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.

Prayer and Preparation

Growing up, personal prayer disciplines weren't really a thing I learned in church.

I did pray, but it was primarily something I did at home.  There was a simple grace before meals, an offering of thanks for food and fellowship.  At night, as a small child, I'd pray with Mom before bed, after which we'd tell each other "Sillies," meaning the silliest thing we could think of.  That usually got me giggling, which may or may not have been the most efficacious thing to get me to sleep.

But in church?  Not that I can recall.  I mean, of course there were prayers in worship, which my preteen and adolescent brain mostly tuned out.  In Sunday school, we learned Bible stories, talked about helping people, and did actually service work.  All of that was lovely.  There was much progressive activism, and some marvelous opportunities to serve.  The life of the spirit wasn't really front and center.  My Presbyterian denomination being of a strongly intellectual and liberal bent, the point and the purpose of the practice of prayer wasn't really presented.  

In my late teens, I can't really recall praying at all, and when my home church split in one of those tempest-in-a-teapot ego-pissing-contest fractures that so often happen in congregational life, that was that.  Prayer didn't seem to change the arc of anything in the world, and church?  It was just precisely the same human mess you found everywhere else.  Church folks who thought otherwise were, or so my late adolescent thinking went, either earnestly naive or hypocritical.  At best, church was unnecessary, so I went with the naturally solitary tendencies of my introversion, and just stopped going.  

But the yearning for meaning didn't fade.  

In college, I found myself praying infrequently and clumsily, usually in the form of calling out to the heavens in the wee hours of the morning when God's presence seemed close. 

That deepened and became more pressing, and as I returned to church seeking meaning, I was drawn powerfully to service ministries.  But I also found I hungered for prayer.  Again, I didn't have deeply ingrained personal rituals of invocation and supplication.  It just wasn't taught, because what mattered was justice and equity and service.  The spiritual thing was your own journey, utterly idiosyncratic, do-whatever-floats-yer-ark-if-ya-feel-like-it kinda way.  Or you can just not, because, again, it's all about your unique journey.

This is, I am now convinced, one of the primary reasons the progressive church has withered.  A disciple of Jesus who does not pray is like a Buddhist who scoffs at meditation, a Muslim who thinks alms-giving is for suckers, or a Wiccan who turns up their noses at incantation.  You've neglected the roots, and if the root dies, so goes the plant.

Prayer shapes us, both individually and collectively.  It deepens our sense of God's presence, enriches our connectedness as a Christ-centered spiritual community, and refines and reinforces our integrity as persons.   When we neglect it, over-intellectualize it, use critique to distance ourselves ontologically from it, or generally fail to make it a vital part of our practice of the Way, we fragment and fail.

Even just the rote practice can shift the way we conceive of the world, as described years ago by writer/journalist AJ Jacobs in his entertaining THE YEAR OF LIVING BIBLICALLY.  

Jacobs noted, as urbane-liberal-he committed to adhering to biblical injunctions for twelve months, that the regular practices of the faith had an unanticipated effect.  The more he prayed and kept the rules of Torah...even as a stunt intended only to provide grist for a manuscript...the more he felt that something was at work in the world.  He'd notice odd resonances, and had a stronger sense of purpose   He'd temporarily tuned his mind to the frequency of faith, and it changed him...temporarily.

That change is the goal of prayer.  

It's not about control, or about getting what we want.  

It's about opening up our perception of the world.  It's about priming us to see the workings of God's grace.

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.