If you've found your prayer life unmoored by theological change, first of all, I hope you know how normal you are. Having gone through what you've gone through and considered what you've considered, why wouldn't you question prayer? If you grew up believing God controls but have now experienced enough trauma to realize God doesn't control, I think it’s understandable you’ve lost interest.
But, secondly, you might be encouraged to know that others have gone through similar kinds of things and found in their letting go of the old and embracing the new that their prayer life underwent a metamorphosis. So, maybe there's still room for prayer. If you think so (and if you don't, it's fine), then perhaps the following will be helpful. I spent some time recently reflecting on why it is I still pray. Here you go.
1 - I pray because it's what Jesus did.
I find Jesus praying throughout the gospel story multiple times in homes, in synagogues, at dinner parties, in public, in the garden, on the cross, in groups, and alone. There are, at least, a couple of dozen references of him in prayer. Clearly, his life was saturated in and influenced by prayer. Because I find his life compelling, I think it's worth it to emulate his practices. So, I pray.
2 - I pray because prayer influences me.
Prayer, for me, has turned into a way I increase the interiority of who I am. A larger interiority allows me to "hold things." The theology behind that idea is that the cross isn't the place where everything gets fixed; it's the place where everything is held. Jesus, on the cross, stretches out his hands and embraces all things, both good and bad.
And as he's holding the whole world (including me) with all its chaos, pain, joy, regret, and potential, I find the strength to hold my "little world" with all its chaos, pain, joy, regret, and potential.
My current belief is that God doesn't exactly know how everything will play out (though I do think he's got some good ideas), which means that my ability to create interiority and align myself with love is really important. If my interiority is small, petty, unforgiving, and scapegoat-driven, then my actions will be small, petty, unforgiving, and scapegoat-driven.
Obviously, you’ll have to take my word for it. There’s no empirical data I have to back this up, but I have a sense that prayer has helped me. So, I still pray because prayer influences me.
3 - I pray because, by faith, I believe it influences others.
I don't pray for God to fix things because I don't think love is controlling, but that doesn't mean I've stopped believing that prayer influences people, situations, or the world. I don't always know how, but by faith, I believe that prayer does something.
When I speak of faith, I'm not speaking of having faith in Christ, but rather the faith of Christ. Faith isn't a mental ascent, an affirmation, belief, saying a creed, or an intellectual understanding of God. Those things I just listed aren't unimportant, but a head-faith doesn't always translate into a heart-faith. Love isn't an intellectual thing. Love is a relationship thing. And yes, God is love.
So, it's a faith of… and on the way… and what we learn on the way is that we are all interrelated. We are, as MLK jr said, in an inescapable network of mutuality. You wouldn't even exist without others. Yes, mom and dad, but also consider how the atoms you're made without came from somewhere else. The blood in your veins is red because of the iron in stars. The water you drink may have come from clouds that soaked up particles of sweat from a raccoon in Utah. Good grief, we're all so interconnected. When reading Rob Bell's latest book, I was reminded that a woman's monthly cycle is influenced by the ongoing faithful rotation of the moon. The moon. Crazy! Females have a connection with a rock floating in space 238,000 miles away!
Put your hand on your arm, or your leg, or over your heart. Think about it. Stars, Atoms, Racoons, Blood, Reproductive cycles, the moon, the universe… you're inside of it, and it's inside of you.
And don't make me get started with quantum entanglement, which has been telling us for a while now that stuff is connected in ways we can’t even comprehend. Sub-atomic particles can be split up, moved around the world from each other but still communicate. That's interrelated!
Why am I saying this? Because the faith of Christ reminds me of my relationship with everyone and everything in the cosmos. Maybe there's something like a quantum entanglement expression to our prayers.
Physicist and theologian Ilia Delio says, "If things can affect one another despite distance or space-time coordinates, then nature is a deeply entangled field of energy; the nature of the universe is undivided wholeness."
Deeply entangled.
Undivided wholeness.
Maybe this is what the Apostle Paul was getting at when he said, "For none of us lives for ourselves alone, & none of us dies for ourselves alone." (Romans 14:7)
So, yes, in light of even a cursory understanding of all this interrelatedness, I'm compelled to say that I believe prayer can influence others.
4 - Finally, I pray because, well, I think it's likely that something is going on bigger and more significant than me.
Imagine that, something bigger than me. Can it be proven? No, I don't think so. And I suppose I hope it never will be proven. Because a life proved, is a life without risk, and a life without risk is a life without love.
I think it's likely that the God who is present to us and present to all things is in the middle of all this prayer. "In him," again from the Apostle Paul, "we move, live and have our being." So maybe our prayers open up new possibilities for God and us. (Check out The Adjustment Bureau) If this is true, then indeed something bigger is going on. The point is, fresh, new, previously unavailable opportunities might emerge in and around my prayers.
Lately, I've been doing a lot of theological reading. Every week it seems I'm uncovering new things I had previously never considered. It's remarkable how true the old adage is: the more you know, the more you realize you don't know. I've never once finished a book and thought, "Oh, wow, there's less out there than I realized." Ha, no, it's always more.
What's true of theology is true of science, technology, cosmology, and anything else you can think of. There always seems to be more out there, right?
Have you heard about the final words of Steve Jobs? You can catch the full story in a NY Times article written by his sister, but apparently, before taking his last breath, Jobs looked at his sister, then his children, then his partner, Laurene, and then looked over their shoulders and said, "OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW."
I don't know anything about the kind of faith Steve Jobs had, but I sure like those last words. It could be a tiny glimpse into something playing out that's much bigger.
Even after all I've been through, I just think it's more likely than not that something is going on that's bigger and more significant than me. And if that’s true, then it encourages me to pray.
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