Why do Catholics always kneel in the back pew? In fact, why do almost all churchgoers sit in the last row? Do they hope to go unnoticed, or wish to be the last in the building and the first out? Do they hope that the preacher will not look them in the eye, or the plate might not be passed all the way back? Or, let us suppose, they have read their Gospel well. The Pharisee stood close in front and proudly declared: ” ‘God, I thank thee that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector [publican]. I fast twice a week, I give tithes of all that I get’ ” (Lk. 18:11-12). In the back of the temple with eyes cast down, unworthy to look up to heaven, the publican [tax collector in the RSV] beat his breast and mumbled ” ‘God, be merciful to me a sinner!’ ” (Lk. 18:13)
Where do I sit in Church might well be phrased, where do I stand in prayer? What about my own attitude to prayer? Where am I in the temple of the Lord? Am I moving backwards, and thereby maybe secretly moving closer to God? I have always found myself in the middle of the Church, perhaps as also in the middle of the road prudentially. I am not proud enough to be a Pharisee, nor humble enough to be the Publican. There is something of them both in my prayer. Although I have put myself in the middle all my life, perhaps neither hot nor cold, I think I have crossed the aisle in middle age from left to right. In short, I have become a republican at prayer.
I do not use “republican” to refer to any particular party platform present or past. I think of “republican” as synonymous with “conservative;” I think of “conservative” in religion as a viewpoint that is more quietist than activist, more inclined to emphasize what God is doing to save the world than what the world is doing to further that initiative of God, more identified with Mary than Martha, more drawn to prayer of thanksgiving than to petition, and finally owning to be more preserving than progressing, more likely to say “yes to all that has been” than “no to all that should not be.” I believe in Church reform more than reformation that is revolution. Ditto for the world. I would rather read Edmund Burke on the affairs of political men than Thomas Paine. I agree more with Isaiah than with the New York Times. The reader would not, however, be able to guarantee from all this “political” terminology how I would vote in any political election.
Back then when I was a democrat, I used to pray for my daily bread because I was truly hungry. I had no friends, and I needed some. A first friend is irreplaceable precisely because one was so desperate then and insecure. Suppose I cannot make a friend? Back then, I had no success, and I needed to win one so badly. I was poor, but I. wanted to be rich. After all, did I not know that the Lord hears the cry of the poor? Most of all, I needed not only to be loved, I needed to find someone to love. A lot of my activity, and a lot of my prayer for the welfare of others, contained a large element of needing to be needed. These were the days when it was easy to be part of a group; misery loved company, and we kept each other good company too. Young people tend to be groupy because they find strength in each other’s shared weakness. I was much more a “party” man in a political sense back then. Our party was lean and hungry; there were a lot of benefits we needed. We prayed for them; we worked for them. I prayed for them; I worked for them. Anything was possible in prayer, and we were taught to ask for our daily bread. So many things needed doing in the world, so many needed doing in me. To get down on my knees and plead was not an unmotivated activity. I needed God, I needed people, I needed to find my way. And, of course, I still do.
What changed then? I am no longer a democrat in prayer. I no longer pray long hours. Back then I was terribly, lonely and God was company that did not disdain to be with me always and everywhere. I no longer pray for so many people by name. Back then I wanted so much to be a part of their life and to be helpful and loving to them. I wanted truly to help them, to be sure, but I also needed to help myself. I often prayed out of loneliness, and worked out of fear of failure.
With the passage of years, thanks be to God, the need and the fear have lessened. I am not lonely in the same way, though an essential loneliness is never touched by human intimacy. I am not working to prove myself in the same way, though an essential awareness that we are all unprofitable servants will never pass. I have been loved, by God and by men and women. I have been enabled to serve God and others, because of the grace of God. Somewhere along the way I became a republican at prayer, wanting to conserve the good things given to me, and not so much concerned that I be given them.
The reader should not think I have chosen these political terms to have fun with the liberals and the conservatives while all the time pretending to be writing about the spiritual life. I make no value judgment about democrats and republicans. Christians can be either. They become for me descriptive words. Nor do I mean to imply that an earlier prayer, seen now with its admixture of human needs and growth pains, need suggest that prayer was invalid. It was not. It was the best prayer I was capable of then, and God took it as the prayer that was the only prayer possible for me. The prayers of our childhood seem naive to us now, but they were valid and pleasing to our Father in heaven back then. We pray as a child when we are a child; we pray as a youth when we are a youth; I pray as a middle-aged man now that I am so. St. Paul writes: “When I was a child, I reasoned like a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways” (I Cor. 13:11): Neither the stage in life nor the prayer appropriate to it should be seen as inferior because replaced by something that comes later. Age need not be better than youth, though it is different. Nor need republican prayer be better than democratic, though it is different. It is the story of that difference that I wish to explore and share with you.
