Why pray? Evidently, God likes to be asked. God certainly does not need our wisdom or our knowledge, nor even the information contained in our prayers (“your Father knows what you need before you ask him”). But by inviting us into the partnership of creation, God also invites us into relationship. God is love, said the apostle John. God does not merely have love or feel love. God is love and cannot not love. As such, God yearns for relationship with the creatures made in his image. (Philip Yancey, Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference?, p. 143)
Do you yearn for a relationship with me, God? I don’t understand… I don’t get it at all. Why? Why? I’m a nothing, God. I’m a bit of cork floating in Lake Michigan, and for some unfathomable reason you are interested in my life. It makes no sense. Is this what it means for you to be love itself? You cannot not love… well, that must present you with challenges. I can choose not to love, but apparently you cannot.
I want to pray to you, but I’m scared. How do I know you’re not going to ask me to do some ridiculous thing? Like Abraham having to offer up Isaac… what was THAT all about??? Did you not know ahead of time that he had faith? That story scares the piss out of me, God. How do I know that if I pray to you you’re not going to ask me to do something like that too? Give up what is most precious to me… If I’d been him, I’d have walked away right then. I don’t have a son or a daughter, but I have a little dog Jazz, and I could never do anything to hurt her. I’d walk away from you first.
There are days, God, when religion has worn me out. I don’t like religion. Nor religious people… no, that’s not true… I love my congregation, and it has religious people in it. It’s professional religious people I don’t know what to do with. What a strange lot clergy are. I have questions about religion, God, questions I’m afraid even to admit or ask.
My congregation looks to me as a spiritual leader… Ha!! How ridiculous is that!? I know nothing more than they know… actually, I know less than they know. They are the ones who teach ME about faith. I preach to them for 15 minutes a week, and for the other 167 hours and 45 minutes, they preach to me with their lives.
But most important, what do I do with you, God? You, who yearn for a relationship with me… for reasons I do not grasp. How can I trust you? How can I learn to pray to you again? I’m always having to learn how to pray over and over. I pray to you all the time in my job… but how can I learn to pray to you as just me… little me, floating along with all my fears and hopes.
I like what your servant Augustine said: “My soul’s house is too small, God. Enlarge it. It’s falling apart. Repair it. It has things in it that offend your sight, that I know. But who can clean it up except you?” That’s an honest prayer. Augustine had his problems, but he could write beautiful stuff.
So every day I have to start again. You are God, and I am me. And you yearn for relationship with me. So I should start to pray again. But I’m scared… and hopeful.
I know that you are writing about more than the binding of Isaac here, but I would like to say something about the binding.
I think it is safe to say that Abraham would have walked away too. God blinked first. Abraham knew what was going on. On the way to the binding Abraham told Isaac that God would provide the lamb.
I think we have to read stories like this, and Job, in the context of Israel in exile dealing through myth with what it would take to restore their nation.
In the Hellenistic world these myths took on other meanings. We inherited these later meanings. But they too had a historical context that is not ours. (I don’t even like the idea that a lamb died in that story.)
I have never read Yancey. I don’t think I ever will. He, like many of his spiritual ancestors, I imagine, lays an unbearable burden on us.
If there is a God, I think he asks nothing of us. We owe him nothing.
I would not try to pray, if I were you. (But I am not, of course.) I would climb a mountain or walk by a river or through a forest – with Jazz.
Thanks for this, Chris. I see a good deal of my own experience reflected in your words.
I can’t not pray, or at least not try to pray, Ken. “Our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.” Even if the offering of Isaac is a myth, it still symbolizes the demands our ideals place on us… a scary thing to get close to. I do love to walk with Jazz, except for her a walk is more of an opportunity to sniff and scrounge for UGOs (unidentified ground objects). (-:
Ryan, thanks for your encouragement. Peace to all.
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Chris,
A little bit of “uh-huh” and a whole lot of “oh yeah.”
SRB
Re: “Do you yearn for a relationship with me, God? I don’t understand… I don’t get it at all. Why? Why? I’m a nothing, God. I’m a bit of cork floating in Lake Michigan, and for some unfathomable reason you are interested in my life. ”
In modernity, understanding the universe or cosmos as we do, so vast, and in it us and our planet and sun so tiny, where indifference is the nature of the order of things, in evolution, in physics and in economics, a God concerned with us just makes no sense. You are not at all unique here, even though it is your vocation to keep the faith, just as it is for Yancey.
I think the conflict you feel is inevitable. The expectations your vocation must carry are heavy.
I think a vocation with heavy expectations is the public (or private) school teacher. My job seems easy by comparison. Actually, I love my vocation. I have the best job in the world! I get to do things I love and be with people I love.
Maybe faith (and its handmaid prayer) is a protest against the indifference of the universe… Good grief… that sounds almost… existentialist!!
Peace to you today. (-: