Zahnd: Believing in an interventionist God

Brian Zahnd has a post today that I needed to hear: I Believe In An Interventionist God.

In my journey out of evangelicalism and into some broader, more historic practice of Christianity, I have struggled with prayer. As I wrestle with questions about what even is God, really—thanks Teillhard and Ilia Delio!—and whether God’s nature is to compel anyone or anything—thanks Thomas J. Oord!—I vacillate between wanting to fall back on a sort of naive presumption of the evangelical god and wondering what even the use of prayer is. And yet, at some part of my core deeper than the intellect, I know there’s some real value, use, and need for prayer. It means something.

Zahnd observes:

Prayer is the oxygen of faith. When we can’t pray, we can at least say our prayers. When the tide of faith has receded far out to sea, liturgical prayers—prayers that we did not compose—can sustain us until the tide comes back in. It’s the vetted prayers passed down through the ages that best sustain faith in a dark night of the soul. The soul that can hold on to the prayers during the dark night will eventually arrive at a new dawn.

He’s right.

In this time the liturgical prayers from the Book of Common Prayer have been so valuable for me. For a closing prayer at the end of last week’s diocesan convention a priest broke out this beautiful familiar prayer from the Compline, and I was unexpectedly immediately in tears:

Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night,
and give your angels charge over those who sleep.
Tend the sick, Lord Christ;
give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering,
pity the afflicted, shield the joyous;
and all for your love’s sake. Amen.

Zahnd understands the temptation to look around at the world and just ask “what’s the use?”. But that way lies a dead, shriveled faith.

[P]rayers go unanswered, children die of cancer, and even the most faith-filled suffer “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” God intervenes, but from our vantage point not nearly as often as we would like. It does create the temptation to fling our hands up in despair and say, “I no longer believe in an interventionist God.” I understand this impulse, but I think it is mostly an attempt to seal ourselves off from potential disappointment. We give up praying lest we be disappointed, or we pray such safe prayers that we no longer run the risk of being disappointed. But if we are to have any hope for a life of vibrant faith, we have to run the risk of disappointment. Faith by its very nature is a risky venture. So I choose the risk of disappointment. I do this because it is my experience that God can help me bear disappointment, but if I quit engaging with God by ceasing to implore divine intervention in our world and in my life for fear of disappointment, my soul begins to waste away. I don’t want to live in a world where God seems absent just because I don’t want to risk disappointment.

And I love that when Zahnd gets down to what he does believe about prayer and God’s engagement in the world, he ends at a conclusion that fits in just fine with Teillhard, Delio, and Oord:

I actually believe—though I cannot prove it—that God is in a constant state of intervention in the world. I hold to the seemingly outrageous idea that God is never not intervening in the world! God is love, and God is always loving the world. God’s intervention is God’s love. God’s intervening love may rarely (if ever) be coercive and controlling, but the intervention of love is there nevertheless. What God’s loving, though noncoercive, intervention looks like exactly is hard to tell, but I suspect that has more to do with our own spiritual blindness than with any imagined absence or ambivalence on God’s part.

I am slowly feeling my own reactionary, deconstructing pendulum reach the apex of its swing and head back toward a better resting place. Slowly finding my voice in prayer again. But I am supremely thankful for the written prayers—I like Zahnd’s word here, vetted prayers—that have sustained my faith in the interim.

Some quick thoughts as I synthesize Beck and Delio this morning...

Richard Beck has a post this week addressing “intellectual problems with petitionary prayer”, or to put the question another way: how does prayer “work”? He critiques a vision of God sitting at a distance from the world and being convinced to reach in and intervene in a Creation that otherwise ticks on autonomously. He calls this the “magic domino theory” - the idea that prayer is to get God to reach in and tip over the magic domino that knocks over other dominos to make things happen.

Beck’s latest book, as I understand it (having read his posts about it but not the book itself) argues for a re-enchanted view of the world. In this post he builds off of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ line that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God”:

God isn’t at a distance. God’s energy and power suffuses creation. Creation isn’t ticking along autonomously, like a machine. Creation is alive and exists in an on-going radical dependence upon God. We are continuously bathed in God’s sustaining light and love, and should God ever look away from us we would cease to be.

Now I love this, but I am also internally screaming “but what does this really MEAN?” After a lifetime in fundamentalist evangelicalism being told to accept a broad disconnect between the reality of creation and the “mystery” of God in it, I need something more tangible.

This is where I appreciate being able to read Ilia Delio alongside Beck. Delio, I think, would agree with Beck’s vision of creation being imbued with God’s presence. But she would then start to talk about what that permeation might actually mean at a level of quantum mechanics. And this is so helpful to me because even though, to adapt Arthur C. Clarke, sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic, I need to at least conceptually be able to ground that “magic” (or to use Beck’s word, “enchanted”) view of God’s interaction with creation in the real, scientific world somehow.

And even though my understanding of quantum physics is quite limited, Delio’s push to bring theology into discussion with modern cosmology has been a key to my ability to stay within the stream of Christianity. I couldn’t deal any more with the disconnected, capricious, judgmental God that evangelicalism gave me. But that we could personify “God” as a conceptualization of the mysterious relational charge running through the fabric of the universe? That somehow uniquely enlightened and enlivened Jesus of Nazareth? That’s an approach that can unite my head and my heart as I (like everyone else) try to grapple with the mysteries of life.

You are always more ready to hear than we are to pray...

