The following talk was given at the Tendai
Betsuin in Honolulu as part of a panel discussion “Exploring our Mystic
Traditions in Four Great Religions” sponsored by Inter Religious Encounters for
World Peace, The Interfaith Alliance Hawaii and All Believers Network. I was asked to indicate especially the role
of mystic and/or prayer without images (apophatic prayer) in Christian
tradition.
Prayer, a Christian Perspective
Buddy Summers
1/5/05
Tender and precious is the soul of this evening. Thank you for inviting me to participate.
Drawing as concretely as possible from the life of my faith community, I want to highlight some of the images, intentions and structures that set the stage for the mystical aspect of prayer in my experience.
In doing this I hope to provide you with anecdotal insight into one person’s vision of prayer within the Christian tradition.
To help us connect with each other---a few words about myself and what I mean by the word “prayer.”
Who Is This Person?
I am 59. Native Texan, husband, father, grandfather and Presbyterian Church (USA) minister of 31 years.
My mother was
a Presbyterian descended from a long line of hearty women of faith. Her father and grandfather were
physicians. Her ancestors were
Scots-Irish, coming to south
My father was
a Coca-Cola businessman and World War II veteran. His father came to south
I am the first fruit of mom and dad’s post war marriage. I have four younger sisters and a younger brother.
After three years in the infantry, I completed undergraduate and graduate studies with a BA in government from The University of Texas and a Masters of Divinity degree from Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Preparation for pastoral ministry included studies in philosophy, theology, and ethics and the reading and the interpretation of biblical texts in Greek and Hebrew.
I served
churches in
In 1983, I
co-founded Witness For Peace, a national interfaith project of active
nonviolent resistance to the
I’m speaking in no official capacity and have only my interpreted experience to share with you.
My Overview of Prayer
I use the word “prayer” to refer to communication with God. “Talk to me,” says God. When I talk, God listens and, more importantly, God responds.
1
From my side, most of the talk is some form of “I wanna.” O God, I want to prosper, my sister to get well, the war in Iraq to end, somebody to get what they deserve (or not), your will to be done on earth. I don’t put down this sort of prayer at all. It feels absolutely natural.
Further, it doesn’t matter to me (or my sense of what counts as prayer) whether I talk to God in selfish or altruistic terms, in thoughtful or reactionary terms---it just doesn’t matter. What matters is that I find myself turning toward God in hunger and yearning as well as in thanksgiving and astonishment.
The “I wanna” prayer is about saying what I want---even if what I want is only to be heard.
It works for me to believe that God welcomes all my prayers, and that God answers all my “I wanna” prayers in the same way. To every “I wanna” prayer, God says, “Come closer.”
2
The more deeply I enter into prayer, the fewer things I feel compelled to say or ask. Meister Eckhart wrote, “If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, 'thank you,' that would suffice.” Going even further, John Bunyan wrote that "The best prayers often have more groans than words."
There comes a point in my prayer experience when words fall away. Words give way to groans. Groans give way to stillness. There is, after all, the divine invitation “Be still, and know.”
First, it was “Talk to me.” Then, “Come closer.” Now, “Be still.” In stillness before God, there is one further word that I often hear. The word is “Go.”
God invites me to get up and go, to leave the prayer closet (a metaphor, you understand) to go out into the world, to bear a message of God’s no strings attached inclusive love. The way I imagine it is that God says, “Go, you know what to do.”
3
Of course,
this is overly simplified. And yet I can
put it even more succinctly. God has two
answers to my prayers: “Come” and “Go.” To my “I wanna” prayer,
God says “Come.” To the prayer of stillness, God says “Go.”
Apophatic prayer, the mystic’s prayer without images, names for me what happens between the “Come” and the “Go,” what happens when the “I wanna” prayer has ceased, when I find myself, simply still before God.
Places Where Prayer Happens
Now, from my own faith community experience, I want to describe three places/types of occasions where prayer, including prayer without words happens.
The Communion Ritual
Our Sunday worship service is open, flowing and informal. Underneath, it has a classic call and response structure, including a form of the Eucharistic meal whose ritual, I sense, enables “coming closer to God, being still, and being sent out again.”
Some background. Our church is a union congregation. The parent denominations are The Presbyterian Church (USA) and The Disciples of Christ.
Like Catholic Christians and some other Protestant denominations, The Disciples have a tradition of the weekly celebration of The Eucharist, also known as Holy Communion or The Lord’s Supper. Most Presbyterian congregations celebrate the Lord’s Supper monthly. Our congregation follows the Disciples’ way with weekly communion.
Protestants and Catholics differed historically over central aspects of the meaning of The Eucharist. Both streams of tradition, however, link the communion ritual to Jesus’ last meal with his disciples and both use bread and wine (or a wine substitute) as the material elements of the ritual.
By eating the bread and drinking the wine, it is believed that some form of participation with the crucified and risen Jesus is attained, or received as a gift from God.
I introduce the breaking of the bread with these words,
“On the night of his arrest, Jesus took bread, gave thanks and broke it saying, ‘This is my body which is broken for you, my life which is lived out and broken open for you. Live like this together and for Others. Do this in remembrance of me.’”