The shift from democrat to republican in prayer comprises simply a shift from need for God to a fear of God. I do not mean a need for God that is craven, but a need that is justified when one is indeed without so much. I do not mean a fear of God that is servile, but a fear that is justified when one is indeed aware of how much one has been given and how dependent it all remains upon the giver of the gifts. The man or woman of many blessings fears complacency. He or she understands the story of the rich man who said: ” ‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’ And he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns, and build larger ones; and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; take your ease, eat, drink, be merry.’ But God said to him, Tool! This night your soul is required of you; and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So is he who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God’ (Lk. 12:17-21). A republican at prayer can count his or her blessings, but they do so with the fear of
God in their hearts. A white, male, middle-class, American cleric is a rich man by any standard in this world of misery and hunger and oppression. Can a rich man enter the kingdom of God? What is the rich man’s prayer? Can one be a republican at prayer? With God, all things are possible.
When Jacob wrestles with God during the night and will not let him go until he receives a blessing, Jacob is a young man hoping to win the heavenly resources necessary for a full and rich life. When he wrestles with his twin brother Esau in the womb of Rebecca, Jacob is needy and hopes to win out what he must have. When he outwits his brother Esau, and succeeds in outwitting his father Isaac, who gives the second-born Jacob the blessing of fruitfulness reserved for the first-born, Esau, Jacob prays and fights from need and desire. He is poor; he would be rich.
When Jacob has worked 14 plus years for his uncle Laban and returns to the promised land with wives, children, and flocks, he is indeed now a rich man. His fear is that he might lose what he has acquired. He devises several strategies to minimize his losses should Esau prove unfriendly when they meet. His prayer is not the wrestling of a blessing that might be called a democratic prayer; his prayer is to conserve what he has, that God may continue to bless him. He prays as a republican who knows that unless God sustains him, all that was gained is lost.
A story is told of a holy man who struggled all his life with God’s ways. In his old age, a disciple asks him if he still wrestles with God. Yes, he replies, only now, I hope to lose. You may remember the movie, “The Mouse that Roared.” A tiny nation in Europe attacks the United States in a token invasion with the design of quickly acknowledging total defeat, and then throwing itself upon the known generous mercy of a country that rebuilds, better than before, its very enemies. Prayer of petition fits well the strong and the young; prayer of surrender to the will of God fits better the older you become. I pray to give in to God, to lose the fight, to give up my life. I pray not to be led into temptation, not to be put to the test. I pray that the simple blessings of my life that I have always enjoyed, like my body, my name, my own history, that God might continue to create them lest I fall into nothingness. I am more aware of everything depending on God than the day before, and not as much as I will be tomorrow.
Far from becoming more speculative and contemplative in a new-discovery way of prayer, I find my prayer has become so simple. I cling to God; I don’t trust the ground under my feet without God. It might fall away. That anything at all exists seems to me daily ever more astounding and amazing. One need not add anything to everyday life; one has only to recognize the hand of God and the cornucopia of marvels that surround the daily routine of things and people that touch daily life. Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” is the prayer awareness of an older republican.
Toward the end of his days, Thomas Merton had become something of a hermit. He also had become devoted in his last years to the art of photography: the very is-ness and thing-ness of ordinary beings become illuminated and captured by the camera. We are given eyes to see the things that we have always seen but never looked at. How wonderful is the smallest of God’s creatures. How mind-boggling that anything can be known. What a miracle of God’s design beyond price that we can see. We would have been satisfied with so much less. We are rich, rich beyond Midas and all his gold. Everything we touch is real gold; we touch on the mystery of God.
I have found that prayer comes very easily when I walk outside and breathe the sky air. I find that I can pray in the late afternoon when listening to classical music and lost in my awareness of the miracle of the day just lived. I say the rosary several times a day, between buildings when I walk along, or alone in the chapel, whenever my mind is tired with thoughts that don’t seem to lead me to prayer. That is almost always. My thoughts weigh me down; I make my living thinking. Late at night my mind is such a sieve that I am distracted from distractions. Long ago I used to pray the rosary and think the words. Then I thought of the mysteries of the life of Jesus, then I used to repeat prayers like the doxology along each of the beads; but now, I do not think of anything. I just cleave to God, and the sounds and the fingering of the beads become a holding prayer that rises in my soul like incense.
I have gone back to repeating an ejaculation that I learned in grammar school; we used to try to say it 4000 times during Advent. I suspect that was the reputed time between creation and the birth of Jesus. Some Advents I actually kept score and accomplished it. The practice has left that sentence carved into my tongue, and I say it without thought or without effort: “Divine Infant of Bethlehem, come and take birth in our hearts.” I find that I can pray by my senses always and everywhere, and my soul is content to cling to God in a simplicity that I hope is beyond naivete.
