Liminality Farm

To pray is to change. Prayer is the central avenue God uses to transform us. If we are unwilling to change, we will abandon prayer as a noticeable characteristic of our lives.

R.J. Foster, Celebration of Discipline, Special Anniversary Edition

The spiritual discipline of prayer is, well, a toughie, at least for me. When I was a kid in the Anglican church, there was Prayers For The People at every service and that seemed good. But also, it left me a bit with the impression that God was Not To Be Bothered with anything less than expansive prayer for the human collective (note: I’m sure had I bothered to actually ASK anybody if this was true, the lovely people at my childhood church would have set me straight but I was 11 or so and I didn’t like looking like I didn’t just magically know EVERYTHING).

Fast forward to middle-age and now I struggle with praying because it feels like I’m a 40 year old woman (that part’s true) trying to talk to Santa Claus (that part hopefully not true). It’s not that I don’t believe God EXISTS, it’s that I just don’t know how it feels to be in relationship with Him. The solution to that, of course, being prayer.

Performative social media prayers aside, as the quote above says, there is a transformational aspect that I think is at the heart of the matter. It’s worth noting that like most deceptively simple practices, there are multiple different types of prayer (the exact taxonomy tends to depend on — surprise! — your denomination) which generally fall into the following categories:

1. Thanksgiving/Praise: Prayer that focuses directly on the goodness of God, either as His inherent quality or in context as an expression of thanks for His gifts.
   • Praise tends to make me wonder, what’s the point? Does an infinite Being actually need me to build Him up? In that context I thought this was an interesting observation: The purpose of praise is that by explicitly recognizing the goodness of God, and simultaneously noting that we are made in God’s likeness, we can also recognize what is praiseworthy in ourselves and others. It opens us up to deep transformation in our relationships with both God and other humans (Prayer Eleven: Praising Prayer)
     
2. Repentance: The biblical definition of repentance is actually reasonably complex, but the basic idea is that one turns towards God. Then, by extension, repentance also means turning away from what separates you from God, commonly called sin (also a more complex concept than most suppose, as far as I can tell). So a prayer of repentance is often the initiating action of that turning away process.
   
3. Petition/Intercession: Here’s where we ask for things either for ourselves (petition or supplication) or for others (intercession).
   • The Foster chapter I’ve been quoting is mostly about intercessory prayer, although I am pulling concepts from it that are more general. Don’t get me wrong, this is obviously important. But at least, where I am right now, this is where I mostly get that “talking to Santa” feeling. So that’s some growth that’s still coming for me, and for now I will focus on some of the other aspects of prayer.
   • Having said that, I don’t think that asking for things, for yourself or others is “fake” — the Lord’s Prayer is top to bottom full of requests, after all. It’s clearly a crucial part of the relationship with God.
     
4. Contemplative: With the other types focused on talking to God (or about God) here’s the part where you sit and LISTEN. Contemplative prayer can be further divided into kataphatic (or cataphatic) and apophatic prayer:
   
   1. Kataphatic: Kataphatic theology emphasizes what we believe God to be — we use images, sounds, thoughts and body positions to celebrate the “revealed” beauty of creation. Most of Western Christian prayer is kataphatic (including all the forms listed above). Contemplative kataphatic prayer takes the form of what most world contemplative traditions would describe as mindfulness — awareness of the present moment and all it contains.
      
   2. Apophatic: Apophatic theology, by contrast, speaks about what God is not. That’s not a bad thing! It focuses on his ultimate transcendence and unknowability, which might make us feel uncomfortable — but here, as per usual, this kind of discomfort is usually a catalyst for growth.
      
   3. A note: In the descriptions of Christian mysticism I’ve been able to track down thus far, they seem fairly solidly in the kataphatic AND apophatic camp, as opposed to kataphatic VS apophatic. The two are paired theologies, like two sides of the same coin. They make a complete description only when viewed together — kataphatic theology on it’s own limits the Divine to what we can observe with our human senses and apophatic theology on it’s own misses the opportunity to celebrate the deep diversity in Creation.

A more detailed but still concise summary is available at the Prayer Eleven website. The author there also briefly discusses what he refers to as “Mysterious Prayer” (speaking in tongues, special revelation) which are out of scope for this blog presently.

A note about the Foster chapter on prayer (from where I got the quote that opened this post) in case you’re thinking of reading along with me through his ordering of the spiritual disciplines. There’s a clobber paragraph in there on “sexual deviancy” and how “one man with one woman in marriage for life” is “the God-created banks for sex”. Honestly don’t you just wish this crowd would take all this fervour for “sexual deviancy” and apply it to say, pedophiles instead of the LGBTQ+ community? But I — as usual — digress.

If you’re sufficiently annoyed by Foster’s un-Quakerish approach to this, you can skip the rest of this post. I think there’s lots of other good resources on prayer and as time goes on I’ll keep posting them (including my review of the Centering Prayer online course I took from Sounds True).

Anyway, if you’re OK to keep going in the spirit of “take what you like and leave the rest” there were some usable insights, including, but not limited to, this gem of prose (note all quotes in this post are taken from R.J. Foster, Celebration of Discipline, Special Anniversary Edition except where indicated otherwise):

We begin praying for others by first quieting our fleshly activity and listening to the silent thunder of the Lord of hosts.

Y’all got that? Step 1: Quiet fleshly activity. Step 2: Listen for silent thunder. Step 3: Profit! OK I added that last bit. But aside from the somewhat melodramatic phrasing, become quiet and listen is actually proving to be a useful strategy for me so far. Why?

• It was a natural extension of the previous spiritual discipline I had been working on: meditation.
• It helped to ameliorate the sensation of speaking into the void. I did choose a contemplative approach, which meant that I wasn’t listening for the “answer” to some question I had asked, I was just….listening.

It was liberating to me to understand that prayer involved a learning process. I was set free to question, to experiment, even to fail, for I knew I was learning.

Let me emphasize that experimental part. I chose to explore contemplative prayer (specifically Centering Prayer) first, but that is not the only way I intend to pray FOREVER. Even my brief list above is enough to show that “prayer” isn’t just one thing, and shouldn’t be. I can’t think of any other relationship I have where I interact in just one way.

God is the ground of our beseeching, as Juliana of Norwich put it, and we are utterly dependent upon him. Our prayer is to be like a reflex action to God’s prior initiative upon the heart.

I think this is a good place to close this introductory post — I’ll create more specific “lab book entries” as I go along and if I’m a responsible blogger I’ll come back and add links here. You can also check out the Prayer Mindmap!

Thank you, as always, for reading,
A