As I prepare to pour from a pitcher into a chalice, I trace a circle on the lip of the communion cup saying
“After supper he took the cup saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant, the including circle of God’s love that includes everyone, excludes no one. Into this circle of God’s including love, you may pour out your hunger and your yearnings and receive back from God what you need for living, even as my life is poured out,’ says Jesus, ‘and given to you all.’ Share in this. All of you. These are the gifts of God for the people of God.”
The invitation to participate in the ritual is not to church members or believers only. We invite
“Whoever hungers and thirsts for wholeness and healing in community to come and receive by faith whatever there might be for you in the communion this morning.”
The congregation is seated in concentric circles, ovals really. In the center of the room, there is a Table. Its top is made from the cross section of a monkey pod tree.
On the Table, several places are set with bread and a cup. People come to one of the places, tear off a piece of bread, dip it in the cup, and eat in silence.
As they come to the Table, they gesture or touch one another indicating their sense of God’s belief in and love for each other. There is jostling, hugging and not a few kisses.
From where I sit as communion takes place, the experience acquires an apophatic, mystical, dimension.
In the New Testament, there is a metaphor which describes a congregation as the Body of Christ. Within this ritual dance of Holy Communion, there arises, for me, a sense of God’s Real Presence, in the flesh and blood Body of Christ, in the people pressing around the Table.
Taize (Singing and Silence)
Several years
ago, some people in my congregation discovered that there was a faith community
in
The Taize
Community is an ecumenical Christian brotherhood founded just after WWII to
work for reconciliation in
Taize is a monastic community. Meals are simple. Chores are shared. Everyone gathers for worship three times a day. Each hour service includes long periods of silence and the repetitive singing of short songs with words like this---
O Lord hear my prayer, O Lord hear my
prayer/ When I call answer me…
O Lord hear my prayer, O Lord hear my
prayer/ Come and listen to me.
O Lord hear my…..
My personal favorite is this. It is based upon a passage from the New Testament.
The
The
Long after the service is ended, the words and music continue to resound deep within providing a kind of sanctuary in the midst of an otherwise intense life. Within that sanctuary, God lives (or, at least, I find access to God) and from within that sanctuary I find that God gives life.
For several years now, a group of singers and musicians have gathered once monthly to conduct a full Taize service at CCU. From across the island, a few people come to sit together in silence, light candles and chant the music of Taize.
It is an inductive experience leading to that place between “Come” and “Go.” Remember that place? Tears are not uncommon. I see (and hear about) candlelight in some of the faces many well beyond the time we spend together.
Labyrinth (Walking and
Silence)
After
September 11th, two church members decided to create a public
meditation space on the Kawainui Marsh trail in
A labyrinth is a circuitous path inscribed within a circle. It is not a maze. There is no getting lost. In due course, if you persevere, you reach the center. The way out is the same as the way in. It’s a voluntary experience. You could just step across the lines and walk to the middle or out at any time.
A labyrinth
pattern is found on the stone floor of the Chartres Cathedral in
A few years
ago, Lauren Artress at Grace Cathedral in
She described walking the labyrinth as a spiritual journey in three stages. The first stage, walking in, involves releasing, emptying, and letting go of the things that block your relationship with God.
The second stage begins when you reach the Center. There awaits the possibility of Meeting, Restoration, Illumination.
The third stage, going back out, involves retracing your steps in hope of reentering the world grounded and empowered by God---perhaps having received a new insight about one’s calling or a work to be done.
Of course, not everyone who walks the labyrinth knows (or cares) about the three stage journey. They just walk it. Even so, it has become for me what an old Church of Scotland preacher used to call a “thin place”---a place where there is but a thin membrane between heaven and earth. In this thin place it sometimes happens for me that just about everything falls away except the consciousness of whispers from the Other side.
The Kawainui Marsh Labyrinth has not only been walked but maintained spontaneously by scores if not hundreds of neighbors, mostly unknown to each other.
Christmas Eve, several of us met there spontaneously and walked the labyrinth by candlelight. When there was no more walking upon the gravel path, when the Celtic harp and soprano sax had gone home, a deep silence carried across the marsh.
Even though the labyrinth has no official standing, county maintenance trucks have been observed to go out of their way to avoid driving across this pattern that keeps reappearing in the gravel. Perhaps it is such a thin place that they fear falling through.
Conclusion
I conclude with two observations:
First concerning the role of images in prayer and my relationship to God---To my way of thinking, images, intentionality, and structures are integral to communion with God, They set the stage, provide an occasion, and then fall away leaving only Presence, Communion, Commission. That’s the way I’m thinking of it.
And second and this is mostly my bottom line: what has prayer to do with peace on earth? The kind of peace where justice rolls down in ever flowing streams, where everyone has access to health care, meaningful work, living wages, music and the arts---that kind of peace. The kind of peace in which the common good is the common goal. What has prayer got to do with that?
While I do not think that prayer guarantees or creates peace, reconciliation, wholeness or healing, my experience is that these things do not occur outside of deep longing, profound stillness, lots of trials, not a few errors, and an incredibly generous universe.
Many engaged in peace and justice work encounter considerable pain and frustration. I do. It is a sweet thing then to be invited to take this time out to talk about prayer. In my life, it is prayer that makes it possible for me to go, to go and do---the work.
Thank you for having invited me to share this evening with you.
Blessings. Blessings.
