Ritual Prayer

Don: Prayer is one of the most obvious forms of ritual in any faith community. We are flush with ritual prayer: Individual and group prayer, intercessory prayer, fasting in prayer, opening and closing prayer, and children’s prayer;  prayer for the offering, for a baptism, for a baby dedication, for an ordination service, and so on. As well, many of us pray before we eat, go to bed, travel, and so on, often in a ritual fashion.

With so much prayer going on in religious life, you would think it would be well defined. A good definition would be useful in discussing it. One is that it is “talking with God,” but I personally can’t help feel my prayer is somewhat one-sided. I often wait and listen for God’s response to my words, but it’s not clear whether what I think I hear in my head is God’s voice or just my own simulation of it. Prayer is difficult for many of us. Perhaps there are some who have a natural gift of prayer, but not me.

A major impediment to prayer may be confusion over the outcome of prayer: What we want and expect vs. what is delivered. Our expectations may be influenced by how, where, and what we pray. We often mistake prayer for magic—the desire to harness the power of God for our own benefit is the most common reason why we pray. The Bible’s promise of the product of prayer—“Ask and ye shall receive”, etc.—is easy to misunderstand.

Responsibility for unanswered prayer always seems to end up back on our doorstep. If we pray for healing but are not healed, to get a job but are not hired, to stay in a relationship but lose it anyway; it’s because our faith is too weak or our prayer was too short or not sincere enough or not repeated often enough or not prayed by enough people, and so on. The blame always comes back to the supplicant. Such prayer is difficult to sustain. Constant failure is fatiguing, and unfulfilled expectations lead to doubt, depression, and despair, magnified when, in church, the supplicant hears only of the successful (never the failed) prayers of others, of the miraculous interventions. We tell these stories every week in the children’s department, in updating the congregation of news in the mission field, and personal testimonies by church members.

Like the disciples, we need to be taught how to pray. It’s not just a matter of being taught the wording and structure—how to begin and end; but being taught the expectations of prayer—the outcomes, the end product. In ritual prayers, the outcomes sometimes become difficult to understand.

Catholic Father and theologian Ron Rolheiser compares prayer to eating:

What eventually makes us stop praying, John of the Cross says, is simple boredom, tiredness, lack of energy. It’s hard, very hard, existentially impossible, to crank-up the energy, day in and day out, to pray with real affectivity, real feeling, and real heart. We simply cannot sustain that kind of energy and enthusiasm. We’re human beings, limited in our energies, and chronically too-tired, dissipated, and torn in various directions to sustain prayer on the basis of feelings. We need something else to help us. What?

Ritual – a rhythm, a routine. Monks have secrets worth knowing and anyone who has ever been to a monastery knows that monks (who pray often and a lot) sustain themselves in prayer not through feeling, variety, or creativity, but through ritual, rhythm, and routine. Monastic prayer is simple, often rote, has a clear durational-expectancy, and is structured so as to allow each monk the freedom to invest himself or hold back, in terms of energy and heart, depending upon his disposition on a given day. That’s wise anthropology.

Prayer is like eating. There needs to be a good rhythm between big banquets (high celebration, high aesthetics, lots of time, proper formality) and the everyday family supper (simple, no-frills, short, predictable). A family that tries to eat every meal as if it were a banquet soon finds that most of its members are looking for an excuse to be absent. With good reason. Everyone needs to eat every day, but nobody has energy for a banquet every day. The same holds true for prayer. One wonders whether the huge drop-off of people who used to attend church services daily isn’t connected to this. People attended daily services more when those services were short, routine, predictable, and gave them the freedom to be as present or absent (in terms of emotional investment) as their energy and heart allowed on that given day.

Today, unfortunately, we are misled by a number of misconceptions about prayer and liturgy. Too commonly, we accept the following set of axioms as wise: Creativity and variety are always good. Every prayer- celebration should be one of high energy. Longer is better than shorter. Either you should pray with feeling or you shouldn’t pray at all. Ritual is meaningless unless we are emotionally invested in it.

