary to a child reciting “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep” at bedtime. All of the articulate prayers I have mentioned so far have been scripted, but of course spoken prayer includes spontaneous words, either in a group or individually. Perhaps the prayers with which we are most familiar are the whispered pleas for help, the gasped words of gratitude when danger passes, or even the desperate deals we try to strike with the Divine. Unlike most of the scripted prayers printed in church bulletins, our spontaneous prayers to God can be angry, demanding, questioning, accusatory, and argumentative. McCord Adams emphasizes that this is part of learning to live with someone, like a parent or a partner, and says that God takes even angry prayers as positive steps towards relationship. God desires relationship with us and welcomes all our efforts. Fran, a prayer-mentor of mine, describes some of her spoken prayers to God in ways that remind me of text messaging with my closest friends. She tells God what is going on in her life, including the important stuff and the minute bits of joy, disappointment, and humor. She talks to God like an old friend.

McCord Adams’s final category, shared activities, is particularly relevant to the topic of praying in a time of political strife. In 1965, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Alabama. Afterwards, he said of marching, “I felt my legs were praying.”4 The phrase “praying with our feet” has been embraced by many politically active people who understand their efforts at creating a better society—particularly through political change—to be a form of prayer. McCord Adams’s category of shared activities conveys this sensibility, that those who work for the common good, for the well-being of their community, for justice and kindness, are engaged in an activity in which God is also involved.

As any parent or partner knows, being in close relationship with another person is hard. It ideally involves all four forms of togetherness. Likewise, McCord Adams’s analogies imply that prayer works best when it involves a variety of practices—silent, felt, spoken, and physically enacted.

Of course, these analogies are imperfect, for God is neither a human parent nor a human spouse. God does not, in my experience, change diapers or unload the dishwasher. God is not so neatly contained nor so reliably recognizable. McCord Adams is convinced that God is personal, but this does not mean that God is a big human being in the sky. God exceeds all our human categories and comprehension. This leads to a general rule among Christian theologians, going back to Augustine: if anyone is confident that they completely understand God, then they are not talking about God at all.

God is not obvious, is mysterious, is portrayed in multiple and competing ways. The hard evidence around us does not easily lead to the conclusion that we are in relationship with the Holy, let alone with a loving God who intends goodness for all of us. The beautiful creation of which we are a part includes meanness, suffering, pain, futility, and evil. This leads to questions of who God is and how God operates. These questions are vitally important. And we don’t get to figure them out before we start.

Perhaps it would make the most sense to first sort out exactly if God exists and what characteristics God possesses and how God interacts with the cosmos and then we could understand prayer. However, as far as I can tell, it doesn’t work that way. Earlier I mentioned that Christian theology begins with the practices of faithful people. Efforts to understand exactly what is implied or affirmed by those practices come second. This is summed up in a very old definition of theology as “faith seeking understanding.”5 One might assume that this means you first have to assent to a bunch of ideas, join a religious community, or sign on to a set of values before you can start seeking understanding. However, if we think of “faith,” like prayer, through the lens of relationship, then it becomes clearer. We don’t get to know all there is about God before we decide whether or not to have faith. Instead, we learn about God in the process of “faith-ing,” of relating to God in the world. McCord Adams’s analogies are helpful, again. A child knows little of her parents at birth; a newborn is a bundle of hope and possibility. It is through the daily reality of relating that they come to know one another. One hopes to know a prospective spouse better before committing to marriage, and so there was likely a period of relating before the vows, including a million small decisions to keep relating in order to get to know the other person better. And long after the wedding day, partners continue to grow in understanding one another. McCord Adams states that God is the subject matter of theology (that which theologians are trying to understand) and prayer is part of how we come to know God.6

I’m suggesting that we start praying, including talking to God, before we know who God is. This is true for an adult who doesn’t belong to a particular tradition and yet lights a candle for a friend going through hardship. It is also true for a small child being raised in a church. The children’s minister teaches the kids little songs about God and little prayers to God; it is in the singing and the praying that the children come to have some sense of who God is.