If I see the world as a gift that should not be there, and amazing that it remains with us, so much the more have I come to see much of the time that I also am a gift. Just as not one tree on the campus of the school where I teach would I wish to see cut down, despite the fact that none are perfect, so I accept myself as God’s creature. As the little boy in the posters says: “God doesn’t make junk.” That it is enough to be, that it is wonderful to be human, that I do not need to be anything more to be valuable, what a lesson to learn. Self-acceptance and even more, self-forgiveness, have come at a great price. At one time in my life, nothing seemed harder. The love of some very specific human beings did more to convince me of the incarnational love of Jesus who is Lord, than any amount of reflection had achieved.
If it is enough to be human, how much more rich am I if it is true that I am a child of God. With God as not just creator, but as Father, do I not belong to God’s family, just as any child, for better or for worse? Membership and love are not earned. First of all it is given lavishly. One’s life is not the lifting of self by one’s own boot straps, but rather the response to a love that one did not initiate. God’s love precedes me. It often seems to me a consolation to think that if God ever loved me, he loves me now. Surely when God made me, God loved me. Surely God knew all about me then, and saw me to the end of my earthly life. God loved me once, and God’s love is eternally faithful. His is an unconditional love. My prayer seems to bathe just in that awareness. If everything and everyone are gift, then always and everywhere we should give thanks. It is that simple. Nothing else has to be done. I presume, of course, that on another level, one must deal with the practical and material needs and demands of human community.
Forgiveness seems to me to be the essence of Christianity. God created in the beginning out of nothing, but with forgiveness God creates good heart out of bad heart. God works with a handicap, and nothing could be more miraculous than to turn human freedom around from its hardness and pain, to softness and joy. God is the master of the heart, the hound of heaven that is infinitely resourceful. Even the pagans love their friends, in some kind of mutual self-interest. To love one’s enemies is to know the Kingdom of God is within you. The “Magnificat” of Mary is the summation of the Old Testament hope and the New Testament acceptance of the “good news.” Mary’s song of thanksgiving is a Eucharist of words that echoes the Eucharist of bread. “Give us this day our daily bread” and “I am the bread of life.” Whereas it is “impossible” for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven, and for a virgin to conceive and bear a son, the “Magnificat” celebrates the good news that in fact “nothing is impossible to God.” Our hope is not that we shall become so much better or that the human world will progress; our hope is in what God is doing in our midst. Because God is infinitely resourceful, no one will find it easy to refuse a relentless and appealing courtship. God will not take “no” for an answer. In theory, we can hold out against the Almighty, but in practice, there is every reason to hope that God’s sovereign love will prevail. I am loved means I am forgiven. It is as simple as that. “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden” (Lk. 1:47-48).
If I am forgiven, I do not need to fear death any more. When I fear death, I fear that I am not important enough to anyone to want me to live on. To be forgiven is to recognize that we are so important to God that God will insist we live on. His love for us has made Jesus vulnerable. My life makes a difference. There is someone who truly cares about the condition of my flesh, and who truly wishes my body and soul well. Moreover, this person is in a position to do something for me.
When we do not feel forgiven, we are afraid and we tend to panic. We are like the drowning swimmer whom the lifeguard comes to save. So full of fear of death are we, that we cling to our savior in a death grip and take him down with us. The cross is the record of our striking out in blind fear at the hand that came to save us. An animal that is wounded will run and hide; the last thing it wants is for a savior to touch its wound. It presumes that you come to make its pain worse, and it will bite the hand that tries to save it. So we pierced the side of Jesus. In our fear of our condition so wounded, no one dares touch us with a healing hand without suffering the sting of our anger and panic.
The child who pounds its fists against its mother’s breast in a rage discovers that its mother does not hit back. The child knows in an instant that it is forgiven and well loved in that embrace that absorbs its blows. Tears of repentance and relief flow from that encounter with forgiveness when we are at our worst and God is at God’s best. We are actually “tangled lovers,” who at bottom do not wish to hide and bite, but whose fears of unloveliness run deep and strong. The love that can accept us in our sins will win our heart. It is too good to be true; someone could know me truly and love me still. Yet it is thus. Tangled as we are in the net. of our defenses and coping neuroses, we want to be lovers of the good and the true and the beautiful. We yearn for the living God with all our hearts. “Our souls were made for you, O Lord, and they will not rest until they rest in Thee” (St. Augustine).
