Tag Archives: prayer

Moltmann on Meditation

by on November 7, 2011

Happy Moltmann Monday, y’all!  Today’s excerpt comes from The Spirit of Life in his chapter on the theology of mystical experience. I’m giving you the first few sentences for context, but pay attention to the last half particularly.

The Greek philosophers, the [parents] of the Church, and the monastic Fathers comprehended things ‘with their eyes’. They ‘theorized’ in the literal sense of the word (theoreiz in Greek=to look at). We really arrive at understanding when we go on looking at a flower or a sunset or a manifestation of God until this flower is the flower per se, and this sunset is the sunset, and this manifestation of God is wholly God and nothing but God Godself. Then the observer becomes part of the flower, or part of the sunset, or part of God. For through his perception he participates in his object or counterpart, and is transported into it. The act of perception transforms the perceiver, not what is perceived. Perception confers communion. We know in order to participate, not in order to dominate. Theat is why we can only know to the extent in which we are capable of loving what we see, and in love are able to let it be wholly itself. Knowledge, as the Hebrew word (yada) tells us, is an act of love, not an act of domination. When someone has understood, he says: ‘I see it. I love you. I behold God.’ The result is pure ‘theory’, and pure good-pleasure.”

 

You’ve likely heard me say before I’m not a contemplative. I won’t get into a passionate discussion of why here; suffice it to say I have a hard time sitting around trying to zone out. I have a hard time thinking that is in any way Christian. (Okay, I got into my discussion a leeeeetle bit.) However I’m trying to learn, and stretch myself into the uncomfortable territory that is the great mystical Christian tradition. And I am learning that it is not a zoning out, but a honing in. It is not a removal from the world, but an immersion into the world at the deepest level. This is why I love the phrase “perception confers communion.” That phrase makes me want to practice meditation daily, just for the hope that I can get a  taste of that happening in me. It is when we return to that feeling of being transported into something so much bigger and wider and more loving and present and real, which is to say, being transported into the presence of God. You have to set your intention to be present to it, but you can’t go there like you walk to the store. You have to be lifted, transported there. You have to set yourself in such a place that you can be carried into it.

And it doesn’t carry you away. It carries you in and with. It confers communion. And isn’t that our goal?

Comments { 2 }

The world is full of praise

by on June 20, 2011

A word on praise and prayer from Moltmann’s The Source of Life:

The world is full of praise, for God is in this world. God is not far off, in the Beyond, but is himself the life in the world. Israel expresses this by saying that God’s Spirit, God’s Wisdom and God’s presence fill everything created in such a way that all things live from God and have their existence and continuance in God…So nothing is so far from God that it does not hold God ‘within itself’, as Aquinas said, and God is so cose to all things that, together with human beings, in him ‘they live and move and have their being’ (Acts 17.28).

It is only for modern men and women that the world has become dumb, for it has now come to be seen merely as material for research and technology. The modern world for its part has led to what Rachel Carson called ‘the silent spring’, and has turned the song of praise of living creation into the stillness of the dead and ravaged world. But the world is not mute. All creatures speak, even if human beings can no longer hear them. All creatures are aflame with the present glory of the Lord, and reflect his glory in a thousand different mirrors, but ‘we are blind, we have no eyes’ said Calvin, as did Francis of Assisi.

People who thank God every morning for the new day in their lives, people who praise God through their delight in existence and glorify him through their love for life, are not doing something singular. They are only doing what all creatures do, universally and unceasingly, each in its own way. With the lives they live these people are joining with cosmic resonance of God’s goodness and beauty. To pray like this means to wake up out of the mute world of modernity and turn back to the cosmic solidarity of all created being.

 

I love this description of prayer as waking up to the presence of God in the world, and how that inevitably leads us to a feeling of solidarity with all of creation, beloved as we all are by God our Creator.  For so many people prayer is duty, obligation, even punishment for past wrongs, while it is meant to be an act which awakens your heart to God in all fullness.

I also appreciate Moltmann’s criticism of our often haughty approach to the world, treating it as some sort of pet project on which we’re calling the shots. We have made the world dumb because we so desperately want to feel smart.  But there is wisdom in our return to a cooperative understanding of life, where we work in and with creation (and our fellow human beings), joining the “cosmic resonance of God’s goodness and beauty.”  To pray, to live in the life of God’s Spirit, is to be awakened to this fullness and humbled by the ways we’ve attempted to silence it.

Comments { 2 }

Article in Immerse

by on April 13, 2011

I have a brief article on prayer out in this month’s Immerse Journal.  Immerse is a magazine dedicated to issues of relevance to people who work with and for youth.  The magazine has fantastic content, and it’s really lovely to hold and to look at, too.  (Yes, I’m still one of those people who values a tangible book or magazine and loves to feel the weight of the paper and see the color of the inks.)  I’d highly recommend it.

I was asked to write a piece for their Soul Care column, and I talked about my prayer life, which has become mostly wordless in recent years.  Here’s a brief look:

“Sometimes, when I’m thinking about something that is worrying me, I just let out a sigh and close my eyes for a moment, sending it along to God like a quiet postcard.  At times, it feels like God and I are like an old married couple who know each other well enough to shoot a glance across the room at a party to signal we’re tired.  God knows my glances, knows my sighs, knows what it is I struggle with and what I long for and what I desperately need help doing.  Somehow, in not attempting to write a persuasive seminary paper with multiple points every time I pray, I’ve been freed to trust more deeply in that relationship, to breathe, and most importantly, to let go.”

Comments { 0 }

Dear God, I hope

by on March 24, 2011

Over the last month or so, my 6 year old has come up with a new little rhythm in his prayers. All of them- before meals, before bed, when we see an accident on the highway.  He says, “Dear God, I hope…”  Last night it was, “Dear God, I hope that no more people die in Japan, and I hope nobody in Africa gets bit by those mosquitoes that make them sick, and I hope I have really good dreams tonight.”

Something about the simple, declarative essence of his “I hope” statements has really struck me. I love that, in true 6 year old optimist fashion, he can throw out some gargantuan requests like they’re completely possible. Like it just takes us bringing our hope to God for malaria to be a thing of the past. Last night when I heard him pray that, I wondered if he was, in some way, right.  If we actually did bring our declarative hopes out like that and hang them like flags of promise, I wonder if malaria wouldn’t seem that far-fetched a problem to fix.  Maybe our hopes stay so small and inward that we need to get them to a place the wind can sway them in a way that actually moves us all in the same direction. Maybe we need to declare them, like blaring trumpets, both to God and to ourselves:  Dear God, I  hope!

Comments { 1 }

A Prayer for our Enemies…and for us

by on October 18, 2010

In honor of last week’s synchroblog on loving our enemies, here’s a prayer Moltmann wrote for a sermon on this difficult teaching of Jesus:

“Heavenly Father, we call upon you in Jesus’ name.  We come with empty hands.  We have not been able to love our enemies.  As a rule we have never even seen them.  We have avoided them.  When we saw them, we felt only fear and anger, not love.

So we come to you, not as the children of your love, but as the enemy of our enemies, beseeching you for ourselves and all the others;

Bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you.  Forgive us for what we have failed to do for our enemies.

You lead us out of the constriction of fear and out of the prison of hate, into the wide space of freedom.  Let us see your sun, which rises upon the evil and the good, and rejoice in its warmth, together with our enemies.  Amen.”

-from a sermon entitled “Revolutionary Love of our Enemies” in The Power of the Powerless, p.55.

-and thanks to Tia Lynn Lecorchick for organizing, and for the picture up top

Comments { 1 }