On Just Repeating Prayers Like a Trained Seal

 

Friend Xerxes, former left-wing political columnist, has eschewed politics. I suspect this is because he realized that the left-wing position has become indefensible. Why fasten himself to a dying animal? His latest column is about prayer. In a piece titled “Getting Beyond the Rituals,” he expresses the common Protestant objection to rote prayers and ritual generally. Instead, you are supposed to speak and do from the heart.

I was seduced when younger by this dismissal of rote prayer—after all, surely your heart can’t be in it? And the inevitable result was that I stopped praying. 

“What deadens us most to God's presence,” Xerxes’s source argues, “is the inner dialogue that we are continuously engaged in with ourselves, the endless chatter of human thought… including the chatter of spoken prayer.”

Here “spoken prayer” is being conflated, Improperly, with rote prayer. St. Theresa of Avile would agree that “mental prayer” is better than praying out loud. But that, as the quotation goes on to make clear, is not what Frederick Beuchner, Xerxes’s source, means.

“I keep trying, and once or twice I have been conscious, but not conscious of anything, not even of myself. I have heard a stillness that encloses all sounds, stilled the way whiteness encloses all colors, stilled the way wordlessness encloses all words. I like to believe that once or twice, at times like those, I have bumbled my way into at least the outermost suburbs of the Truth that can never be told but only come upon, that can never be proved but only lived for and loved.”

And my Catholic objection is this: this is not prayer. He is necessarily not conscious, as he claims, of “God’s presence”: he is “not conscious of anything, not even of himself.” Whatever is happening, this allows for no personal relationship with God, which is what prayer is supposed to be about.

Moreover, this amounts, by his own admission, to praying only once of twice in your life. 

In other words, it is an alibi for forgetting about God.

“The Truth that can never be told?” A Truth beyond words? Jesus is the Word; and he is the only path.

I recently came across a map on the internet that sought to divide Europe into two zones: religious Europe and atheist Europe. I presume they had no particular religious axe to grind, but the line they drew was almost exactly the line between Catholic Europe and what had been, since the Reformation, Protestant Europe.

Being filled with the Spirit, being inspired, is great, but it does not stick around. And, without ritual, you are left with nothing. And no way to get it back.