Reluctant Prayer

I do not like to pray, but I think prayer is important.

Of course, "prayer" can mean many different things, and I do not mean all of them.  But - despite my disliking for the activity of prayer - I practice several kinds of prayer.

Petition and Intercession
I spend most of my prayer time asking for things.  This probably sounds foolish on more than one level.  Here's the thing: I use the language of asking because it's what comes most naturally. I'm not an expert at this.  But this asking is, for me, like stretching my muscles before a run.  If I stretch well, I can run further and faster, and I do more good than harm.  Stretching prepares me to do more than I could have done otherwise.  It expels stiffness and inertia and inaction.

Asking God to do good in the lives of others could be a cop-out, where we dump our problems on the divine and then proceed to ignore them.  What I try to practice is a kind of asking where I'm not giving up on being part of the solution.  Frankly, I think a lot of the big problems in the world will take more than just me, so I have no shame about asking God to do some of the heavy lifting.  But it's also important that I take some time out of my day to practice being less concerned with my own worries and more concerned with others.  This is not the run; it is the warmup, the stretching.  The stretching does some good all on its own, but it also prepares me to do other good.

One part of this I have a hard time sorting out is whether and how to tell people I am praying for them.  Some people are grateful for it, others are bothered by it.  I understand both of those reactions.  There are times when we feel the weight of grief less heavily when we know others care enough to devote part of their day to the contemplation of our suffering.  And there are times when it seems like people tell us about their prayers so that we will think more highly of them.  I have yet to figure this all out.  I'll just say it now: if you tell me of your sorrows, I will do my best to remember those sorrows in my quiet time, and I will bring them, in silent contemplation, into the presence of my contemplation of the divine. 

Make Me A Blessing
My main prayer each day is one I learned from actor Richard Gere.  Years ago, after he became a Buddhist, he said in an interview that when he meets someone he says to himself, silently, "Let me be a blessing to this person."  This has stayed with me, and it seems like a good prayer.  (He might not call it a prayer, which is fine with me.)  I begin my day with that prayer, in the abstract, something like this: "Let me be a blessing to everyone I encounter, to everyone affected by my life.  Let me be a blessing, and not a curse.  Let me not bring shame on anyone, and keep me from doing or saying what is foolish or harmful."  This is not unlike the well-known prayer of St Francis, whose story I have loved since Professor Pardon Tillinghast first made me study it in college years ago.

We Become Like What We Worship
What lies behind all this is my hunch - and I admit it's just a hunch - that we come to resemble the things that matter most to us, the things that we treasure and mentally caress in our inmost parts.  And I think this happens subtly and slowly, the way habits build up, or the way our bodies slowly change over time, one cell division at a time.  The little things add up to the big thing; our small gestures become the great sweep of our lives.

So in prayer I'm trying to take time out of each day to at least expose myself once again to the things I think are most worth imitating: love of neighbor, love of justice, peacemaking, contentment, hospitality, generosity, gentleness, defense of the downtrodden, healing, joy, patience, self-control.  So much of the rest of my day I wind up chasing after things that take up an amount of time that is disproportionate to their value.

If prayer does nothing else than force me to remember what I claim is important--even if this means exposing myself to myself as a hypocrite--then it has already done me some good.  And I hope this will mean I'm less of a jerk to everyone else, too.  When I'm honest with myself (and let's be honest, that's not as often as it should be) this leads me to what churches have long called confession and repentance, the acknowledgement that I'm not all I claim to be, that I'm not yet all I could be, that I have let myself and others down, and that needs to change.  Perhaps this comes from my long interest in Socrates: I think it's probably healthy to make it a habit to consider one's own life.

Musement and Contemplation
There is another kind of prayer that I find quite difficult most of the time, but sometimes I fall into it, and when I do, it is always a delight.  It happens sometimes when I am walking, or in the shower, or while reading something that utterly disrupts my usual patterns of thinking.  It happens sometimes while I lie awake at night.  Charles Peirce talks about this as "musement," a kind of disinterested contemplation of all our possible and actual experiences.

