A different sort of prayer team
Join Americans of all faiths by praying, meditating, or affirming the kind of country we want
to become, each evening at 8:30 p.m. Eastern timeNote: the following was inspired by the very partisan Presidential Prayer Team's latest effort, Pray the Vote. Rather than saying something negative about the PPT, I wanted to think of a positive, inclusive alternative.
Something needs fixing. In my humble opinion, something needs to shift in our government, in the public consciousness--in all of our hearts. I truly believe that God, by whatever name you call him or her, can work miracles through us. God can use us as tools with which to build a more just, humane, caring and compassionate world. But we need to allow it. We need to be open, and to really listen for that "still small voice". We need, frankly, to get our egos out of the way. Whenever I think about creating a better world, I automatically think of the way Marcus Borg has explained The Lord's Prayer:
The kingdom of God was utterly central to Jesus. One New Testament scholar has written: Ask any 100 New Testament scholars what was most central to Jesus' message, and all 100 will answer: The kingdom of God. We see this in the inaugural address of Jesus in Mark's gospel. It's in Mark 1:15. It's very brief and very pointed. It says simply: "The kingdom of God is at hand." The verse continues: "Repent and believe this gospel." The word "repent," though I don't want to linger over it today, means go beyond the mind that you have and then believe this gospel. For Mark, the gospel is the coming of the kingdom of God.
We also see its centrality in the many parables and short sayings of Jesus that concern the kingdom of God. We see it, most familiarly in "The Lord's Prayer". Right up front in "The Lord's Prayer", right after we ask for the hallowing of God's name, we pray: " Thy kingdom come." The kingdom of God is not heaven. I think you all know that. But it's been easy for generations of Christians to imagine that the kingdom of God is about heaven because of the phrase that Matthew uses for this notion. In Matthew's gospel, the kingdom of God is regularly called the kingdom of heaven. That is because Matthew is, perhaps, the most traditionally piously Jewish of the gospel writers. And as a devout and pious Jew, he avoids using the word God out of reverence whenever possible. But when Matthew writes about the kingdom of heaven, he means kingdom of God. Thus, very importantly, the kingdom of God or Matthew's kingdom of heaven is something for the earth's.
In a way, this is something we should have known for a long time from "The Lord's Prayer" itself, for when we pray "The Lord's Prayer," we pray: "Thy kingdom come on earth as it already is in heaven." We oftentimes miss that because we say that prayer in the nice cadences and nicely balanced couplets of Matthew's version of it. You know how it goes. "Our father who art in heaven. Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." We leave those little beats of silence, and we miss the fact that every time we pray that prayer, we are praying: Your kingdom come on Earth.
As my colleague, John Dominic Crossan, pungently and provocatively remarks: "Heaven's in great shape. Earth is where the problems are." That's why we pray for the coming of God's kingdom on Earth. So, what did this phrase mean? Well, Jesus speaks of the kingdom of God as both present and future. Its present meaning seems to be a power or presence and community that you can experience now. You can enter the kingdom of God, be in the kingdom of God according to the Gospels. But it is also spoken of as future, as something not yet here but still to come.
All right, now, try to follow me on this. If any of the words in the excerpt above make little "Whoop! Whoop!" alarms go off in your head, (from Galaxy Quest: "I know that sound. That's a BAD sound!") please consider substituting or omitting the word rather than assuming what I write here is only for Christians. It's not. Christianity is the lens through which some of us see the bigger picture. I think there is a core meaning that people of many faiths, or even no faith in particular, can get behind. One is the idea of a better world--and I'll tell you what Borg says about that in a moment. The other is "go beyond the mind that you have." All of us, regardless of faith or party affiliation, need to be willing to go beyond the minds we have, and what we think we know. Often the minds we have are filled with biases and assumptions about people who are different from ourselves, but we don't recognize them as biases. Let me turn now to the way Marcus Borg describes what the "politics of the Kingdom" might look like:
Let me provide you with some examples of what I think this might mean for our time as citizens and residents of this particular country--not a comprehensive list, but some for instances. I think it minimally means universal healthcare. It's just astounding to me that we don't have this in our country. There are countries in the world that are not as prosperous as we who do have that. If the argument is made that the quality of healthcare will go down for all of us if we make it universal, well, should I be entitled to superb healthcare if the cost of that is no healthcare for some people? A politics of the kingdom would also mean a concern about the growing gap between rich and poor in our country. That gap has widened dramatically in the last 40 years. Want a statistic? I know statistics can be distrusted, but try to listen to this one. In 1965, the wealthiest one percent of American families owned 23 percent of what are called family assets. Family assets are anything that can be owned by a family--stocks, property, etc. By 1995, the wealthiest one percent of families in our country owned 43 percent of total family assets. I think it is much more difficult to be a poor person in this country now than it was 40 years ago.
