Sean Reagan

I am reading God and You: Prayer as a Personal Relationship by William Barry. Barry is a thoughtful Jesuit whose project frames prayer as akin to a deep and abiding friendship. Even as he acknowledges prayer’s breadth – petitionary, contemplative, emotional, mental et cetera – he maintains its ground is in the nature of mutual relationship.

In many ways, this is a sound and pragmatic approach. Human beings are by nature cooperative and relational. Working with one another towards shared ends is our modus operandi. In this light, prayer is simply an extension of the natural expression of our humanness. You can’t not pray.

Barry’s characterization is appealing because of its innate familiarity. There are no intellectual leaps involved. We’re just being reminded of what we’re already adept at. Prayerful relationship with God might be difficult or challenging, but only in the way that any relationship can be challenging or difficult. Indeed, a relationship that was never challenging or difficult would not really count as a meaningful relationship in the first case.

Part of the problem with Barry’s book is a familiar one in Christianity. On the one hand, he portrays God as an impenetrable mystery and on the other – simultaneously – as personally interested in us, all-loving et cetera.

. . . human beings are finite and limited and cannot take in the Mystery we call God. At the deepest level of our being we are both attracted to knowing and loving that Mystery and terrified of it” (Barry 32).

Yet in the next paragraph, Barry writes that “God loves us with an everlasting love.”

It is not nitpicking – nor an offense against Barry – to observe that one cannot have it both ways. God cannot simultaneously be both knowable and familiar and mysterious and unknowable.

I say all this carefully and hopefully at least modestly respectfully. I’m hardly immune to holding contradictory views. But I do think when we become clear about the contradiction – or when it is effectively pointed out to us – we are obligated to give it careful attention. Conflict needs to be resolved.

In my experience, we need to not rush through or past the mystery part. It’s good to realize that we don’t know something. It’s scary and unsettling, but it’s not inherently problematic. It’s not evil. In fact, it can be a very creative and ultimately loving space.

Gaps in our map are not indicative of gaps in the territory! A thousand years ago, it made perfect sense to imagine the sun revolved around the earth. We’ve updated our maps now. The earth isn’t flat. Gardens don’t grow according to the whims of gods and goddesses or when we execute virgins. People weren’t made; they evolved. They are still evolving.

It’s true we don’t know everything, but that’s not a good argument for throwing God into the apparent gap – even if it’s a God who “loves us with an everlasting love.”

If you sit in the mystery, what happens? If you do not rush into the pre-given mental frameworks of Catholicism, monotheism, humanism and so forth, what happens?

The suggestion is not that we shouldn’t ever pray, or that we shouldn’t think in terms of “God” or “not-God.” We are where we are, and we have to own that. After all, here I am reading William Barry and it’s not because I feel like being an intellectual pain-in-the-ass.

The suggestion is simply to give attention to what is happening in order to see clearly what-is-happening. And perhaps to notice the way in which we tend to assume that we already know what is happening. And perhaps to notice that we tend to translate what is happening into familiar terms – love, inner peace, stillness, Christ, lovingkindness, ego, et cetera.

In a way, the only thing we can really do – especially when we reach the apparent “mystery” – is to slowly and carefully update our maps. The relevant territory is internal. We have to go alone and we have to go with the intention of leaving a trail. The deeply personal nature of the work means that external teachers and traditions are only going to be so helpful.

The last thing we put down on this interior journey is our expectation of what we’ll find as we go. If you know in advance what the center holds – if you know it’s a “God” whose love is everlasting – for that matter, if you are sure there is a “center” at all – then you aren’t really going empty-handed into the so-called heart of the so-called mystery.

In a different context – here paraphrased – the artist Jasper Johns said that in order to be a great artist one had to give up everything, including the desire to be a great artist. It is a leap – a commitment – most of us are not willing to make. And it’s okay but also, aren’t we ready at last to make it? Given the sea, why not swim?

If you are reading this – and mulling it over, agreeing or disagreeing – then you are no longer happy or content with retreating into redundant ideology and semantics about God and Love and Inner Peace and all of that. You want to go all the way now and you are trying to figure out how. I don’t personally have any answers in that regard and I’m probably the last – or second to last anyway – person I’d ask.

But here’s the thing. Posts like this – and the reading and thought that underlie them – are a nontrivial part of how “Sean” goes empty-handed into the interior. And if you are here, then perhaps you are traveling, too. And perhaps – just perhaps – in that lovelily syllable “too” is a hint of what comes next.

The tower of knowing reaches higher and higher into the sky. Its foundations support apparently infinite extension. Each floor includes the beginning of a staircase that ascends to yet another level. We build this tower faster and faster. We build machines to speed up the process even more – through automation, efficiency, scalability.

And yet our spiritual hunger – our need to know and to be right in and about our knowing – continues unabated. It is as if we are a starving people eating air. No matter how much of it we swallow, it does not satisfy. It does not nourish. It does not end, even briefly, our hunger.

One who would be fed in a sustainable way – so as to sustainably feed others in turn – does not eschew knowledge but simply sees clearly the inherent futility of any ultimate end to it.

We are not rats in a maze to which we shall one day find an exit. We are not ensouled primates begging favor from Heaven while avoiding Hell. And we are not lanterns whose function is to be set aflame and to remain so lit unto eternity.

We did not ask to be given this experience because it arises of its own accord. Nor are we the authors of its conclusion. There is no maze to be let out from.

There is no distinction between the structure of our bodies and that to which the word “soul” might point, which is another way of saying there is neither a mediator to help us bridge the gap, nor a gap that needs to be bridged.