Theologian Karl Rahner says that the word “God” is the term that culture and history give us to ask the really big questions about ourselves and the world. The term “God” helps us ask questions about the meaning of the universe and of our lives within it. History also gives us the word “God” to use when we are talking about aspects of our experience that open up beyond ourselves, which many might call spiritual. We need language to gesture towards parts of our lived reality that defy explicit definition; the word “God” helps.7 I would add to Rahner’s two-fold description of the word “God”; it is also the term that history and culture give us to use when we desire to be in relationship with that which we cannot pinpoint but still feel called to. It is a word that helps us pray.

Electronic Networks

When I first joined Facebook several years ago, I was pleasantly surprised that this social-media tool is so often used for prayer requests. People ask for prayers when loved ones are ill, when preparing for a job interview, when embarking on a new project or adventure. Sometimes people post specifics, “Pray for me at 10:00am tomorrow!” and sometimes not, “Unspoken prayer request. God knows the need.” Often, people make space for various interpretations of what they are asking for, requesting “prayer, mojo, or good vibes.” A lot of people are doing something that fits within an expansive understanding of prayer, using a variety of language. Some of these people are “spiritual but not religious.” Many have experienced harm in churches or other religious settings. Some never had a religious upbringing; others reject the terms of the religious tradition they inherited. In the midst of all that diversity, uncertainty, and ambiguity, people are reaching out to relate to God, or the Holy, or the Universe—whatever term they prefer—and they are asking others to join them. Remarkably, the communities of prayer that emerge do not require those involved to agree on all the terms—what is meant by “prayer” and precisely who is “God”—in order to be part of the collective communication.8 Long before all the answers about who God is are worked out, people move towards relationship with God. Drawn by intuition or curiosity or hope or longing—we pray.

The act of prayer reveals a deep hope that God cares for us. Prayer shows the hope and, in some sense, the act of believing that our lives do not play out in a neutral setting or a context apathetic to our existence. In praying, we act as if God is interested in our lives and in us, as if we are already in relationship with God and more is invited. Various religious traditions, including Christianity, affirm this and take it further based on other forms of revelation or knowledge: that God desires goodness, moves toward love, urges compassion, and is justice.

Prayer and Perspective

When we pray, we bring ourselves and our concerns before God—precisely the God who is beyond our comprehension. This shifts the framing of our own existence. It can alter our sense of scale.

Our vision (literal and metaphorical) is usually honed on the mid-range—on trees and cars and people and buildings. Given a microscope, we can focus on much smaller realities, on bacteria and cells and such. As I understand it, scientists have not found an absolute end in this direction—more powerful tools help humans see ever smaller parts and particles. Similarly, given a telescope, we can focus on much bigger realities, on stars and planets and galaxies. Our most powerful tools have not found the limit of the cosmos, but instead reveal ever greater horizons.

So as we walk along the street, focusing on trees and cars and other people, we occupy one small strata of an enormous continuum, stretching from microbes to galaxies. It can be awe-inspiring to look up at the stars and recognize ourselves as a tiny element of a vast cosmos. It can, in different ways, help us see our own size more clearly. Stargazing can shift our sense of scale.

In prayer, we put ourselves in intentional relationship with God, whose reality dwarfs the universe and undergirds electrons. God is bigger than the cosmos and smaller than the tiniest particle yet discovered. God is the Creator of the whole continuum. We bring our present conditions, our painful pasts, and our dreams for the future before God eternal, Creator of time itself. Concerned as we are with the minutiae of our own daily lives, we benefit from stepping back to allow our view to include both the small details and the God of all Creation. Prayer involves bringing ourselves and our concerns before the Holy, the mystery of the Universe that holds all things together. This can shift our sense of scale and give us a different perspective on our own realities.

Such a shift does not simply make us insignificant. We already affirm in praying the belief that God cares for us—each and every one. Rather, it emphasizes that we are part of something more expansive than ourselves and that our advocate in all of this, God, is more expansive still. Such a shift of scale does not negate our experiences of pain and suffering. However, these experiences are placed within a larger context that is, we affirm, concerned with our well-being. Prayer assures us that we do not face the difficulties of life on our own. The Holy, God, the Universe—whatever name we choose—desires goodness, moves towards love, and is (at the very least) rooting for us.

Prayer and Formation

In addition to granting us perspective, prayer also forms our habits of mind and emotion. Humans are profoundly malleable. We can be shaped by what happens to us and by what we, ourselves, do. Intentional prayer is a way of shaping ourselves in accordance to the commitments and values that we hold and that are held by our community. Specifically, prayer shapes the habits of mind and emotion that are sometimes called “affections.”9 For example, gratitude is an affection. It includes both an intellectual assessment that something is a good part of one’s life and, in some sense, a gift rather than a necessary outcome. It also includes an emotion of gladness and thanksgiving. If someone makes a point of being grateful for specific things in their life on a daily basis, that person will develop a habit of gratitude, a disposition of thankfulness that will influence how she understands and interacts with the world.10 The practices of different communities cultivate particular affections. Theologian Don. E. Saliers says, “whatever else it may include, the Christian faith is a pattern of deep emotions” or affections.11 Christian practices—especially prayer—form habits of mind and emotion that include gratitude, repentance, joy, and love. Other possible affections, such as resentment or disappointment, are discouraged.

Habits of mind and emotion, cultivated in a particular community, are connected with that community’s understanding of God. For example, a group that views the Holy as intimately connected with nature might develop affections of reverence for the Earth.

Prayer is a practice that forms affections in those who pray, and those affections cohere with how the one who prays understands God. This coherence is part of a multi-directional dynamism. The one who prays does so in a certain way because of her understanding of God (God is just; I will pray for justice), and praying in such a way shapes her understanding of God (I pray for justice; I see justice as holy). This might seem circular, but it is not a vicious circle, for there are lots of influences and checks that come into play. For religious communities, the tradition itself guides this dynamic with prior affirmations of who God is and isn’t. Some of these most basic affirmations are in the form of exemplary prayers. Faithful Jews pray daily, “Hear O Israel, the LORD is our God, the LORD is One.” Faithful Christians recite, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.” Learning how to pray with such examples teaches those who pray about God. These prayers, themselves, are rooted in Scripture, which also teaches Jews and Christians about God. Sacred rituals and writings from other traditions function similarly to convey a vision of the Holy and form members of community in affections that cohere with this vision.

Another element in this dynamic is God. When we reach out to relate to God in prayer, God does not leave us hanging. God responds. This means the dynamic of prayer is not a vicious circle, but a back-and-forth of increasing familiarity. Some people hear God audibly; others sense God’s presence; some see visions; others simply experience a lessening of burdens or a bit of calm. For most who pray, the received communication varies, and often includes long periods where it seems that God is not present to the conversation at all. Often, prayers for particular outcomes lead to disappointment and feel like rejection or absence. And yet, somehow, for many of us, stubborn persistence in prayer subtly influences our daily lives and our vision of God. We become aware of God as a permanent co-resident of our lives. Drawing again on McCord Adams’s analogies, we become aware of God rattling around the house with us, like a spouse or a parent, and we get a sense of God’s own habits and peculiarities. They start to rub off on us.

My mother delights in seeing beauty. Her tendency to stop and notice a skyline or to be moved to tears by a sculpture seemed a bit odd to me as a child. As a teenager, I found it ridiculous. Then I started thinking, when I saw a particular tree or painting, “I bet Mom would love this.” Now I stop and stare like she does. Furthermore, when I get choked up over a painting at a museum, my tears about the beauty of the painting are also part of my relationship with my mom. Similarly, after years of praying, we are shaped by God’s own preferences and quirks. We start to “feel” what God feels and to experience, in some small ways, God’s passions.12 We start to love what God loves. Our hopes and desires imperfectly reflect who God is and what God intends for the cosmos.

Intercessory Prayer

Of course, this can be dangerous to the status quo. Being shaped by prayer can make us unsatisfied with all that contradicts God’s loving creativity. McCord Adams says that as prayer attunes us with “divine delight in Truth and beauty, with God’s hunger and thirst for joyful life together with all created persons, with God’s blessed rage for justice,” it also aligns us with “God’s apoplectic intolerance of human cruelty and degradation.”13 Intentionally relating to God in prayer heightens empathy—makes us perceptive to the love and beauty that surrounds us and sensitive to the pain and suffering in our world.

The combination of empathy and intentional relationship with God leads to the particular kind of prayer that the virtual community I’m describing engaged in throughout 2017—intercessory prayer, often including specific requests for aid, blessing, protection, or healing for the person who is the subject of the prayer. At other times, it can be a matter of holding a person “in the Light” or in the presence of God. One can imagine the practice of intercessory prayer as standing in the space between God and a person and bridging the distance.