It's not only that this wreaks havoc on the lives of the poor, but I think it is making our society an increasingly unstable society for all of us. Yet that gap is growing. The primary factor encouraging the growth of that gap is economic policy, and tax policy, in particular. If you have followed the tax bills before Congress over the last several years, all of them benefit primarily the wealthiest two percent of our population. We throw a sock to people making $50,000 a year or whatever so that everybody will feel good, but the real benefits go to those at the top who structure the system in their own narrow self-interests. A politics of the kingdom would mean concern about ecology, concern for the environment and the non-human world, for God loves the whole of creation, and the whole of creation belongs to God.
A politics of the kingdom would also mean serious reflection about what it means to be an imperial power, for we are as a nation the imperial power of our time. Like it or not, that is who we are. We are the Rome of our time. We need to be as thoughtful, responsible and creative as possible about the use of our imperial power, for it can be used in two very different ways. We can use it to control the world in our own self-interest and to impose our will upon the world, or we can use it to build it up. It makes all the difference which we choose.
All right, now I ask you this... Does that sound a good vision of what we should become as a nation? Do you believe that prayer, or affirmations, or "sending out vibes" works? Then let's join together, each in our own way, our minds and hearts, and pray a better country.
If you have any ideas about how to make this a known, positive alternative to the Presidential Prayer Team, please feel free to share them with me. My e-mail address is renee at bmgbiz.net.
I only knew that I needed to do this thing, but I didn't really know what I was meant to do with it. I don't even have a good name for it yet. If you would like to send in your own positive, hopeful prayer, I can start posting them on a separate page.
Renee in Ohio
Praying for plants...visualizing whirled peas?
When I first posted about a different sort of prayer team, I referenced Marcus Borg, who is a liberal Christian theologian. To provide another perspective on the potential power of prayer, I share the following from an interview with Dr. Larry Dossey:
One of the best-kept secrets I've come across in the past few years is an organization in Salem, Oregon called Spindrift. If you look up the term "spindrift" in the dictionary it comes from an old Scottish word referring to the fuzzy spray where a wave breaks and meets the air. It's the interface between something ethereal and something concrete, which is how they chose the name.
The people at Spindrift have performed experiments for over ten years, showing the ability of what they call "prayer practitioners" to make a difference in what happens in the development and metabolism of extremely simple biological systems, such as sprouting seeds and yeast cultures. They have measured the amount of carbon dioxide a yeast culture gives off to determine how active it is.
One reason they don't work with human beings is that plants are much simpler. You can count sprouting beans, and do it time and time again to see if it's replicable. Beans don't change as drastically as humans. It far easier to work with yeast, sprouting beans, wheat seeds and so on. So that's what they have done. They have gone beyond showing that prayer works, and have examined the issue of which prayer strategy works best. They have tested two.
The first is a directed prayer strategy, where not only do you provide God, Goddess or the Absolute with the diagnosis of the problem, but you provide the treatment too. You say, "John's got carcinoma of the lung, so make it go away." Or "Harry has a heart attack, we want to see it healed." This is the kind of petitionary prayer most of us grow up thinking is the only kind of prayer there is.
But then they tested what they call a nondirected prayer strategy, which is completely open ended, and does not attach a goal to the prayer. They have several of these nondirected prayer strategies. The most famous prayer of this type is "Thy will be done." Another one they used is from the Beatles tune, "Let it be." My all-time favorite nondirected prayer strategy is the caption on the back cover of the first Whole Earth Catalog, "You can't put it together. It is together." One of the assumptions of this nondirected prayer strategy is that at some level, in some way, at some deep level of reality, things are just fine, perfect as they are. Over a decade, Spindrift has shown, and this is the bottom line, that both methods of prayer work. But working with these prayer pracitioners, they have shown that the nondirected prayer method is two to four times more powerful than the directed.
How does prayer work? I don't know. I really have no idea how prayer works or who makes things we pray for happen. I am open to the possibility that our "thought energy" changes things in the physical world, which probably makes me the worst kind of heretic to some Christians. But I have read and heard enough about the power of affirmations and the effects of prayer that I can't dismiss it out of hand. Believe--don't believe--or believe in something totally different from what I do. It really doesn't matter to me. But think of it this way: even if prayer doesn't have any sort of supernatural effect, couldn't it have an effect on you? If you spend 10 to 15 minutes a day in peaceful relaxation, reminding yourself of the kind of country, and the kind of world you want to help create, maybe at some point you will find yourself about to make some snarky comment to someone you disagree with, and you will stop yourself. Maybe you will be ready to make some crass generalization about the other side, you will stop and ask yourself, "Is this the kind of us vs. them thinking that adds to the problem rather than helping to make things better? Right now, am I moving closer to or further away from What Really Matters--the kind of world I want to help create?" So the bottom line is this: If you want, in the way you want, I invite you to join me in praying, meditating, sending vibes or thought energy, or affirming the country you are already working to help create. Maybe it will help change the world, moving us closer to bringing about "The Great Turning". Maybe it will change you. Maybe it will just be a quiet time (we all need more of that) when you can remind yourself that you are united in intention and action with people who want to make things better. Whatever it ends up being, in the final analysis, "It couldn't hoit!"