Each of these axioms is over-romantic, ill thought-out, anthropologically naive, and not helpful in sustaining a life a prayer. Prayer is a relationship, a long-term one, and lives by those rules. Relating to anyone long-term has its ups and downs. Nobody can be interesting all the time, sustain high energy all the time, or fully invest himself or herself all the time. Never travel with anyone who expects you to be interesting, lively, and emotionally-invested all the time. Real life doesn’t work that way. Neither does prayer. What sustains a relationship long-term is ritual, routine, a regular rhythm that incarnates the commitment.

Imagine you’ve an aged mother in a nursing-home and you’ve committed yourself to visiting her twice a week. How do you sustain yourself in this? Not by feeling, energy, or emotion, but by commitment, routine, and ritual. You go to visit her at a given time, not because you feel like, but because it’s time. You go to visit her in spite of the fact that you sometimes don’t feel like it, that you sometimes can’t give her the best of your heart, and that often you are tired, distracted, restless, over- burdened, and are occasionally sneaking a glance at your watch and wondering how soon you can make a graceful exit. Moreover, your conversation with her will not always be deep or about meaningful things. Occasionally there will be emotional satisfaction and the sense the something important was shared, but many times, perhaps most times, there will only be the sense that it was good that you were there and that an important life-giving connection has been nurtured and sustained, despite what seemingly occurred at the surface. You’ve been with your mother and that’s more important than whatever feelings or conversation might have taken place on a given day.

Prayer works the same way. That’s why the saints and the great spiritual writers have always said that there is only one, non-negotiable, rule for prayer: “Show up! Show up regularly!” The ups and downs of our minds and hearts are of secondary importance. http://ronrolheiser.com/the-value-of-ritual-in-sustaining-prayer/

Another metaphor for prayer is the autonomous nervous system. I write in my forthcoming book:

Prayer is to the soul what the autonomic nervous system is to the body. The autonomic nervous system regulates the function of our internal organs without our consciously having to control them. You don’t need to remind your heart to beat. You don’t have to tell it to beat harder when you run up stairs. Usually, the system maintains your body in a state of relative rest, but in emergencies it releases adrenalin, a stimulant, into your body.

Similarly, prayer is always working in the background, and can be invoked unconsciously by the spirit in a crisis.

Prayer feeds and sustains that spirit, the inner light, the eternity set in every heart. It is automatic, spontaneous, perpetual, and soul-sustaining. Like the heart, it will rise to a higher level of output if we are struggling to climb steep spiritual stairs. It is always working to maintain the health of the soul. That is the one and only predefined product or function of prayer, just as the heart has only one product or function (blood flow).

Prayer can no more supply you with a new Mercedes or save your life or the life of a loved one than the heart can oxygenate your blood or digest your food. Such things are just not its function.

Thus the scriptural reference to our not knowing how to pray, and the disciples’ request to be taught how to pray, have to do with the output, not the method, of prayer. We need to learn (or to re-learn) that its function or product or output is the health of the soul. In that sense, prayer does indeed move mountains, it does indeed bring prosperity, and it is indeed always answered—but only in accordance with God’s intended function for it, which is: To keep the inner light lit, to see that faith will never be unfulfilled, and that grace will never be misappropriated.

Such being the power and the product of prayer, its effects should be anticipated on the soul, not on the body. Soul and body are linked in the same way that the heart or the intestines are linked with the brain: If the heart or the intestines don’t work, then the brain is affected. But the effect is not precisely predictable and is not the proximate result of organ dysfunction. So too with prayer: Proper prayer focuses on the health of our soul but because the soul is linked with the body it can have secondary, collateral effects on physical and emotional health. (From Weaver, Donald; forthcoming 2017: Feeling God About Yourself. Kailua Kona, HI: Elysian Detroit)

Thus, the ritual of prayer is deeply ingrained in everything we say and do. We pray at all times of the day and night. We pray before sleep, before undertaking a journey, and so on. Some of us use props to help us pray—prayer shawls, prayer books, prayer beads and rosaries, prayer wheels—and, within our prayers, words that play a similar propping function: “Thee” and “Thou” and similar words not in use outside ritual prayer.