One of the first questions to arise whenever intercessory prayer is mentioned is “does it work?” What’s meant by this question is something like “does what the intercessor asked for actually happen?” Does the person recover from illness, get the job, have a child?

But is this the primary question? Theologian Howard Thurman says that a person who prays does not first calculate whether or not intercessory prayer will be pragmatically effective and then choose how to proceed. A person who prays brings their concerns to God, including concerns for those he loves. In Thurman’s words, “[a] man prays for loved ones because he has to, not merely because his prayer may accomplish something.”14

In my year of political prayer, I let my own intercessory prayers go public. A community of prayer developed in response, as people prayed with me, made prayer requests, and responded. This afforded me a glimpse into the intercessory prayers of others. I’ve come to believe that intercessory prayer (expansively defined) is extremely common and almost instinctual. When we learn of someone suffering, we want to channel all the goodness of the universe in their direction. We want to comfort them, shield them from harm, and surround them with healing. Our desire for their well-being means that we connect the person, in our thoughts and emotions, with all that we know of goodness and love. And we use whatever language we have at hand—given by religious communities, borrowed from science-fiction, salvaged from a past we barely remember, or invented on the spot—to bring that person to God.

Although we aren’t likely motivated by efficacy, we still have the question, “does it work?” Thurman and others agree that, in some sense, it does.15 However, it is important to be careful about exactly how this is affirmed. There are two major missteps to avoid. First, God is not Jeeves. Prayer does not work in the same manner as Amazon Prime, and God is not a house elf. Eternal God, Creator of the Universe, cannot be coerced, manipulated, or forced to do anything. This goes back to the discussion earlier about the ways in which McCord Adams’s relational analogies do not fit perfectly because God is not another human person. With a parent or a partner, it might make sense to bargain and persuade and expect reciprocity in many ways. “If you do this, I’ll do that,” or “if you love me, you’d. . .” But our relationship with God is far more asymmetrical. God’s perspective is not ours and God’s ways of being in the world are not transparent to our observation. In other words, when we act like God is our wish-granter, we diminish God and set ourselves up for disappointment. The second misstep to avoid is understanding how prayer works in such a way that the logic can be read backwards. For example, the statement that prayer can work miracles, without further nuance, can easily slide into the conclusion that someone who did not receive a miracle didn’t pray enough. That is the logic of charlatans. It is victim-blaming masked in religious language. It lies about God (making God our wish-granting servant) and about people (translating suffering into inadequacy). Both of these problems arise from giving our prayers too much power in shaping events.

Theologian John Calvin was adamantly opposed to overestimating our power in relation to God. Emphasizing the glory and sovereignty of God, Calvin said that our prayers do not change God but they can change us.16 Our pleas will not, so to speak, change God’s mind. Another author, Ole Hallesby, makes a similar point but highlights how our prayer does have an important role to play. God always cares for all persons and is always eager to “employ His [sic] powers in the alleviation of our distress.”17 Our prayer does not change God’s mind, for God always wills to help us. Praying simply gives God “access to our needs.”18 For Hallesby, God knocks at the door to assist us; prayer grants God admittance.

McCord Adams grants still more room to prayer. God’s character and long-term project with humanity is unchanging. God loves us and wills goodness for each and every one of us. Our prayers do not convince God to be on our side; God is already there. At the same time, God aims to be in relationship with us in such a way that we become friends and partners with God. God aims for friendship across the “size-gap” between humanity and divinity.19 McCord Adams draws on biblical stories of Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Job to argue that, “if Bible story leaders are supposed to model being in the world with God, what they model is interaction in which their complaints and protests are heard, in which their preferences help shape the plan, and in which they grow into junior partners in a family business.”20

In this model, our prayers do not manipulate God, but rather are welcomed by God as collaborative input in how God’s unchanging goodness could shape a given situation. I find this persuasive. Whatever God is up to in relation to humanity, human freedom seems to be an important element. Because human freedom makes possible so much suffering—including all the ways we hurt ourselves and one another and the Earth—God must consider it quite valuable to include it in creation. Surely God would then take our freedom seriously in prayer. Put another way, if God respects our freedom enough to allow us to harm one another, wouldn’t God respect our freedom enough to accept friendly suggestions on how to help one another? Of course, we remain junior partners and trust God to disregard our short-sighted and wrong-headed ideas.