Because I have known the love of God in its forgiveness, I can forgive myself. Because I can forgive myself, I can almost forget myself, and I can forgive others. I can afford to pray without need or anxiety, a prayer that is mostly wonder and thanksgiving. The way things are with God is enough for me. There is no salvation that has to be further earned or achieved. If God is for us, who can be against us? I cling to that awareness, and I cleave to my faith in the Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
We are the prodigal sons and daughters who do manage to squander much of our life. We believe in an even more prodigal father, whose love is lavish and spendthrift, who counts no cost and abides no obstacle. In giving us his only Son, God gave us everything. His Son is his treasure, the perfect expression of his being. Jesus is the Word of God. Our God is the Lord of history; his will is sovereign. Creation is not a space lab that has gone out of control because human freedom has malfunctioned and the creator of that freedom must stand by helpless and impotent on the sidelines wringing his hands. Nothing escapes God’s providence. The only question is whether or not God is for us. The answer has been given already. Clear and irrevocable is the flesh of Jesus that can never be taken back, the flesh of Jesus that sits in glory, the manifestation of the everlasting love of God for each one of us human beings.
If it is true that we are forgiven, and if it is true that the enfleshment of Jesus is the irrevocable gift of God’s fulsome love for us, if we need not fear death because we are not alone and our body is not defenseless in a world of hostile, impersonal, and unloving forces, then we must cleave to that God in whom we believe. St. Paul writes: “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we are saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Romans 8:22-25).
Prayer is cleaving to God. My prayer has become more and more the simple clinging to faith. If there is a God, if Jesus has been given, we have been saved. The practice of repeating the name of Jesus, or the Pilgrim’s Prayer of “Lord Jesus, have mercy on me a sinner,” captures the single-minded purpose of cleaving to the Lord who saves us. Life will still go on; details and discipline must still be attended to. One is not excused from living. But the inner strength is from God. One knows that God is working out our salvation from within.
Both the King James version and the Revised Standard translate Genesis 2:24 with the word “cleave.” “Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves [emphasis mine] to his wife, and they become one flesh.” When that text is quoted in the Gospel of Mark (10:7) and Matthew (19:5), the English translation of the derivatives of the Greek word, “kollao,” becomes “join.” Thus, ” For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ ” When St. Paul quotes the same text from Genesis in his letter to the Ephesians (5:31), the translation is the same. The same Greek root, “kollao,” also occurs in the following passage of St. Paul: “Do you not know that he who joins [emphasis mine] himself to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, ‘The two shall become one flesh.’ But he who is united [emphasis mine] to the Lord becomes one spirit with him” (I Cor. 6:16-17). In the Greek, the same word is used for “join” to a prostitute and “unite” to the Lord. The King James version speaks of being “joined to a harlot” and “being joined to the Lord.” The Latin Vulgate uses the word “adhaeret,” from which we derive “adhere,” for both instances. It is the derivative of “collao” that St. Paul employs to translate the Genesis text about the original marriage: “to cleave” to one’s wife. The prostitute, of course, is less than a spouse; the Lord Jesus more than a spouse. That we should cling, cleave, hold fast to the Lord, because the Lord is the love of our whole life seems clear enough.
Though we may cleave to God in prayer that is almost blind and wordless, the truth is that God cleaves first to us: “I have loved you with an everlasting love” (Jer. 31:3). “Behold, I have graven you on the palms of my hands” (Is. 49:16). Our prayer remains always a response to a conversation already begun by God. We think we initiate the dialog, but we are answering to a grace given to seek God in what seems to us the first move. We seem to be walking alone, but in fact we are being carried. We think we are being faithful to God, when in fact God is being faithful to us with the prior commitment. We pray out of a quiet desperation not to let go of God, but our prayer is the token of God’s ever holding on to us. We do not seek God; God seeks us. Our desire for God is already his presence. Nothing we initiate comes from our nothingness without God; everything we initiate comes from God’s grace. Even our freedom is God’s grace, without ceasing in the least to be our freedom. There is no creature without the ever-creative presence of the Creator; there is no deed done without the providence, ever graceful, of the Lord of history. All our life, painful and joyful, remains the work of providence; all is grace.
For all that has been we can give thanks, for all that will be, we can say “yes.” If I pray over and over again, as I do, the Pilgrim’s Prayer, “Lord, have mercy,” it is because I know that I would not be saying it at all if God was not at that moment having mercy upon me. And thus, if I can only keep saying it, I can hope that the mercy of God which is ever patient and faithful abides by me, abides with me, and abides in me. “In him we move, and live, and have our being” (Acts 17:28). I pray constantly, dumbly and hungrily, repetitiously and mindlessly, because it is my best way of appreciating and appropriating God’s prayer within me. “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words” (Romans 8:26).