THE PLACE OF PRAYER
Garvey, John
THE PLACE OF PRAYER JOHN GARVEY A few years ago it was said by a lot of people that prayer and action were really one and the same thing, or that prayer (as it had been defined and...
...What kind of theology would "work" in the modern world7 The answers came in large blocks: we had theologies of hope and theologies of revolution, black theology, secular and liberal theologies...
...Books which deal with church structure and the social impact of religion are still with us---one example is Mary Daly's recent feminist work Beyond God the Father (Beacon, $3.95)--but something else is happening now...
...Along with this feeling that prayer and contemplation were to take a back seatmif they were allowed along for the ride at allm came talk about the end of religious writing...
...Nouwen writes, "What we see, and like to see, is cure and change...
...THE PLACE OF PRAYER JOHN GARVEY A few years ago it was said by a lot of people that prayer and action were really one and the same thing, or that prayer (as it had been defined and practiced traditionally) was a cop-out, a turning away from the immediate needs of a suffering world...
...Henri Nouwen's Out of Solitude (Ave Maria Press, $1.75) illustrates the ways in which social issues, at their depths, can be seen as contemplative problems...
...It enables us to enter into our own identity rather than to search for one from the outside...
...ditional manuals of spirituality, the emphasis there was often on transcending much of what we know as human nature...
...bookstores are again stocking John of the Cross...
...Books which deal directly and unapologetically with prayer are appearing again, and they are finding a large audience...
...Another version of the same idea, and a more tempting one, is the pendulum theory: once we were at one extreme, then we swung to the other, and now we are losing momentum and moving toward a dangle in between...
...In A Contemporary Meditation on Prayer (Thomas More Press, $2.45) Eugene Kennedy notes that people are turning to prayer because it is "the human activity par excellence...
...The writings of Louis Evely, Henri Nouwen, Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, and Brother Roger of Taiz6 are increasingly popular...
...But what we do not see and do not want to see is care, the sharing in the experience of brokenness...
...They see this as breathing time, and in a way it is...
...Several established publishing companies folded, and everyone waited for the domino theory to work on the rest...
...Although this thought can be found in some tra...
...it recognizes that while man does not live by bread alone, man does not live without bread, either...
...You can't shake them off as if they were only bad moods...
...But the problems remain...
...They seek the worship they need wherever it seems best, and for a lot of those who remain involved with their own denominations problems of assent to dogma are resolved by indifference...
...Kennedy shows the new emphasis, which is rather on transformation...
...Thomas Merton's writing receives a lot of attention, and there has been a revival of interest in C. S. Lewis...
...Religious and theological writing circled around ecclesiastical and social structures...
...But cure without care makes us into rulers, controllers, manipulators, and prevents a real community from taking shape...
...It is true that dealing openly with structural issues, problems of authority, and alternative theologies-all once forbidden topics--involves a kind of exorcism which leaves us, at the end, free to deal with more substantive things...
...But this doesn't get us very far...
...Some people say so...
...This indifference may look irreverent to conservative Christians, but I would like to suggest that it may be the beginning of a new kind of reverence, one which bridges the traditional separation between "worldly" and "spiritual" matters...
...And still, cure without care is as dehumanizing as a gift given with a cold heart . . . Our tendency is to run away from the painful realities or to try to change them as soon as possible...
...to understand it we have to understand ourselves, especially in our most generous and unself-conscious moments of giving ourselves in friendship and love . . . Prayer never estranges us from any genuine aspect of our personalities...
...One unfocused notion is that in hard times people turn to God, something that is not at all established...
...Three recent books illustrate what is new about the recent emphasis on prayer...
...At the dumb end of the spectrum there is the inane evangelical writing of people like Hal Lindsey and Pat Boone, whose latest book has the incredible title A Miracle a Day Keeps the Devil Away...
...II April 1975:56...
...they are irrelevant to the lives of most believers and are understood to have little to do with the way Christians should live...
...Is the new tendency toward prayer an abandonment of problems which remain as real as they ever were...
...The explanations for this trend vary...
...The fact that few people have recently bothered to challenge the doctrine of infallibility, for example, or papal teaching on birth control, has not led anyone to conclude that these teachings are now widely accepted where a few years ago they were the subject of angry debate...
...The resurgence of interest in prayer has not been accompanied by renewed interest in the churches...
...But this does not mean a conservative victory or a turning away from anything...
...For many people allegiance to particular denominations is no longer central to being Christian...
...It makes it look as if the churchy approach and the secular passion which followed its collapse were the poles between which contemporary religious history happens...
Vol. 102 • April 1975 • No. 2
