Prayer, God's Will, and the Multiverse

We are tired of multiverses, because multiverses are exhausting.  Every variant of every narrative?  It's inhuman, unmanageable, utterly overwhelming.  We are creatures of linear space-time with a limited amount of organic storage in our sloppy noggins.  At a certain point, we have to stop considering every single freakin' possibility and just go with something, or we go nuts.

Disney and Marvel haven't quite figured this out yet, but having wrassled theologically with the concept of the multiverse for years, I'm quite aware of how inhuman it can be.  It can shatter the self, and unless approached with caution, be inherently dis-integrative.  

My faith is paradoxically both multiversal and orthodox, idiosyncratically heretical in ways that at many points in the history of the Christian faith would have resulted in my being turned into a human S'more, charred and crisp with a screamy filling.  

My sense of the reality of God...meaning my intellectual assent to God's transforming presence in my life...arose from my engagement with the idea of the Many Worlds.  There, finally, I found an understanding of existence in which God was both necessary and inescapable, where the Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans, Being Itself, and the Numinous had the elbow room they needed.  It's the beating heart of my practical theology.

Years ago, I expressed that journey in a book.  Who wants to read a book on faith and speculative physics written by a small church pastor?  Very few people, as it turns out.  

But...why does that matter?  It does not.

That theology still shapes and stretches me.

One struggle that I encounter in my faith comes at the foundation of my prayer life, as I speak the prayer taught by my Master.  "Thy will be done," I say, every morning as I rise, and I'll often pause to reflect on how beyond my grasp even that simple statement is.

God's will, from my theology, is everything.  Every. Possible. Thing.  The Divine Self-Expression, the Logos?  It's everything, as omniscience must be.  Everything that can be known is known to God.  God's thought is perfection, and perfection means completeness, eh?  Every joy, every sorrow, every delight, every horror, all of it is part of the Divine Will.

"Thy will be done," I pray, knowing that with all possible futures open, this could include terrible things.  

There's a possibility, every day, of my own failure and inadequacy.  Of my own death.  Of the suffering of those that I love.  It's the fundamental challenge that rises from our mortal freedom.  God knows what our most abject desolation looks like, and to God, that knowledge is as real as this very moment.

It's a grim, hard teaching.  But that, if I am honest to my spiritual intuition, is part of God's will.

If it weren't for Jesus, that knowledge could leave me anxious and fearful, or estranged and angry.  But the life and teachings of Jesus define God for me, and they press back hard against my doubt and my ignorance.  There are things God knows that we would best not know, as we were warned in Eden.  God is entirely aware of how far we can fall, and will allow us to fall farther than we can imagine.

But the Gospel shows God's simultaneous desire that we not partake of that knowledge.  

Our flawed wanting, our greed and lust, our resentments and hatred?  Our compulsive injustices, and our pathological gracelessness?  We are shown they might be overcome.  We can understand our smallness, and embrace Christ's mercy, and find in Jesus the nature of the Good.

I see in Jesus the fullness of what it means when God's love is made real.  When I pray for God's will in my life, that's how I understand it.  What is the most Christlike outcome?  Sometimes, that's healing or teaching.  Sometimes, it's forgiveness.  Sometimes, the cross.

All are God's will, and as I pray, I hold to that truth with fear and trembling.

Our Father

I was sitting at table with a group of fellow Presbyterians, where they were pitching out their reactions and thoughts around my recent book on reclaiming the Lord's Prayer.  It was an engaging conversation, and their frank comments and thoughtful ponderings made for some delightful back and forth.

During the discussion, one of the folks around the table started chatting about the very first chapter of the book.  It being a book about the Lord's Prayer and all, it tracks through that ancient prayer phrase by phrase, and the very first phrase is "Our Father."  Pater Hemon, in the Greek of Luke 11 and Matthew 6, although without the italics or capitalization, because common Greek didn't roll that way.

One of the participants, an Older White Gentleman, had something to say about that.  "I was struck," he said, "by that first chapter about fathers."  "I didn't think," he continued, with a mischievous grin on his face, "that we were allowed to use that word any more."

This, I will confess, did occur to me in the writing of the book.

It is the strong preference of my comrades in the Presbyterian People's Front to avoid male pronouns in the evocation of God.  Growing up in a very progressive church, this would typically manifest in prayer language that either centered the divine feminine or attempted to avoid gender altogether.

There's a strong and relevant truth to all of that effort, because YHWH ain't a male bipedal hominid.  We're not talkin' Zeus here, not some towering white bearded dude in a robe glowering down from His Obviously Anthropomorphic Throne.  Theological assumptions of male dominance or superiority rising from that language aren't to be tolerated.

I steer away from the use of gendered language to describe God myself, truth be told, and at no point in the book do I ever refer to God as "He."  Not even in the chapter where I talk about God the Father.  Not even once.