Wow, Proper 22 from the BCP this week:

Almighty and everlasting God, you are always more ready to hear than we to pray, and to give more than we either desire or deserve: Pour upon us the abundance of your mercy, forgiving us of those things of which our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things for which we are not worth to ask, except through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ our Savior; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Brian Zahnd's Prayer School

A month ago I had the opportunity to attend the Prayer School weekend taught by Brian Zahnd at Word of Life Church in St. Joseph, MO. I’ve intended to write up some thoughts on it ever since, but maybe it’s been good to let things percolate a little while first. So many thoughts.

First, a little bit about Brian, since it’s hard for me to separate him from the prayer school. I found Brian through his sermon podcast, which I’ve listened to fairly regularly for a little over a year now. His story includes planting a Pentecostal church in his 20s, seeing it grow successfully, hitting something of a mid-life faith crisis in his 40s, whereupon he took a harder, broader look at theology. His teaching retains pieces of his charismatic background while embracing liturgy (“good liturgy”, he would say), the Book of Common Prayer, pacifism, and a strong sense of progressive revelation. He details this story in his recent book Water to Wine, which I’d happily recommend as, if nothing else, a wonderful faith story.

In this post I’m going to share my thoughts directly about the prayer school; in a future post I want to follow up with a few thoughts about Zahnd and Word of Life church directly, since I got the feeling many attending, and probably many who have read his books or listened to the podcast, are curious about the man and his ministry.

Prayer School

[Initial note: Brian only teaches these classes in person - no recordings are distributed. He says he believes it’s something that should be passed along as ‘secrets’ from person to person. I’ll respect that and not go into tremendous detail. However, there’s nothing too unfamiliar there if you’ve listened to his podcast over the past year or so.]

Zahnd organizes the prayer school into three sessions, held Friday morning, Friday afternoon, and Saturday morning. (Word of Life Church holds a regular Friday night service which we were also encouraged to attend.) Through those sessions he teaches (and models) prayer not as “getting God to do what you want” but as a way to be “properly formed”.

He encourages the use of prayers that have been written through church history both as good prayers that allow us to learn from our forefathers, and as ways to teach us to pray better when we pray extemporaneously. Brian uses a musical metaphor likening these rote prayers to a guitarist practicing scales. You don’t always play just the scales, he says, but if you haven’t practiced your scales over and over, when you get to play the second verse guitar solo, you’re not gonna do very well.

In the final session Brian talks about contemplative prayer, which he likes to call “sitting with Jesus”. (He’s preached sermons with similar titles if you’re really curious.) For this topic he draws on a long line of contemplatives in the spirit of Thomas Merton.

The whole class is structured around a morning liturgy of prayer which he challenges everyone to try for 6 weeks. It includes daily Bible readings, weekly prayers from the BCP, rote prayers including that of St. Francis, and time for personal petition and contemplation.

Thoughts

A good bit of what drew me to attend the prayer school in the first place was this seemingly odd combination of liturgy, old prayers, and contemplation. What a mix! And in that I wasn’t disappointed. Zahnd is a talented teacher, though if I were going to try to describe his personality and approach I might start by referencing some Old Testament prophet instead of a teacher. There’s an air of confident, in-your-face declaration that was a bit of a shock to this guy who is used to long brainy sermons.

I really like the emphasis on using and learning from the prepared prayers. The Book of Common Prayer is full of beautiful language and really meaningful prayers and is a rich treasury that today’s church should draw on. (I’m a sucker for the musical metaphor, too.)

Zahnd makes a compelling case for using rote prayers from Acts 2:42, which in the NIV is translated

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.

However, he points out, in the Greek it’s not “prayer” but “the prayers”, definite article, plural. (I looked it up in an interlinear online, and sure enough, he’s right.) And devoting one’s self to “the prayers” is a horse of a different color than “prayer”.

I haven’t done a very good job of taking up Pastor Brian’s six-week challenge so far. I’ve used the liturgy inconsistently a few times per week, often getting distracted by my schedule. However, I still feel the draw to use it more regularly, so I’m going to try to make it a priority. Where previously the idea of spending 20-30 minutes in prayer was incomprehensible to me - I’d be out of ideas after 5 minutes! - with this liturgy I can easily spend 20-30 minutes in reading and prayer, which is great. I just need to find a way to make it a habit.

There’s so much more I’d like to write but I’ll save it for a follow-up post.

May I go through the day calling on you

A beautiful prayer, credited only as an “Ethiopian Prayer”, from today’s noon-time reading in Phyllis Tickle’s The Divine Hours:

God, you have prepared in peace the path I must follow today. Help me to walk straight on that path. If I speak, remove lies from my lips. If I am hungry, take away from me all complaint. If I have plenty, destroy pride in me. May I go through the day calling on you, you, O Lord, who know no other Lord.

Amen.

St. Thomas More's Prayer for Good Humor

I ran across this fantastic prayer this morning in a story about Pope Francis. (Reportedly the Pope prays this prayer daily.) It’s beautiful, funny, and practical all in one.

Prayer for Good Humor

Grant me, O Lord, good digestion, and also something to digest. Grant me a healthy body, and the necessary good humor to maintain it. Grant me a simple soul that knows to treasure all that is good and that doesn’t frighten easily at the sight of evil, but rather finds the means to put things back in their place. Give me a soul that knows not boredom, grumblings, sighs and laments, nor excess of stress, because of that obstructing thing called “I.” Grant me, O Lord, a sense of good humor. Allow me the grace to be able to take a joke to discover in life a bit of joy, and to be able to share it with others. -St. Thomas More, Chancellor to King Henry VIII