Prayer may not save us. But prayer may make us worthy of being saved. (Abraham Joshua Heschel, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity)
In my childhood, I experienced prayer as a spiritual discipline I was forced to practice. Each night my mother would gather my father, my younger brother, and me for our nightly devotions. She would read some daily meditation and then force us to pray in this order: my younger brother, me, my father, and her. Everyone had to pray. No one was free to refuse. To this day, I have resented this manipulation. And this was the beginning of my conflicted relationship with prayer.
That conflicted relationship with prayer has continued throughout my life. As a pastor, I was expected to pray often. Whenever I returned to my family home in South Carolina, my mother always called upon me to pray, and I felt (perhaps unjustly) that she was still manipulating me and making sure I was faithful to her understanding of the faith. I cannot abide being manipulated.
And then there are all those questions associated with prayer.
- What about all those hundreds of people I prayed for who were ill and who did not survive?
- If everything is God’s will anyway, then why bother to pray?
- What about all the prayers of generations of slaves or the men, women, and children who prayed so desperately to escape the Holocaust?
- Does God arbitrarily choose which prayers to answer or arbitrarily choose how to answer prayers?
- If there is a bigger picture which determines which prayers are answered in ways that heal, liberate, and preserve life, then what is that picture and how does our freedom and dignity as children of God relate to this grander scheme?
Ultimately, authentic religion may be suprarational, but it can never be irrational. And it cannot ever be afraid to question, search, and change.
I have a lot of questions about the power of prayer. I am not ready to jettison prayer from my life or from authentic faith. But I am suspicious of the shallow claims so many Christians (and those of other faiths) make for that power. I am like the man in the Gospels who said, “I believe (trust), help my unbelief (lack of trust).” And in the honorable tradition of the Jewish faith, I refuse to settle for easy, credulous answers. According to the tradition of the Hebrew Scriptures, the name “Israel” means “to wrestle with God.” Judaism is a religion which wrestles with God in its search for truth. It refuses to be content with answers to complex questions that are uninformed and lack deep reflection. I have always admired the Jewish faith for such a courageous search. The Christian faith, when it has been at its best, has continued such honesty. We cannot properly worship and praise God without using our minds as well as our hearts. Ultimately, authentic religion may be suprarational, but it can never be irrational. And it cannot ever be afraid to question, search, and change.
So, I continue my struggles with prayer and God. To my credit, I have not quit the search. I hope I have deepened my faith. I certainly have a more authentic and trustworthy understanding of God, creation, humanity, and myself because I have continued that struggle. I am put together in a way that I cannot be content with answers that are contradicted by experience or reason. But I am also put together in ways that allow me to experience transcendence, wonder, and sacred connections. Like Jacob of old, I am Israel. And as I age, I understand that such an identity is required to grow in my faith.
One of the spiritual giants of the 20th Century was the Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel. He has been a blessing and mentor in my life. He has taught me more about the nature of wonder in both life and religion than anyone else. And it’s been that wonder which has allowed me to stay the journey. I trust there is a God and that this God is like Heschel’s brother Jesus of Nazareth. But I do not absolutely know there is a God who is like Jesus. And neither does anyone else one else know without a single doubt whatever they may profess.
I listen with my mind and heart to Heschel’s wisdom and insight. So, when he wrote “Prayer may not save us. But prayer may make us worthy of being saved,” I realized that he was revealing one of the absolute truths about prayer I could embrace. Praying to a God who asks us “to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with our God”—who loves unconditionally and with deep compassion—whose eye is even on the sparrow—who is not threatened by our doubts, struggles, and feeble attempts to live and love—to spend time with this kind of God can only make me a better human. And if that miraculous transformation can occur, then prayer, with all my questions and frustrations, is infinitely worth the effort. There is much I do not know for sure (and I’ve discovered that the same is true for everyone else in spite of their claims to the contrary). But I do know this about myself: I want so much to be worthy of being made whole. I want so much to be a blessing to this crazy, bleeding, beautiful world. And I want to be a blessing to this God of wonder with whom I wrestle daily.
