Archive for the ‘Prayer’ Category
“How Can I Help You?”
Hungry for Power Vs. Repairing the World
This question is an invitation—a beautiful invitation.
If you ask me how you can help, I have an immediate gut response: “Yes! Wait. What do I need right now?” Your question makes me an active participant in my life. The question reminds me I have choices to make about my needs. Do I need someone to hold a door or a wrench or a flashlight? Do I need a kick in the butt or a power nap?
What I need right now depends on what I am trying to do at this moment. But longer term, what does an employee need from a boss to do her job? What does a student need from an instructor to apply these writing lessons to his life? You can see the question initiates a call and response—like most everything with communication. A question that needs an answer. A draft followed by a revision.

From Christian theology, I might call the question an artifact of kenosis, that notion of self-giving that is so hard for us power-hungry humans to live out. Then again, maybe it is less an artifact and more an aspiration. Maybe the question is a statement about the person I hope to become: caring and thoughtful and using my time and attention to help you reach your goal. But still aspirational, because I have a feeling you may actually tell me what you need. And then I have to put down my book or turn off the TV or be late to work to help you.
No matter how you look at it, the question asks you to know something about yourself and about your journey through life. What do you need to move forward in your journey right now? Back to theology for a moment: The psalmists who wrote the Songs of Ascent (Psalms 120-134 in the Christian Bible) knew to query the creator and to articulate their need, whether for food or stability or growth or to beat up enemies. These authors (and generations of people who pray) had the sense that the Holy One was waiting in the wings with lovingkindness (“chesed”). They (the authors along with the many who pray) made a career of depending on that offer of help.
Maybe our use of the “How can I help you?” depends on the psalmist’s impulse. We thwart our own power-hungry instincts when we ask it of those who have no chance of moving us forward. But we ask it because of the kind of people we want to be and because we believe there is a deep well of chesed out there.
Maybe we ask “How can I help you?” because we are weary of constant rage and yearn for a vocation of repairing the world.
Morris dancers on break from repairing the world.
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Image credits: Kirk Livingston
That moment when you’ve realize you’ve been doing it wrong all these years
Father Jacob and Question #4: “Where Does My Ladder Lean?”
The blind old priest in rural Finland hired an ex-con to read his mail. Maybe she was a murderer. Maybe she was innocent. Whatever the case, she brought enough real-world cynicism to her reading job to sway the old man.
Letters came. People wanted help with this and that: Sickness. Poverty. Death Troubles with the law. More sickness. They wanted God-help and the priest’s duty or calling or reputation was that he prayed and stuff happened in the real world. So the ex-con read the letters and the priest prayed. Except the ex-con’s readings, which included critical questions for the priest, gradually exposed his shaky foundations.
What a fool I’ve been, all these years.
The Finnish film “Letters to Father Jacob” continues with a twist, but the question “How have I spent my life and what do I have to show for it?” is central to all that happens next.
Seven critical questions help frame how we progress in our quest to balance work, art and economics in real life. One of those questions has to do with where we aim all our efforts: “Where does my ladder lean?” Common assumptions about work include the notion that you want the corner office and the big stock options that come with the high-octane positions. Of course you do: money and power are on everyone’s radar. Writers and artists want fame and money. Athletes want wins and fat contracts. Televangelists want souls with wallets. We all aim at something because that’s how we motivate ourselves.
It’s worth asking again and again what it is we are aiming at. At any point on the ladder it makes sense to stop and consider our end-goal. Especially because our work or art exacts a price from us. We’re used to the notion of the corporate executive who sacrifices family life and interpersonal relationships in his or her climb. But the craftsman or artist also pays a price: maybe relationships. But for certain the crafter or artist pays a price of looking at the world in a particular way. They move through the world with that bit of art or craft as a centerpiece—their own tool set for processing the world. Or perhaps the ladder is a ladder of faith and suddenly you wonder if it leans against, well, anything.