I also don't mind if folks want to use other terms to describe God.  So many other words and images point to the Divine Nature.  God is Love, of course.  And Light.  And a Consuming Fire.   If Scripture's cool with God being like a mother hen with sheltering wings, or telling us the Creator of the Universe can manifest as an incandescent shrubbery, then all bets are off.  You do you.

So in that spirit of inclusivity, I'm not of a mind to abandon the use of the word Father in prayer, because it, um, works.  It ain't inherently broke.  Is it perfect?  No.  Of course not.  No human language, none, can bear the full weight of God's reality.  We could theologically wordsmith until the end of time, and still not fully capture it.  Our efforts to use our categorical semiotics more precisely just ends up creating a muddled, clumsy tangle.

Were I to reword the prayer to my own heretical idiosyncracies, I'd be forced to acknowledge that "Our Numinous Omnipassible Multiversal Panentheist Reality Engine" just doesn't flow off the tongue.   

Father isn't that.  It's not an academic abstraction.  It's a concrete, actual, material relation that's comprehensible on a human scale.

And we human beings, with our propensities for overcomplicating our lives?  That can be helpful.

I So Basic

Why write a book on the Lord's Prayer? 

I mean, it's hardly a complicated thing.  It's one of the most familiar rituals of the Christian faith, and it's pretty danged simple.  This isn't a deep dive into the discursive techniques of Thomistic theology, or a treatise on the distinctives between Tillich and Berdyaev.

It's not particularly trendy, or buzzy, or pushing the leading edge.  It's just the Lord's Prayer.  We all know that already, right?

It's. Just. So. Basic.

I mean, of course it is.

But how are we at the basics?  How important are the basics?

If you're entirely new to the faith, how much do you know about the point and purpose of prayer?  What do you know about this core Christian practice, and the whys and wherefores of this thing Jesus asks his followers to do?  There was a time when most Americans were culturally Christian, but honey, that time ain't now.  Sure, it's basic. Basics, after all, are a good place to start.

If you've left the church, burned by politicization or the mean-girls cruelty that often drives folks from communities, were the basics what drove you away?  Likely not.  I bailed on church in young adulthood after a totally pointless ego-driven fight tore the church I'd grown up in apart.  Watching Christians squabble and scheme over control of a church just made the whole thing seem like complete [bovine excrement].  When I finally returned, it was to the simplest practices of following Jesus, of service and prayer.  When you start again, it's a fine idea to start at the beginning.

But what if you're deep in, so far past the first stages of being a "Baby Christian" that talking about the Lord's Prayer feels like going back to read Hop On Pop or Horton Hears a Who.  You're sophisticated.  You're experienced.  You've got your doctorate in Presuppositional Apologetics, or host a podcast on Queering the Meta-liturgics of Contemplation.

You need this prayer.

Because when Jesus taught this prayer, he didn't describe it as a "starter prayer."  This isn't a prayer for beginners, to be replaced by more sophisticated mystic incantations as we advance to higher and higher levels of spiritual power.  This is.  The Prayer.   It doesn't matter if we've just discovered the grace of the Gospel, or if we're the Renowned Senior Pastor of a Gigachurch.  It doesn't matter if we're tenure track or if we've got 97,000 followers on ChristTok.   

This is the prayer we are meant to pray.

It is meant to shape us and form us and remind us of our purpose, no matter where we are in our journey.  

And as we're in a time when Christians have kinda forgotten the purpose of prayer, when we pray for wealth and material success, when we pray for political power, when we pray for influence?

Perhaps a refresher is in order.

Not Praying for Power

As a Christian, there is, in this political season, a deep and abiding temptation.  I feel it, as others feel it.

It is the danger of conflating the divine intent with my own, and to turn to God to give me power.

I have, without question, certain sociopolitical predilections.  They fall, generally, somewhere in the peculiar Venn diagram of anarcholibertarianism, liberalism, and social democracy.  This means I'm politically a bit on the odd side, but, eh, I'm the sort of weird that isn't afraid to be weird.

This has, generally speaking, meant that my voting falls on the Democratic side of the rigidly binary US political spectrum.

That hasn't lessened, as the political heat has intensified and American conservatism has gone on a drunken bender in Trumpsville.  When you're a faithful person with a great deal on the line, the Tempter whispers in one's ear: pray for power.  Power over them.  Pray for the reins of the Wagon of State.  Pray for the sword.  Ask for dominion.  Manifest the success of your party, and the grovelling, complete demise of your adversaries.  You pray for Gott Mit Uns, as the Germans used to pray it.

That's certainly been the case on the American far right, where the operating assumption is that Trump is God's Perfect Righteous Anointed, chosen for such a time as this, and prayers for God to give power to the One have become the norm.