Emerson called prayer the consideration of the facts of the universe from the highest possible point of view.  I'm not sure I get anything like the highest possible point of view when I pray, but contemplative prayer does feel like an attempt to at least consider what such a point of view would be like.

Perhaps the best part of this Peircean/Emersonian kind of prayer is the opportunity for rest.  Oddly, Peirce says that this is not a relaxation of one's mental powers but the vigorous use of one's powers.  The difference between this and hard work is that musement doesn't try to accomplish anything.  Peirce says that we could call this "Pure Play."  Play may be physically tiring but it is mentally and spiritually refreshing, and it often shows us things we would not otherwise have seen.  At least, this is my experience in the outdoors - I climb mountains and wade in rivers and snorkel in the ocean in order to experience the moment when what is possible becomes actual, when what I have not yet seen becomes a fact in my existence.  The novelty of it makes life delicious.

Why I Pray
This is a good deal of what drives me to pray, anyway: I want to love my neighbor and my world more than I actually do, so I spend time preparing to do so; I want to become more like the best things and the best people I know, so I spend time dwelling on them, in the belief that worship shapes my character; and I know it is good for me to have my patterns of thought disrupted, so I try to allow myself to enter into a playful contemplation of the world and all that it symbolizes.  None of this is easy.  It is like any other exercise, sometimes rewarding, often difficult, and nearly always a preparation for the unexpected.

Home and Hospitality

A friend asked me today to explain what I mean by "home" in a sentence or two.  This is too tall an order for someone as wordy as me.  I think of Du Bellay's "Heureux qui, comme Ulysse," of what Hebrews 11 says about Abraham, who looked forward to leaving his tents for a city with foundations; I think of the mountains of my youth, and my homesickness for their colors, and sounds, and seasonal smells.  I think of Odysseus, and his long road home, home to where others patiently waited for his return.  It matters that we find our way home, and the whole earth does not count as our home.  We incarcerate people in places that are not home-ly; we fight to live in our particular home when we are invaded, even though our species can live almost anywhere.  Home matters.

Perhaps home means this: the place where we feel free to show, or to receive hospitality.  The measure of our willingness to be hospitable to others, or of our ability to receive hospitality in new places, is the measure of our homes.  They are not measured in square feet, but in welcome.  What do you think?  That feels like a good first try, but perhaps you can say something better, or truer than that.

Boredom and Curiosity - My Talk To The Class of 2016

This year I had the rare privilege of giving the Convocation Address to our new students.  Here's a bit of what I said, with a link to the full text:

"I think boredom often begins when we start to care too much about those serious stories we tell about our lives, the ones we hope others will care about. If we become too fixated on accomplishing, in some distant future, the practical and respectable things that will make others respect us, we can easily come to view the events of the current day as an obstacle to be overcome on the way. As a result, rather than enjoying our today, we endure it."

Future Hopes, Present Experience, and the Wisdom of the Past

A reflection on Henry Bugbee's Inward Morning, his entry dated Friday, September 5.

Bugbee writes: "Of experience...we may hope for understanding in our own time, and in this we do not seem to have the edge on preceding generations of men."

Science grows from one generation to another.  What we know is more advanced than what previous generations knew.  But precisely because of this, we are alienated from what science will know, what it aims to know when it reaches its goal.  Science uses experience, it swims in the medium of experience on a long-distance swim.  We are like generations of migratory butterflies, none of us making the whole journey, but each of us making part of it so that the next generation may fly further.  Standing on one another's shoulders we become the giants upon whose shoulders our intellectual descendants may stand.

At first blush, experience seems less worth knowing, since it is subjective, unquantifiable, subject to the winds of time and the diurnal tides of the chemistry of our blood.  But experience is immediate.  No generation is privileged; every generation receives the same share.  Here our knowledge is not a deposit that we hope will gain interest for our children; it is something in our hands and for us now.  The wisdom of the past does not advance the next generation so much as clarify our own.