And the function of a lantern is to be lit and hefted, then darkened and put away, and then lit and hefted, and then darkened and put away. To seek only one of those states – and to seek to make it permanent unto the exclusion of the other – is to miss the contingent nature of light and dark and the one who perceives them both distinctly.

In Cambridge once, a man stumbled out of the library – stacks of books spilling from his carosel, pages of random essays flying away behind him in the breeze – and fell exhausted onto a bench facing the slow unfurling of the Charles River in late summer sunlight. A lifetime of study had suddenly vanished from his mind, leaving it clear and smooth, like a prism through which the sun streamed. He felt as if were a dog suddenly liberated from leash and collar and the owner who had insisted such restraints were necessary. It was as if he had awakened from a dream of confinement and restriction and could run now in open fields or nap in a nest of old blankets or trot slowly along a forest path.

Questions beget answers, and those answers beget new questions which in turn beget answers, and it is neither right nor wrong, nor good nor bad, to partake of this cycle. Yet in our confusion, we do not see this cycle, but think we are following a line (meandering but ultimately true) at the end of which is THE ANSWER, and that THE ANSWER is the One True God, and this God is glad at our arrival, and so we are glad, too.

It is not so.

The wheel of a wagon executes an interminable circle. It loops forever. Yet the line it leaves behind it is straight and singular – possessed of both beginning and end – and apparently unerring in its linearity. Imagine the turning wheel gazes at this line, sighs and asks “What is happening? What am I?”

The line does not answer, for the line is merely an effect of the wheel. And the wheel only turns: and turns: and turns.

february thaw –
the chickadees and I
share crumbs

We want to be spiritual experts, masters of A Course in Miracles, Christian gurus unto those in despair and loss. And yet over and over we find that we are in despair, we suffer loss. We are the lost, we are the forsaken.

Faced with this poverty we go back to the start we maybe never left: we pray as children: we beg the Father for mercy and supplication. And some us – perhaps – see this crying out as failure and feel guilty accordingly.

There is – there is always – another way.

So we fall to our knees and beg God to get us out of this hard place in which we presently find ourselves, so what? So we pray to Jesus – literally to the executed peasant whose brief ministry ended over two thousand years ago – to ease our pain and suffering, so what?

It is tempting to think the wise and enlightened never sink to this level – oral prayers beseeching supernatural agents to benevolently intervene on our behalf. It is a problem in the ACIM community that folks are so intent on being well and wise and woke that they can’t accept their brokenness and anguish and confusion. They can’t meet their own self where and as it is.

I speak here from experience.

We are just people having this particular experience of being people, which includes – to varying degrees – pain and loss and confusion. Sometimes it hurts to be who and what we are. Sometimes it hurts bad.

It is not a crime to feel this way. And it is not a crime to turn to simple mental prayers as a response to these feelings.

Mental prayer is vocal and basic. It is the child calling to her father or mother. It is an urgent cry for instant attention, reflecting a primal need to be held in arms whose strength and presence are unconditional and beyond any doubt or question. Mental prayer arises from our interior desire to be perfectly safe, perfectly loved, perfectly fed, et cetera et cetera.

To be human is to have needs and when those needs aren’t met, to strive to meet them. Thus, part of being human is also to face the simple truth that those needs are not always met – sometimes to the point where our discomfort turns to anguish, inconvenience to crisis. Of course we cry out. What else could we do?

To turn to Jesus in dialogue – to literally ask him for aid the way we might ask a parent or partner or therapist – is a way of coming back to our bodies, to the nontrivial clarity of being itself. It reminds us of the stillness and grace that naturally inheres in this being, this way.

How does mental prayer do this? By helping us to simply breathe. We throw our plea at our image of Jesus – the brother who loves us unconditionally, who mediates for us the supernatural agency of God, who never says no or sees any problem as insignificant – and because he’s got it, we can let go and draw a breath. And then another.

And in the simple rhythm of breathing, which is simply to be, we remember some of the essential facts of this experience: that we are not alone, that everything passes, that there is always something we can do – for ourselves and/or for others – that can calm the raging storm inside us.

The goal is not to perfect our external circumstances. That will never happen anyway. Nor is it to perfect our interior psychological spiritual balance so that nothing can ruffle or frighten or disorient or trouble us. That isn’t going to happen either, not perfectly.

The point, really, is simply learn how to not freak out when our actual experience of being human deviates from our projection of what that experience should be. Sometimes the actuality and the projection line up fine. But frequently they don’t. We have to see this and not panic about it. Everything comes and goes. We want to be graceful and gentle about surfing the coming and going. That’s all.

So mental prayer is helpful to the extent it triggers some interior insight that in the fundamental sense, no matter how crazy or upset we are, nothing is happening that is new or wrong or permanent. It’s just life being life responding to life being life. It’s amenable, fixable, pliable. When we remember this, we remember that we are not alone and not deprived of our capacity to be – even in little, hardly noticeable ways – the healing we require.

Go for a walk, visit a neighbor, write a poem, compliment an activist whose work you admire, carry some canned goods to a food bank, sit quietly and compose a gratitude list, fill the bird feeder, do one thing on your to-do list, do something on someone else’s. Whatever. What hurts will pass; the hurt will pass.

It is a sign of spiritual maturity – not specialness – to accept and make use of prayer in the full breadth of its potential. Sometimes it is contemplative, sometimes transcendent, sometimes active. And sometimes it is the wordy gasping of the lost and forsaken, turning to a mythology they thought they had outgrown and left behind.