Anything at all.
This is not a rant against aggressive career movement. It is not a diatribe against capitalistic acquisition. It is a lament that there are not more Father Jacobs out there with an existential intelligence and a passion for listening and, well, seeking help for others. And maybe this is a plea for some to keep on seeking and to keep on waiting.
Perhaps there are unseen things worth desiring.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
Decentered. As in “not the crux of all things.”
A place for everything and everything in its place
I’ve put a recurring early-morning block on my calendar titled “Decenter.” The block or early morning quiet and focus has actually been on my calendar for decades, but I’ve recently retitled it based on a cue from Merold Westphal, a philosopher who teaches at Fordham University.
Westphal, writing in The Phenomenology of Prayer (NY: Fordham University Press, 2005), introduces prayer as a “decentering” activity. As a conversation, prayer takes me out of the center of my universe. Like the prayers of the old poet-king or the prayers of the inveterate letter-writer, these are conversations that recognize some other as the center of everything. Those two saw God as the center—I’m with them on that.
Of course, “de-centering” is not the way we could describe many of the prayers we pray. We send up endless lists to some imagined order-taking god, with caveats about when (“Now works for me. How about now?”) and where and how. And especially how much. But listen to Westphal:
…prayer is a deep, quite possibly the deepest decentering of the self, deep enough to begin dismantling or, if you like, deconstructing that burning preoccupation with myself. (Prayer as the Posture of the Decentered Self, 18)
Again and again I find myself at the center of all existence. Maybe you do too. We’re sorta set up for that, given eyes and ears that operate from a central pivot, constantly swiveling about to take in all we possibly can.
It seems natural enough to think everything revolves around us.
The truth is we need help to back away from this “burning preoccupation.”
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Dumb sketch: Kirk Livingston
Prayer is just magical thinking. Right?
Asking for your own private cascade of miracles
Magical thinking is the hope that something out of nowhere will happen and change everything. When I was a kid writing stories and got stuck, it was magical thinking that rescued: suddenly the space ship landed and my main character got on and was whisked away. These were not cohesive stories. As a kid I engaged in magical thinking when I had a speech to give the next day: “Maybe the Russians will bomb us tonight and I won’t have to give that speech.”
That seemed like a fair trade-off at the time.
Some of my friends will say religionists routinely engage in magical thinking. It is this notion that someone (God) will rescue me from the pit I’ve landed in or the cul-de-sac I’ve driven into. I cannot disagree: I often have more than passing interest in rescue to come from above. Whether a work issue or a personal issue, health or wealth or life or death. Any and all of this succumbs to magical thinking. And that is what prayer is, right? A request for rescue, the more magical the better.
Magic defies logic by definition. Buying lottery tickets is magical thinking. Wearing lucky underwear on game day is magical thinking. Avoiding the professor’s eye contact is magical thinking.
But is prayer magical thinking? Sometimes, certainly: I hope I did not pray for Russian bombs to avoid my fourth grade speech on the cold war. If I did I was engaging in magical thinking.
Is prayer always magical thinking? No.
Can you bear a bit of nuance?
Say there is a God (this is not a given for some readers) and this God hears pleas for mercy. It could be that God engineers circumstance in mighty, global ways that I can neither see nor understand. As a person of faith I believe this is possible and even likely. But magical thinking asks that it happen for me and mine. Magical thinking is always about my zip code, my location, my self-interest. This is precisely where magical thinking and prayer part ways. If there is a God (and I believe there is), then prayer for magical interventions in my life will fall short. That’s because God is not just for me. God is for others too. Many others. If God is bent on reunion with people, then prayer is not answered according to magical thinking, but instead according to some other logic. The person maturing in faith starts to parse out the differences between magical thinking and honest prayer by allowing for silence. The person maturing in faith looks for this other logic.
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Image credit: benedetto bufalino via designboom/thisisn’thappiness