Liturgies

“Peeling Onions” Or “The Problems Progressives Have with Prayer”

By Bob Aldred

St Mary's in Exile has given us the freedom to exercise intellectual integrity. To bring under the microscope all that we have been taught about God, life and death. Without the fear of mortal sin or charge of blasphemy, we can happily question and discard the illogical, historically and scientifically false, and the obviously nonsensical components of orthodox Christianity.

In doing so we have peeled the onion of doctrine and theology, discarding the personal and interventionist God, the historical Jesus, the authority of a literal Bible, and the many rules and rituals imposed by the church.

This approach was to lead us to a knew paradigm, we thought! But has it? Peeling away this onion, eventually may lead to nothing in which to believe. Only time in which to ponder the meaning of life, without the guidance of a Biblical or doctrinal compass.

For the purpose of this homily, I will use prayer as an example of the Progressive's predicament. It will not answer the tough questions about prayer, but simply ask what is it, and why do we do it.

For if there is no interventionist God, why do we pray? Where do we gain our spiritual guidance in moral or ethical dilemmas? Or resilience in times of grief and crisis? What shall we do when our hopes seem dashed? Where do we turn when all human avenues for help for someone we love are exhausted?

If we dismiss prayer as a futile endeavour, with what shall we replace it? Peeling the onion can leave us in tears.

However, being progressive also gives us license to seek new perspectives.

Today, I want to share with you the perspectives of some Progressive Christian writers on prayer, to enable us to move from peeling the onion to planting a new garden in which to grow new understandings.

The first writer is Nicholas Wade and his book, “The Faith Instinct”.

Wade demonstrates that across all cultures and religions there is evidence from at least 50,000 years ago of the human instinct to seek out supernatural help through prayer.

Even here, in the Prayers Of The Faithful, we see the tension between the rational thinking that rejects the notion of an interventionist god, and the instinct to seek help from a higher power, when human intervention is unable to do more.

This instinct to prayer demands that we adopt a belief system that includes prayer to seek answers from a supernatural source, or find an alternative. Common alternatives are Humanism, Secularism, Rationalism, and Free Thought. These options fail to consider prayer as efficacious. The options also reject the spiritual realm.

To put aside prayer from our life has its consequences.

The value of prayer is in the spiritual attributes it instils. Prayer can be shown to be an avenue to express what we love and care about, gives a platform to express our loves and hates, our desires and fears, our striving for values necessary for society to be safe. Prayer is our expression of hope, our inner desire for peace and goodwill, our plea channel for justice, a heartfelt demonstration of love, and much, much, more.

It is not to be confused with the creation of a silence within, or the emptying of the mind through meditation.

In summary, prayer is the means of our engagement with the spiritual. Or in terms of our liturgy, to engage with the “Creative Spirit”.

The concept of the Creative Spirit rings true for me, as it re-images God as Spirit rather than a male or female being.

This leads us to deal with prayer from a new paradigm as Progressive Christians. David Tomlinson, another modern Progressive and an Anglican Vicar, in his book, “Re-enchanting Christianity”, looks at his faith from a new perspective, recognising that our faith is not some stagnant, unchanging belief system.

To quote him, “The priority of the gospel lies not with textual debates and arguments … but with the liberation of human beings to be the whole persons that they might be: spiritually, physically, psychologically, emotionally and socially.”

Progressives like Spong, Tomlinson, and others, do not peel away orthodox Christianity, but re-examine, re-interpret and revitalise our spiritual life to enable us to meet life with a renewed faith and hope.

The Progressive writer that opened for me the new way of understanding prayer, was Harry Emerson Fosdick in his book, “The Meaning of Prayer”. Let me give you a taste of his view.

“We must think of prayer as separable from religion; we must ask not only what our desires are when we pray, but what are dominant in daily business; what we really are after in our innermost ambitions; what is our demand on life. Prayer, in this more inclusive sense, is the settled craving of a man's heart, good or bad, his inward love and determining desire.”

This paradigm of prayer recognises that we all have a spiritual component to our life. The spiritual soul of our identity, and the spiritual culture we share as a community, plays a large role in determining our identity.

Prayer pervades our meditation, contemplation, our passion for love and justice, our hopes for the future, our tears for the suffering, our joy for the blessings that we and those we love, enjoy.

The principle of reinterpretation applied to understanding prayer, can be applied to all components of our Christian belief.

Here, at SMX we describe ourselves as “leaving the hut” of security to explore new ways of understanding the meaning and purpose of life. The example of the hut, is that of people on a journey who have spent time in the safety of a hut along the track of life. The safety and security is embedded in orthodox teachings.

Some choose to stay in the hut, but the progressives leave in the knowledge they are venturing into the unknown. If we extend this, we may say they are searching for a “light on the hill” that will throw new light on the mystery of the creative spirit. We are following our spiritual instinct in faith and hope.

Prayer and many other religious practices, cannot be dismissed liking pealing an onion. It is against our natural instinct. We need a new enlightened way of living out the spiritual.

Let me finish with the progressive Danish theologian, Soren Kierkegaard who asked the question, “What does it mean to be a Christian?” This challenged the underlying Danish Christian culture, which was like questioning motherhood and apple pie and went over like a lead balloon. His challenge was to question not only our belief, but how we live.

His challenge was not only progressive by questioning the unquestionable in order to appreciate more the Creative Spirit. Kierkegaard's was also of the school of Absurdity. This school recognised that there is a limit to our knowledge of the creative spirit.

We then can take the leap of faith, or in his words, embrace the absurd, not rejecting what we don't understand, such as the mystery of life after death, or anything outside of human power we instinctively hope for in prayer. They are new spiritual frontiers to discover.