Beyond the self-evident absurdity of that core premise, that's a terrible way for Christians to pray.  It is, bluntly, an AntiChristian form of prayer.

Over the last six months, and with the help of some fine editors, I've put the finishing touches on an upcoming book about the point and purpose of the Lord's Prayer, which is the beating heart and solid rock of my prayer life.  At the center of that simple prayer is a turning away from all but the most necessary things of this life, and a refutation of the human ego and its grasping for power.  In the prayer Jesus taught us to pray, the only thing we ask to be given is our "daily bread."  Nothing else.  Everything else is about emptying ourselves to make room for God's spirit, and about turning our hearts away from evil and the seductions of the worldly realm: moral decadence, political power, material wealth, social status, all of it.

It's a tough prayer to offer up in a fiercely partisan time, but a necessary one.

It checks the ego against the lie that rises from willfully misrepresenting one's opponent, the Luciferian bargain that Alinsky would have radicals of every persuasion make.  It challenges the partisan unwillingness to show grace and mercy to those who are on an opposing path.  It reminds the one praying it, if they're paying attention, that blind fealty to a party or a leader is a form of idolatry.

As is praying for power, even and especially if you're sure you're right.  Sure, we want power.  But that desire is a broken thing.

And our broken wanting breaks the world.

Of Vocabularies and the Hallowed

I've got another book coming out early next year.  To my great surprise, it's not either of the books I'd been working on recently.  THE YEARS DRAW NEAR, my half-finished manuscript on faith and aging in America?  Nope.  IN THE SHADOW OF HER MAJESTY, my two-thirds completed Cyberutopian Regency Action/Romance?  Uh uh.  

It's a book I first wrote back in 2015 and self-published for the devotional use of my little congregation.  THE PRAYER OF UNWANTING, as it's now called, recenters the Lord's Prayer as part of a personal prayer life.  As the prayer that Jesus explicitly taught, it pushes back against our tendency to approach the Creator with requests for power and prosperity.  It gets us out of our individual and collective solipsisms, which is kinda sorta a prerequisite for being a disciple of Jesus.

As nearly ten years had passed since I wrote the first draft, I had some significant reworking to do, which is why it's helpful to have a competent and thoughtful editor.  Dated references were removed or changed.  Flagrant errors of reasoning or continuity were corrected.

One of those reworkings was a little unexpected.  Ever since I was an undergrad majoring in religious studies at  the University of Virginia o-so-many-moons ago, my go-to Bible translation has been the New Revised Standard Version.  It was my jam during my M.Div. and D.Min. studies.  It's the translation in my pulpit, and in the pew-racks of my little church.  I've commended the HarperCollins NRSV Study Bible to numerous folks.

The NRSV was reworked in Twenty Twenty Two, and became the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition.

Some of those changes were trivial, and many are entirely comprehensible.  But some of the updating seemed less a matter of improvements in linguistic scholarship and new textual resources, and more a matter of taste and nodding to contemporary culture.

Of more significance to my book on the Lord's Prayer: among the changes in the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition was a rewording of the teaching of that prayer in the sermon on the Mount.   I had an entire chapter dedicated to reflecting on the underlying meaning of "hallowed be thy name," with a focus on the word "hallowed."  I'd used the NRSV for all scriptural quotations throughout the book, which presented something of a problem.

In both Matthew 6 and Luke 11, it no longer used the word "hallowed," replacing it with the more awkward phrasing "Let your name be revered as holy."   Clumsy though it might be, "be revered as holy" is a conceptually accurate effort to transpose the Greek Ἁγιασθήτω into English. It means the same thing, even if multiple words are used where once there was but one, so it's not a question of mucking with the meaning.  

Rather, I shall surmise, it's because the word "hallowed" is slightly archaic, something we don't say often in day-to-day conversation.  That's a point I reflect upon at length in the chapter, and a fair observation.  

But then again, it's part of the prayer as it's PRAYED IN THE LITURGIES OF ALMOST EVERY ENGLISH SPEAKING CHURCH IN THE WORLD...sorry, all caps got stuck there for a moment.  And there's just no way anyone could figure out the meaning of an uncommon English word they're unfamiliar with, after all.   Oy gevalt.

As it was, it blew a giant hole in that entire chapter.  I had a choice, then.  I could reconceptualize and rewrite it because the translation that I'd used had been changed to no evident purpose.  

Or I could simply change the translation I used.  

With some regret, I chose the latter.  For consistency, I then systematically updated all of the scripture references in my manuscript to the New International Version, which is a perfectly valid and scholarly translation.

Not a big deal, in this cut-and-paste era.  No harm, no foul, and I still use the NRSVue on regular occasion.