Bugbee again: "It is not a question of our beginning from where they leave off and going on to supersede them. We are fortunate if we can become communicant in our own way with what they have to say." 

Tradition has roots that mean handed-down.  Bugbee reminds me, gives me words to articulate, why it is worth continuing to try to read ancient wisdom.  He reminds me why, when I could have chosen to work in science, it is not a bad choice to work as a teacher, priest, curator, historian, poet, librarian - a custodian of the narratives of experience.  Science aims forward beyond our lives; but experience is here now, where we live.  Is it such a bad thing to live here and now?

Sorcery and Pollution

In the Apocalypse of St John on Patmos, he writes that some will be excluded from heaven by their wickednesses. [1]  He describes them with florid metaphor, calling them "the dogs," for example.  He goes on to name some of them: sorcerers, fornicators, murderers, idolaters, and so on.  A nasty lot, to be sure, all of them worshiping things not worthy of worship.

Of course, sorcery isn't much of a problem for us these days.  At least, that's how most of us see it. But some folks are concerned that magic in modern fiction poses a threat to sanctity.  Several years ago I wrote a book called From Homer To Harry Potter, in which one of my aims was to help Christians (many of whom were concerned about the sorcery of young Mr. Potter and its influence on their children) think about myth, fantasy, and magic.  Not all magic is equal, I argued, and not all of it should alarm us.  

So this word "sorcery" in St. John's Apocalypse caught my eye recently.  Perhaps sorcery is a bad thing, after all?  The word St. John uses is pharmakos, related to the Greek pharmakeia and to our word "pharmacy."  It means one who makes potions, and especially potions used to poison others. 

What's wrong with this version of sorcery should be obvious to everyone: it amounts to the idolatry of power and the abuse of nature to worship that idol.  To put it in simpler terms: it is an idolatry of power because it regards human lives as things to be sacrificed on the altar of power.  We kill because we desire to dominate.  Selah.

And it is an abuse of nature because it regards chemistry as a tool of domination of others.  It concocts in order to destroy, and, again, it destroys in order to dominate.

Christians who are concerned about magic should ponder this.  Is God concerned with hand-waving, spells, and incantations?  I doubt it.  But it would appear that God is not pleased with using chemistry to do violence, and with regarding natural science as a tool for domination of other people.  I know it alarms me, at any rate.

I haven't got a quick conclusion here.  My point is not that we need to do away with chemistry or hold witch-hunts for chemists.  But I frequently return to Francis Bacon in his Advancement of Learning, [2] where he offers a way to speed up science by dividing up the four causes that Aristotle said all scientists need to seek.  Bacon suggests that if we can find the material and efficient causes of things - the matter and energy that cause particular contingent states and arrangements of things in the world - that should be enough for science.  Seeking the other two causes - formal and final causation - amounts to something like seeking the meaning of things and their purposes in the world.  To require scientists to seek these things is probably an undue burden on the natural sciences, and it certainly bogs down their progress by engaging them in endless debates about metaphysics and ethics.  Bacon leaves these latter questions to theologians and metaphysicians, freeing natural scientists to much more rapid progress in their research.  Bacon's division of causes was a brilliant stroke, and modern science owes it very much.

In the same book, Bacon finds he must make a defense of chemistry.  He does so by means of an analogy between chemistry and sorcery. [3]  It is prohibited to converse or do business with evil spirits, he says, but it is not prohibited to inquire into their nature and power.  Those who do the former are sorcerers, but those who do the latter are theologians.  Bacon adds, as an aside, that he's not sure either one is doing anything real, because those alleged spirits are "fabulous and fantastical."  Still, the analogy is helpful: it may be unethical to use poisons on other people, but it is certainly not wrong to seek to understand the nature and power of poisons.  So natural science, when it seeks to understand the nature and power of chemical compounds, for instance, is doing something like theology.