But what of the apparent failures of prayer? Enslaved Africans and African-Americans prayed for liberation for generations before emancipation. Every day people pray for an end to abuse that does not come, healing that does not occur, and resources that do not appear. There are some times when the prayed-for outcome does occur, but there is no way to know that prayer was the cause. This kind of evidence does not bring clarity.

And yet, many people find prayer profoundly helpful. Many find prayer life-giving and transforming in the midst of terrible circumstances, even when what they pray for does not come to pass. This could fall within the notion that prayer changes the one who prays but does not change God. Prayer provides perspective and shapes habits of mind and emotion in ways that can be powerful. The efficacy of intercessory prayer would require something more than this, because the aim is for prayer to “work” on someone other than the one who is praying. Proving such efficacy would require an impossible level of isolation and control (to eliminate other influences) and a string of assumptions about what would count as a successful outcome.21

In my own life, there have been times when I simply could not face or handle situations on my own strength and I have felt buoyed and upheld by the prayers of others. A close friend, Jill, lives with her husband and children in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. Jill is a spiritual person with strong moral and ethical commitments who does not identify with or participate in a faith tradition. In the terrible days after the school shooting on December 14, 2012, when the entire town was reeling with horror, I had no idea how to offer comfort to my friend. I told her I was praying for her. Jill’s response surprised me, as she said that so many people were praying for the people of Newtown and the community could feel it. “It’s palpable,” she said. In ways I can neither demonstrate nor explain, the prayers of friends and strangers provided some small aid in the midst of madness.

Many of us tend to think about how things “work” in simplistic ways. Focused as we are on the mid-range—on people and buildings and cars and trees—we think first of physical causality. A person swings a bat, which either does or does not hit the ball. If the bat does come into physical contact—smack!—the ball changes direction. This is the kind of cause and effect that seems most basic. And yet, we know that there is much more going on in our daily lives than the interaction of nearby physical objects.

With a microscope, we can see millions of bacteria, microbes, cells, and atomic nuclei that are part of the ball field. With a telescope, we can see that the ball field itself is part of a solar system and a galaxy and an expanding universe of galaxies. With different kinds of tools, we could perceive that what appears to be the empty space between the players on the field has a lot going on: oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, ambient particles, chemicals, gravity, magnetic fields, radiation, radio waves and more. We only see one small segment of light, only hear one small segment of sound waves, and cannot detect much of our environment without assistance. The world is bigger, smaller, and much more complex than we can imagine. Given this, it isn’t naïve to think that intercessory prayer works even though we cannot pin down exactly how. Rather, it is arrogance to imagine that what we understand is all that is happening!

I think of intercessory prayer in imagistic terms, quite aware that I don’t grasp it fully. God always wills and intends goodness for each and every one of us and for creation as a whole. There is enough freedom around (human freedom but also evolutionary freedom and perhaps plant and animal and other kinds of freedom that I don’t comprehend), and enough history, and enough complexity, that God’s will-for-goodness for us can encounter interference. Intercessory prayer attempts to clear the haze and overcome the interference, to make the way a bit clearer for the love of God that is always directed towards our flourishing.

Praying Together

So far, these reflections do not address the aspect of my prayer experiment that I found most surprising and sustaining, namely, the community that prayed together. The relationship analogies from McCord Adams—of partners and parents—tend towards a one-on-one interpretation. Even questions of the efficacy of intercessory prayer can keep the one who prays and the one prayed for as individuals quite separate from one another. In reality, while we are individuals, we are also profoundly interconnected with one another.

We are growing up with millions of siblings, and our relationship with our parents always unfolds in that context. Even the most introverted or isolated among us still leads a life interwoven with others. We become who we are in relationship with parents, caregivers, teachers, neighbors, and friends. We are shaped by the bully in third grade, the heartthrob in tenth, and the one adult who offered good advice. We live our days amidst classmates and coworkers, with fellow-travelers on the train or the highway or the sidewalk. If I tell someone who I am, my narrative will include a whole cast of characters who shape my identity. Even within my own skin, I am communal. I have my father’s eyes and my mother’s laugh. My sense of humor is a perfect match of my sisters’. I have the genetics of generations, and the DNA of the children I have carried is still in my bloodstream.22

All of this interrelation is still on the mid-range—the space of people and cars and trees. If we look at a smaller scale, our intestines are a “biome” of bacteria vital to our health; our bodies incorporate a multitude of microbes that are not incidental passengers, but necessary for our functioning. On a larger scale, our bodies are made of stardust, much of which has origins in galaxies beyond the Milky Way.23 Socially, culturally, spiritually, and physically, we are intertwined with the sun and the soil and sustained by the web of creation.