But it did get me to thinking:  If in our faith we called to live out a discrete culture that does not conform to the expectations of broken and fractious humanity...must our choice of language be axiomatically governed by that which ain't the Beloved Community? 

And why would we expect contemporary discourse to have words for that which is holy?

We have those words.  And learning unfamiliar words isn't a chore.  It's good for mind and soul.

Subroutines

This last Sunday, I sat down with my session and finalized my commitment to depart my current congregation at the end of October of 2011.  As my request to provide interim ministry so that the church could openly seek a new pastor while I was still here was nixed by presbytery, there just isn't any other viable option.

Just dithering about and waiting for something to happen does no one any good.  Without hard and fast deadlines towards which a church can plan, things have a tendency to just float and stagnate.  It was a necessary decision, and hopefully one that gives folks here a fighting chance at making things work.

Still and all, setting that date has proven a bit troubling personally.  Finding options for ministry that don't involve me leaving the area is difficult.  There's an overabundance of ordained pastors seeking churches in the DC area.  And leaving the area isn't possible without leaving my family behind, which isn't really the most desirable scenario.  There is, after October 30, 2011, the very real possibility that I will no longer be functionally a pastor.  Yeah, I can do supply preaching.  Or something.  But it's still a large black hole of uncertainty, bearing with it the painful possibility of vocational unfulfillment.  Most significantly, I also don't yet feel...called...anywhere.  Meaning, I'm not yet getting the spiritual cues that show what door, if any, my Maker is opening.  Ultimately, where I go is not really up to me.

In the face of that unsettling possibility, I'd like to say that I was as serene as a cloud, detached and unaffected, confident that the Good Lord has a plan for me.  But lately, I've been feeling less and less like the nonanxious presence that I need to be, and more and more like a panicked cadet during a hull breach.

In the face of that rising anxiety, I reviewed my options.  On the one hand, I could just start pounding back forties of Colt 45 every evening until the world blurs to nothing.  For some reason, this seems like a mistake.  I could just let my anxiety feed on itself until I'm a useless twitching frozen mass of stress.  This also seems like a poor choice.

What I've recently done is expand my prayer life.  Yeah, I know, crazy thing.  To my usual morning and evening prayers (a simple mix of the Lord's Prayer and prayers of supplication and intercession), I've added time for chanting meditation. 

And I have all the time I need.  The way I figure it, I spend a couple of hours a day in a rolling monastic cell as it is.  My commute, reinforced over the span of six and a half years in this ministry, may be across one of the gnarliest stretches of eight lane in the country, but it's so familiar as to require just a small fragment of my mental processing power.  So I've shut off the jabberbox, and stopped making phone calls, and started using the time to pray.  In this era of handsfree bluetooth, I don't even need to worry about looking insane. 

What's amazed me, as I've spent a week chanting Taize music and other meditative songs for the entire duration of my commute, is not just that I feel more centered.  Not totally centered, but better.  It's not just that it echoes through my day, and seems to change the pattern and flow of things, as prayer does.  It's how easy it is to both drive and chant and still turn my thoughts to other things.

After fifteen minutes of singing the same refrain, it requires no effort at all.  My body just takes up the chant, and drives, and both just carry on by themselves.   I find, now, that as I both drive and sing, that there is space for intentionally praying over people, and for visualizing those in need.  It's a bit like layering prayer over prayer, the embodied chant harmonizing with the mentally vocalized prayers of confession and intercession, while some semi-autonomous subroutine in my cortex carefully checks the lane next to me, signals, and pulls over. 

Amazing things, our minds are.

Beloved Spear Bible Puzzler: The Chosen

My discarded sermon concept for this week came in my reflections on Luke's story of the teaching of the Lord's Prayer. In keeping my message nice and simple and straightforward with a memorable takeaway, I neglected to pitch out this little Calvinist puzzler:

In Luke 11:1-13, Jesus presents his approach to prayer. That involves an attenuated Lord's Prayer, followed by a statement on the value of persistence, followed by the assertion that the thing we are to seek in prayer isn't bling or success, but the Holy Spirit. It's clear that what matters is the intent underlying prayer, a desire for connection and meaning that stirs an individual to seek after and pursue relationship with God.

As I reflected on that desire for the Holy Spirit during my sermon prep, I found myself wondering about the theological tautology that seems implied in this section. Desire for God is, I would hold, a gift of the Spirit. But if only those who are stirred by the Spirit seek the Spirit, and it is the seeking of the Spirit that is necessary for humankind to be in right relationship with God and one another, that seems to create a closed circle of engagement with the Creator. Almost, it seems, to the point of necessitating the use of terms like the "elect."

My Bible study on Sunday wrassled with this one for a bit, and folks came up with several interesting responses and reactions. I managed to avoid the use of the term prevenient, despite having spent seven years at a Methodist seminary.

What thinkest thou?