On Practicing Prayer

Prayer is hard, and it is rather easy not to do. But we are told to pray, and we should even on days when we feel like we are only speaking to ourselves in an empty room.

Leo Tolstoy described a man told to lift a handle up and down without further instructions. The man could have scoffed and refused, but instead he began lifting the handle up and down. Nothing happened. But he continued. Then he noticed water coming out the other end; it was a water pump with a spout. He continued. Then he saw that as the water gushed out of the spout it was spreading across the ground. He saw plants, flowers all around him. He was in a garden, and as the water continued to flow the garden flourished. Then he was moved on to another task: gathering fruit. As he moved from lower to higher tasks, he learned more about the structure of the establishment and participated in it.

Prayer is that way. We are told to do it; we could scoff and refuse. But instead we do it; following the pattern of the prayer Jesus taught his disciples, our vision is widened; we begin to see ourselves, others, and the world differently. We continue. This is not blind obedience because as we do it we learn what we could not learn without doing it. Sometimes initial obedience is a pathway to discovery and full participation.  

Dietrich Bonhoeffer explained that when we pray for particular people it is rather difficult to hate them as we pray for them. Prayer when it is a habit changes us even when we think our prayers are like trees falling in a forest without ears. But we are not merely to pray for anything; we are to pray the Lord’s Prayer and to shape our prayers accordingly. We are to appeal to God’s own character, and when we do we may very well find ourselves being shaped into the image of God. We become “perfect” like God by loving our enemies, and we learn to love them by first praying for them.

In this way, the practice of prayer is not merely about “prayer closets” and “small group bible studies.” Prayer is relational; it spills into all areas of who we are in relation to others. Their concerns become ours and ours become theirs. Prayer creates embodied community that reflects the righteousness of God. And as such, prayer must be inherently connected to public action. If we keep the water cupped at the spout, the garden will most certainly wither. The wounds of the world are far too deep and wide to be plugging the spout. 

Fragments on Peace

Since beginning my studies at Fuller, I have toiled over whether or not some form of pacifism is most in keeping with a serious reading of the gospel narratives (and other early Christian teaching).

From the outset I should probably say that my toiling over the pacifism question is not a mere ideological concern. We live in a country whose history is a history of wars and whose present is entangled in wars. We must then ask ourselves the question, “Where and how will we locate ourselves in this country?” This is a practical question, for this question and its answers will permeate our whole lives in everything we see, say, and do in the present and the future. Moreover, a theology that does not pertain to the ethical and the political is all too impotent and mostly useless.  

My first quarter at Fuller, I read John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus (I was also reading Michael Walzer at the time), and I was quite receptive to it I think perhaps because I had recently read N.T. Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of God in which Wright draws Jesus’ renunciation of violence into focus (e.g. 595). During this time I was also studying under Glen Stassen who is a pacifist and who encourages the practice of what he calls “transforming initiatives,” which are inspired from the imperatives (in contrast with the indicatives) in the Sermon on the Mount (e.g. “go, be reconciled!”).

I must say, however, that I have never quite been comfortable with pacifism, but for that matter pacifism is not about feeling comfortable. If anything, just war theory is about we who are comfortable keeping our comfort. Pacifism, however, is not exactly about retaining personal or for that matter societal equilibrium.

I have never quite been convinced by arguments for pacifism, though I must admit that I have purposefully read pacifists with the secret hope of becoming persuaded. The self-sacrificial concern for the other has been a natural draw for me since this fits well into the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth, but pacifism has remained all too much like a quixotic principle to me. And as is the case with many principles, pacifism has seemed to be yet another principled ethic that breaks down in the midst of gritty life – what am I to do as a pacifist when I am standing in front of Dachau and Auschwitz? Simply renouncing violence does not get us very far at all. In part I think it was this apparent sense of passivity in pacifism that C. S. Lewis was reacting to in his talk entitled “Why I am Not a Pacifist” (though I must say, that talk is not among the best responses to pacifism; of course if we all became pacifists, we would get over run; so did Jesus and many of his closest followers. A rationale of self-preservation is practical but does not remain in keeping with the gospel narratives).  

All this to say I have been hungry for an ethic other than pacifism but that is perhaps not far afield from it (as an aside, I should say that I have read my fair share of just war theorists and listened to their lectures, and I do not consider any of that a viable option; using the enemies’ weapons against the enemy will only reveal us to be duplicitous in character).

Roughly six years ago, I read Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It seemed rather saintly, and not something I or anyone else I know could possibly live up to. It struck me as rather pietistic not to mention terribly passive. Shortly thereafter I began reading his Ethics, but I never got very far, though I tried reading it on about two or three different occasions.

Then this winter quarter I took a class entitled “The Ethics of Bonhoeffer.” I was excited about the class because I knew we would be reading Ethics and Letters and Papers from Prison. Now I would be forced to read Ethics. This time my experience of it was completely different. It was, of course, thoroughly theological, which is not unhelpful. But more importantly, his concept of “responsible action” was like a breath of fresh air. It was a convergence of the gospel narratives, pacifism (though not passivism), and thoroughgoing social responsibility. He had my attention. I felt as if finally someone was answering the questions that I wanted to ask but was incapable of asking.

Bonhoeffer had no room for keeping individuals’ consciences unscathed nor did he suppose it to be any more helpful to talk about maxims abstracted from life. His ethic is thoroughly social and concrete. There is no talk of drawing lines between those who share complicity and those who do not. Those who take responsible action plunge into the guilty society as members of the guilty society. “If it is responsible action, if it is action which is concerned solely and entirely with the other man, if it arises from selfless love for the real man who is our brother, then precisely because this so, it cannot wish to shun the fellowship of human guilt” (Touchstone, Ethics, 237) – for more explanation see Tödt, Authentic Faith. This is not a passive peace ethic nor is it concerned with retaining one’s individualistic piety.

I have to agree with Jürgen Moltmann: Bonhoeffer got it right in his “prison theology.”