What is the value of ritual prayer? How can we avoid turning prayer into an object of worship in its own right? Do prayer rituals have something in common that makes them good rather than evil? If the rituals being people together, does that make them good—and vice-versa?

David: I still question whether ritual is a basic need. That beautiful passage in Romans 8 about “the Spirit Himself” interceding for us with God through “groanings too deep for words” suggests that prayer is not necessary. I don’t deny that it can have psychological therapeutic benefit. I don’t think it is necessarily a bad thing, but I also don’t think it is necessary.

Don: Could ritual prayer be necessary for some people at some times? Is ritual prayer “one size fits all” or does it need to be customized to the individual and his or her background, stage of life, relationship with God, and so on?

David: Perhaps. But ritual prayer would seem a poor substitute for having the Spirit pray for one, no matter what one’s personality or circumstances are. Isn’t that what God wants? We are pretty sure he wants that his will be done, so who better to pray on our behalf? Our own prayer is by definition selfish: We pray because we want something. The opening statement of the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy will be done” might as well be its closing statement, it seems to me. It says all that needs to be said. Perhaps we need the Lord’s prayer and its ritual repetition because we fail to see that bit, or we skip over it to get to the “Give us…” bits. We fail to understand (perhaps we don’t want to understand) that everything is about God’s will and Jesus just wanted to din that fact into our ears.

Michael: Prayer might have deep meaning for some people. I don’t think we can speak for everyone.

Reinhard: To pray without emotion makes it almost meaningless, I think. Repetitious recital of prayer, said without conviction, without passion, does nothing for me. To me, prayer is necessary to worship God because the Bible says we should pray without ceasing. It empowers and energizes us, especially in times of urgent need but also (and at least as importantly) over the long term as well in order to build and maintain our relationship with God. We need to pray for our short-term earthly needs but we also need to pray to inherit our eternal lives. It’s an ongoing process to maintain passion in our rituals and not let them deteriorate into meaningless ritual that carries no conviction.

David: If repetition is a necessary aspect of ritual, then how much repetition is necessary? Muslims pray five times a day. Why not six? Or 20? The average Christian (I would wager) prays just once a week, in church. Does the injunction to “pray without ceasing” mean to engage in permanent ritual? If so, then whose ritual prayer comes closest to that ideal? Is the average Moslem closer to God than the average Christian, by virtue of praying to him more frequently? I maintain that while ritual prayer can benefit the psyche, it takes non-ritual prayer to benefit the soul—to connect with God. Non-ritual prayer, to me, takes the form of living life as closely as possible to the way Jesus lived it. I would not want to interfere with anyone’s getting psychological solace from ritual prayer, but I think we should recognize it for what it is and for what it is not: It is not the Spirit Himself praying for us with groanings too deep for words.

Anonymous: My own experience is that if we are not involved emotionally when we pray, we won’t get what we pray for. As a general rule, the more we feel for what we pray, the more we receive. But I don’t understand why prayer fails us in the face of death, which prompts the most emotional prayer. Perhaps in that case emotion somehow overwhelms prayer and renders it useless. Perhaps this is what it means not to know how to pray. I have stood helpless and hopeless in the face of the death of a loved one; given up my right to request, and just stood waiting for a word from God. Even then, despite all the indication of inevitable death, I foolishly expected a word that God would intervene. I was by this time not praying hard; essentially, I was resting.

What is it about death that makes us so resigned to it and so ready to give up? We know it is inevitable, so why do we expect God to intervene? Why do we persist in thinking that prayer and faith can make any difference to an outcome that is inevitable? I like the idea that all we can and should have faith in is that all things, all outcomes—including death—will work together for the good. This amounts to accepting God’s will and allowing his Spirit to take over and pray on our behalf, no matter what; and that brings peace and rest.