Thurman notes that when someone who prays brings themselves into intentional relationship with God, they will naturally pray for their loved ones. If we allow ourselves to see how interconnected we are, this takes an even stronger tone. I cannot bring myself into intentional relationship with God without bringing the people I love. I cannot pray for myself without praying for my neighbor, because my neighbor’s well-being is intimately tied to my own. Omitting to pray about things that influence the community—including politics—would be refusing to bring my whole self to God. It would refuse to hope for God’s grace to touch our life together.

Quite concretely, the shared public prayers served several functions. First, they helped form us in hope. Prayer, as a means of formation, instills habits of mind and emotion. The discipline of lifting up a person or group working for the common good broke the temptation to constant fear and anger. It was a daily dose of admiration, honor, celebration, and envisioning a better reality for all of us. Second, it offered perspective. It was easy to believe, in the early days after the 2016 election, that those of us who care for justice and compassion are few and far between. When people said “amen” to the prayers I posted, they let me know they were out there, and they saw other responses, and it encouraged us all. Likewise, acknowledging the people who were resisting helped place the outrageous events of the day in relation to ongoing work for justice that people have been engaged in for decades. It highlighted the geographical breadth and historical depth of justice struggles. Third, it created a space of (virtual) intimacy in which we could speak of things that are often not brought up in casual conversation. Because we prayed together, we were already conversing about big and personal issues, admitting needs and joys and worries. Fourth, praying together created a web of people, from various backgrounds and geographical locations, asking God to help us move the world a bit closer to the creativity, love, justice, and compassion that is, I believe, what God intends. I do not know what piece of advanced technology might be required to pick up on the “good vibes, juju, and mojo” that we sent out to the universe. But just because we can’t measure it does not mean it doesn’t matter.

There are many stories of hope in these prayers, of small victories, disasters averted, and struggles that continue. For example, on February 24, 2017, this online community of prayer implored God to bless Marty Baron, editor of The Washington Post, “with whatever he needs to support and empower investigative journalism.” On April 16, 2018, the staff of The Washington Post received the Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism for its “revelations about U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore” and they “shared the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.”24 Did a quick prayer on Facebook make the difference? Did our communal discipline of hope for the common good tip the scales? Probably not. But they shaped me, they formed a community, and they invited all that is good in the universe to help us in our present struggles.

1. McCord Adams, “Prayer as the ‘Lifeline of Theology,’” 272.

2. McCord Adams, “Prayer as the ‘Lifeline of Theology,’” 273.

3. McCord Adams, “Prayer as the ‘Lifeline of Theology,’” 273–74.

4. Heschel, “Their Feet Were Praying.”

5. Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding, 2.

6. McCord Adams, “Prayer as the “Lifeline of Theology,” 271.

7. Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, 46–51.

8. For thoughtful reflection on religious community through electronic networks, see Thompson, The Virtual Body of Christ.

9. Saliers, Soul in Paraphrase, 9, 27–28, 77.

10. Gratitude has become a topic of much research. Morin, “Scientifically Proven Benefits of Gratitude.”

11. Saliers, Soul in Paraphrase, 11.

12. See Harak, Virtuous Passions and Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination.

13. McCord Adams, “Prayer as the ‘Lifeline of Theology,’” 279.

14. Thurman, Disciplines of the Spirit, 101.

15. Thurman, Disciplines of the Spirit, 101.

16. Calvin, Institutes, II. 852.

17. Hallesby, Prayer, 14.

18. Hallesby, Prayer, 22.

19. McCord Adams, “Prayer as the ‘Lifeline for Theology,’” 274–75.

20. McCord Adams, “Prayer as the ‘Lifeline for Theology,’” 278.

21. Andrade and Rahakrishnan, “Prayer and healing,” 247–53.

22. Doubleff, “Fetal cells may protect mom from disease.”

23. Sample, “We are all made of stars.”

24. Washington Post Staff, “Washington Post’s 2018 Pulitzer Prizes.”