Here is where I find myself at a loss: theology has a story it can tell about why we should not converse with demons, and for those who live in the community that is shaped by that story, it is compelling.  But what story can we tell that will teach us how to avoid modern sorcery?  We have traded albs and chasubles for lab coats, and for the most part, this has been a positive development.  But we have not been intentional about telling a good story about science, and we have liberated it from questions of meaning and purpose - a liberation that we have recently begun to question, as we "have become death, the destroyer of worlds."  We have become unwitting sorcerers all, crafting potions that do wider and greater violence than the ancient theologians could have imagined.

*******

[1]  Rev 22.14

[2]  See Bacon, Of the Advancement of Learning, 2.VII.3, e.g.

[3]  Bacon, op. cit., 2.VI.2.

Philosophy Begins in Wonder

Aristotle famously remarked that the love of wisdom - philosophy - begins in wonder.  This is correct.

It has since been noted that philosophy aims at the conclusion of wonder.  This, unlike the first statement, might not be correct.

So much depends on what we understand the aim of philosophy to be.  If we model it on the applied sciences, then its aim is to solve particular problems, in which case it aims to be done with its work.  The conclusion of a chain of reasoning becomes its consummation, and the consummation becomes the end.

But if philosophy should also aim to make us scientists as Peirce understood science - he says it is "the pursuit of those who desire to find things out" and something that is carried out in a community, not by an isolated individual - then it aims not just at solving problems but at introducing us to the world.

Bugbee points out (Inward Morning, August 31 entry) that in wonder, "reality has begun to sink into us."  Think about it: when you really wonder at something, isn't it because of a disclosure?  Wonder may seem to concern what is hidden, but the beginning of wonder is also the beginning of an opening, when the world opens to us.  If it were not so, we would not even know to wonder.

Philosophy teaches us - or ought to teach us - to open ourselves in return.  This opening of ourselves is not the conclusion of wonder but the development of the habit of wonder.  I don't mean the slack-jawed laziness that poses as wonder and pretends that all things are wonderful while being open to none of them, but, as Bugbee puts it, a commitment to being in the wilderness and the patience to let ourselves be "overtaken...by that which can make us at home in this condition."

Faith, Hope, and Certainty

“Certainty may be quite compatible with being at a loss to say what one is certain of.  Indeed I seriously doubt if the notion of ‘certainty of,’ or ‘certainty that’ will take us accurately to the heart of the matter.  It seems to me that certainty is at least very much akin to hope and faith.  And I agree with Gabriel Marcel that it would be a mistake to undertake the interpretation of hope and of faith under what I will call the aspect of specificity, as if hope were essentially ‘hope that,’ and faith ‘belief that.’  Likewise, then, of certainty: Perhaps it too is not a matter of knowledge we can be said to possess.” 

Henry Bugbee, The Inward Morning, (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1999), pp.36-37.

The Comfort of Certainty

"Only once, as far as I remember, in all my lifetime have I experienced the pleasure of praise--not for what it might bring but in itself.  That pleasure was beatific; and the praise that conferred it was meant for blame.  It was that a critic said of me that I did not seem to be absolutely sure of my conclusions."

--Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers 1.10. (1897)

I often turn to Peirce not just for technical philosophical matters but also for insights like this one.  What sort of people am I interested in surrounding myself with?  It is most comfortable to surround myself with people who share my views and who espouse them with the air of certainty.  But as Peirce reminds us in "The Fixation of Belief," the great danger there is that in so doing I cut myself off from seeing my own errors and from improving my thinking. 

As with so many things worth remembering, it is hard to keep this in mind.  We need not just people who think differently from the way we think but also communities that will help us return to those words and ideas that sharpen us and provoke us to thought.  This is the challenge of theology and of philosophy, and of liturgies, both sacred and secular - to remind us of what we ought to remember while at the same time challenging us to resist the comfort of resting in what seems sure.  As Augustine writes, "Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee, O Lord."  Until then, until our hearts find rest in the absolute, we should be wary of certainty, which is so often the enemy of learning.