Don: It’s worth reciting Paul once more:

In the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words; and He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose. (Romans 8:26-28)

Not knowing how to pray is not a matter of not knowing the format or the words; it’s a matter of not knowing what to expect from prayer, of not knowing that its true purpose is not to request something for ourselves but to ask that God’s will prevails and that all things work together for good, even though we may not be able to see the good. We must believe the promise that our prayer is answered, always, but not in the way we expect. It requires a complete overhaul of our concept of prayer.

Michael: When my grandfather was on his deathbed, when I was still a child, my neighbors gave me and my siblings a rosary and told us to pray that he would not die. We did so, and I recall that I prayed passionately, but he passed away anyway. It was disconcerting. I wonder why they would have thought that prayer could ward off death; yet I accept that fear of death motivates religious belief and prayer.

David: The resignation of our own will and the quiet acceptance of God’s as described by Anon is perfectly parallel to the Daoist view. Accept that the Dao, the Way, cannot be fathomed, and accept that it alone leads to ultimate good. Acceptance (resignation, submission) brings comfort.

There is a parallel, too, in the contrast between (a) the philosophical views expressed by Paul versus the religious views expressed in other parts of the Bible and by religionists, and (b) the original Daoist philosophical views expressed by Laozi and Zhuangzi versus the religious Daoism which essentially subjugated the philosophy to religious ritual and symbolism. Daoist temples are replete with ritual, including prayer rituals such as kowtowing and offering burning joss sticks and written prayers. These have nothing to do with the Daoism espoused by its founders, but religious Daoism has succeeded because people find its rituals comforting.

The problem is that people are led, by religionists and by human nature, to believe in the efficacy of the rituals. It is both a con trick and a self delusion. I don’t think Daoism is fundamentally any different from the existential philosophies developed independently in other civilizations. We are human beings the world over, and have arrived at the same existential philosophy, differing in the words used (The Dao; the Lord God) but not in the concept they embody, and the same suspect religious practices differing in the forms (kowtow/kneeling; joss sticks/candles) but not the substance of ritual and symbol).

Reinhard: As humans, we have no choice but to face death sooner or later. Of course we pray for loved ones, but God knows that what we need is to strengthen our faith so that some day we will meet them again in God’s kingdom. Prayer brings peace, and passion and conviction strengthens it.

Don: As I have said before, people want a God who will do something for them, who will employ his power on their behalf. It’s harder to sell a religion on the basis of a God who only does what is right and whose will—which we cannot know—will prevail in the end, as opposed to a God we can get to work for us and do our will. But this is what we must learn if we are to pray properly. We’ve misconstrued Jesus’ teaching on how to pray to be about the words and the form of prayer, when he was really teaching us about the outcome of prayer, about the need for the Spirit’s intercession on our behalf so that we can come to see the outcome of prayers is not our expectation of it but God’s will for it.

Like the three Hebrew worthies threatened with Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace, we should accept God’s will as to the outcome, no matter what that outcome might be.

Michael: Then what is the point of prayer? If the outcome is in God’s hands and he has my best interests at heart, why do I need to pray at all?

David: The Hebrew worthies had it right, and so did Jesus, if I may be so arrogant. The message we get from the fiery furnace is not the one intended. The message intended is that whether or not we survive the furnace, God’s will will be done. The message received is that our will to be saved from the fiery furnace will be done if we have enough faith and pray hard enough. On the cross, Jesus said exactly the same as the Hebrew worthies. To paraphrase: Let not my will to live, but Thy will, be done. The worthies survived their ordeal; Jesus did not. But to the worthies as well as to Jesus, the outcome of the prayer was not about their survival or death—it was about God’s will being done.

Reinhard: We still have to initiate prayer, but we do so in order to let God take control of our lives and do whatever is best for us. God knows what that is even if we don’t. A good relationship with God is to depend upon him.

Michael: With regard to forms of prayer: It’s interesting to think of non-verbal forms such as the dancing prayer of the Sufi sect. Perhaps we could discuss that some time.

Don: We will. Kinetic prayer is certainly one form.

* * *