How do we pray to a disappearing God?

In the previous post I mentioned some of my journey with the idea of “prayer” and a few of the inconsistencies in my faith system that had become impossible for me to ignore. Of course this is not a new conversation and humans have been talking about prayer for a long time. For thousands of years we’ve wrestled with what it means to believe (or not) in some kind of divine reality, and what it means to engage, speak, converse, and request. And what we think about prayer has a lot to do with what we believe about God.

In the ancient world it was common to view reality through a three-tiered framework. We walk on the earth, inhabiting the middle realm. God (or the gods) often inhabited the heavenlies above us. And the grave, the abode of the dead, the underworld, was found in the depths beneath us.

You can see this three-tiered framework at work in all sorts of ancient conceptions of the divine, and the way people related to divinity. In many religous worldviews the gods lived above the clouds, and when they weren’t arguing with each other they were deciding if they would send good weather down to their faithful devotees, or whether they would smite them with the smiting of a great and mighty smiter.

Ancient peoples developed all sorts of ways of negotiating this world of the gods. Sacrifices, devotion, priests, worship practices, temples, statues, altars. A huge variety of ways to keep the divine happy, to secure the blessing of the gods, to maintain some kind of mutually beneficial arrangement. And if you could do this, then it would really pay off when it was time to go to war. Going to war was when you really needed the gods on your side. The last thing you wanted was to end up in a battle where your enemy has their gods fighting for them, and your gods are off sulking because you didn’t sacrifice enough cattle.

This kind of language finds its way into ancient Hebrew stories about God too. Sacrifices are made, and the smoke and aroma rises to “heaven” to please God. Help comes from “on high”, divine assistance comes from above, and the ancient song writers talk of lifting up our eyes to the God who is enthroned in the heavens. This kind of language makes perfect sense in a three tiered world.

But we don’t live in the ancient world. And we don’t live in a three-tiered paradigm. We have drilled deep into the earth and instead of finding a shadowy underworld we found the molten core of a very old planet. And we have looked through telescopes and built rockets to take us far beyond the supposed realm of the gods, and we’ve found that there is no God floating around up there peering over the heavenly gates. 

So what does this mean for us? Do all ideas of God simply dissolve in the face of these realisations? Perhaps, and for some that is indeed what occurs. But there are also other possibilities. 

In fact the ancient Hebrew texts also hint to us some other ways of thinking about God. One of the curious things about their temple was that when you went inside there was no statue of God to be found and nothing to bow down to. Rather than God being represented in the statue of a man, or a bull, or a golden calf, their God was the one who could not be seen. Even further, their God was the one who should not be named; the name for God was not to be spoken aloud. So instead they used metaphor upon metaphor upon metaphor to talk about the divine reality. They spoke of wind and fire, a nursing mother, a shepherd, a potter, a rock, a father, a woman in childbirth, a beekeeper, clothing, a tree, a king, laughter, wine, and on and on the list of metaphors goes.

Speaking of God by speaking indirectly of God. 

One of their favoured metaphors was to talk about God as breath or spirit (the old Hebrew word ruach can be translated as either). And while science can now tell us what breath is technically composed of, the metaphor here still works. This is not about power over, nor is it about domination. This is about our life being dependent on something or someone that is beyond us, but beyond us in a way that is deep and close; closer than our breath. And maybe this suggests to us that even when we think we are doing it all ourselves, we are actually deeply dependent, just as we continue to be dependent on the breath in our lungs. 

Another metaphor for God is found within some of the early Christian texts, when John talks about God being “love”. So when we acknowledge our need, our dependence, our decision to share something of ourselves with God – we are acknowledging our dependence not on abusive power, but on love. This is not about swearing allegiance to a maniacal sky-lord. Nor is it about a cranky old man sitting in a dusty throne room checking his prayer mail and deciding which answers to dispense. Instead it is about an invitation into the kind of love that is kind, does not boast and always endures (as another early Christian text puts it).

The Hebrew name for God that should not be spoken (although it could be written) was YHWH. There is actually no clear idea as to how it should be pronounced, and there is no consensus on the best translation into English; but it comes close to the idea of “I am that I am” or simply “to be”. This helps me to move beyond the idea of God as another “being” floating around out there somewhere as a superhuman kind of figure, toward a God who is the source of “being-ness”, the source of “am-ness”, the source of life and love itself. 

And this view of God is slowly re-forming my view of prayer. It means that prayer for me is not about trying to initiate a conversation with God and then compelling this God to respond. Instead, prayer is entering into something that’s already happening; a conversation and movement that is already underway. It is participation. Which is why stillness and silence can be potent modes of prayer too. They allow us to slow down and perceive and pay attention to what is already going on. 

This is a reality that the mystics and contemplatives have practiced for many centuries. It has the potential to renew an age-old invitation into something that can help us navigate the complexity of our modern lives which, like the old gods, continue to demand so much from us.  Prayer is no magical cure for life’s challenges, but there is something necessary and beautiful about naming our need, our longing, our desire, our pain, our grief, our joy. We take these things that circulate in our heads and hearts, the worries that keep us awake at night, the fears and questions and stress and wonderings - and we bring them out of ourselves into the midst of this ongoing conversation that is already happening with God and with others. 

And all of this makes me think of one of Rilke’s poems:

Widening Circles 

Rainer Maria Rilke

I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?

Book of Hours, I 2

translation by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows