On the Limits of Christianity and Prayer

I had lunch this week with a friend from seminary during which we commiserated over the usual suspects that trouble our personal theologies. I left our meeting that day feeling re-invigorated enough to struggle with them some more. Here are some of the results, although they are incomplete in that I feel I will need to return to them again and again.

1 Corinthians 15:12-14; 19

Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from
the dead, how can some of you say there is no
resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain…If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.

I have been thinking about this verse lately, precisely because I find myself doubting the “resurrection of the dead,” whatever that may ultimately mean. Those last words symbolize my disposition. And that is the last thread I hang onto…the uncertainty of what resurrection of the dead may ultimately mean. But how does one base a faith upon pure uncertainty? Oh, how so many of my past tenets of faith have become vestigial organs now. And I don’t mean it to sound as if I am glorying in that, either. I mourn for them…I am to some extent lost without them.

I am struck by the centrality, the necessity of St. Paul’s words. If we do not have this belief, then everything is in vain, of no purpose, pointless. If there is no resurrection, then we are all just wasting our time. Was it easier for St. Paul to believe in miracles than it is for us today? Was there less cynicism? Was there still room enough in the minds of people for the miraculous to occur?

I cannot change that today there appears to be no room for miracles. I take it for certain that the violation of the laws of nature by any deity is impossible. Instead, these days I find my miracles in things visible. And this, I think, is neither good nor bad. It is simply where we are. Some Christians find themselves still waging war against this loss of the supernatural God. I wish them luck, and I pity them for theirs is a faith that is under assault on all sides. As for me, I am tired of trying to rescue this God. I am tired of performing mental acrobatics to try and find some escape clause, some loophole, and some syllogism to keep this God on continued life support. I have decided to pull the plug.

Is there a resurrection of the dead? I have no idea.

Does this mean there is no afterlife? I have no idea.

Perhaps there is hope, and I will allow for that. I will allow that God, the great whatever in the sky, the mysterious force driving the universe, has thus far provided enough evidence of the miraculous in and through the cosmos and nature to provide room for hope. And, yes, it is a scary place to find oneself. And yes, sometimes, I can find comfort in plain old hope…sometimes.

Yet I am still at odds with St. Paul’s declaration. I have heard the explanations of the historical context surrounding the passage. Still, I can’t help feel that what St. Paul is writing is not simply a response to a problem in Corinth. I have to permit that this is precisely what the saint says it is…a central tenet of the faith, without which there is no faith. And that is something that no historical critique of the passage can erase.

Luke 11:1-2a

(Jesus) was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John (the Baptist) taught his disciples.” He said to them, “When you pray, say…”

What follows from verse 2b to verse 4 is St. Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer. Another version is given to us by St. Matthew in chapter 6:9b-13 in his community’s gospel. There is no version given by St. John’s gospel and some scholars offer that a proto version of the prayer can be found in the gospel of St. Mark, 11:24-25. I will not attempt to expound at all on the differences between the versions as other persons with far greater academic pedigrees have done so on many other occasions and with better insight than I can offer. Instead, what I am proposing here is something completely different, going back to the question given in St. Luke’s account – “teach us to pray.” I hope to speak as honestly as I can in this little exercise.

Prayer is something that I struggle with, mainly because I find myself not knowing how to pray. While God is still a mystery to me (and always will be), at this point in my life I find myself trying to think of God in non-personal, non-agential, and non-theistic ways. Thus prayer, at least the concepts and traditions of prayer that I have grown up with, has been blasted to pieces and rendered utterly useless in this new spiritual country in which I roam.

Before I go any further, let me offer a little bit of a negative credo concerning God.

- I do not believe God is a separate being who exists somewhere “out there” beyond time and space.


- I do not believe that God hears our prayers of supplication and requests and then grants or denies them, depending on God’s will.


- I do not believe we can persuade God to do certain things through prayer.


- I do not believe that God can or does intervene in our affairs. God is not a cosmic superman, stepping in to deliver us from harm or evil.


- I am not certain that God can act as an agent in any way, moving or leading the universe towards any certain goal. It may be that God can do this, but I am unwilling to place any bets upon it, at least if in doing so one is required to allow that God has a prior vision of what the universe will or should look like and then, as an agent, works towards the fulfillment of this prior aim. The crux here is prior aim or goal. If I allow this, then I fear that I slip too easily back into the rut of viewing God as a person, going about, working toward a vision, just as you or I would go about working toward a goal or plan. When I consider the world and the cosmos, I am amazed at the struggle towards life, and towards complexity. At the same time, however, I wish to preserve the freedom of the cosmos and all its inhabitants and matter in its quest towards this complexity.

Is this complexification, expressed freely within and by the cosmos, precisely the cosmos’ response to a God that lures it towards something unexpected? Perhaps, but again, I am afraid of even granting this much to God as it again points toward a greater goal or aim of God. Gordon Kaufman has suggested that it is only the creative serendipitous movement of the universe that can be termed rightly as “God.” While I agree with Kaufman on this, still I am driven further from any traditional understanding by the work of persons such as Stuart Kauffman of the Santa Fe Institute who suggest that this ability to move towards complexity and life is an essential feature of the universe, existent from the moment of creation.

If this is so, then where does one draw a line of distinction between God and the world? Thus I find myself becoming more and more a pantheist rather than a panentheist, unless I remain firm in the idea that no one individual can claim to be the ultimate expression of God. God, rather, can only be glimpsed (and I would like to stress that this is a peripheral glimpse, remaining always out of focus) in the entirety of the creative serendipitous movement of the cosmos. Is this enough to base a God/world distinction upon? Perhaps it is.

But let me get back to the original question: How are we to pray? Here is my offering. Several years ago, I ran across a Buddhist blessing to be used before meals. I and others have since adopted it, feeling that if prayer is to be an intentional, conscious act of opening oneself up to understanding and living within the world in a spiritual manner, then any prayer must become an expression of this orientation. Likewise, for me a prayer must avoid becoming a laundry list of requests, pleading for God to do what God is incapable of doing. Prayer is to be in part a remembrance, calling to mind to needs of others in such a way that those needs become our needs. In our prayer we must become the other so that we share in their pain, suffering, joy, and pleasure. So, after all these caveats, here is the prayer that I try to use, adjusting it when necessary (as I mentioned, it is a blessing for use before meals) to reflect the situation at hand. When you pray, say:

“This food is the gift of the whole universe,
the earth, the sky, and much hard work.
May I live in a way that makes me worthy to receive it.
Many beings will struggle for food today.
May they all have enough to eat.”

What I appreciate about this simple blessing is that it avoids pleading with a God that I believe cannot hear. Rather, it serves to focus one's attention on the present moment, realizing both that nothing should be taken for granted, and that one should, as much as possible, become completely empathetic toward the complex web of actions, misfortunes, struggles, and successes that comprise the universe.