Worship And The Catechesis Of Prayer

Although it may be understood in many ways, prayer remains a basic expression of human beings. Learning how to pray requires a recovery of the intuitive, life-changing aspects of religious experience, which are often neglected in favor of cognitive and analytical expressions of faith.

The twentieth century is not likely to be known as the age of spirituality. More reasonably, it may be remembered as the era of retarded consciousness. Many have lost or forgotten the experience of God, which lies at the heart of Christian faith. Still, we long and search for some sense of the divine: witness the renewed interest in the occult, Eastern religions, meditation, and personal religious experience. It is as if we humans knew we were more than rational beings; and that truth was more than reason could prove. Even we moderns are homo religiosus. Prayer and ritual are still the most basic expressions of our humanness. Thomas Aquinas wrote, "?Prayer is the peculiar proof of religion.?" Faith, in Luther's judgment, was "?prayer, nothing but prayer.?" Baron von Hügel concluded that "?prayer is the essential element of all life.?" And Schleiermacher observed, "?to be religious and to pray are really the same thing.?" Still the word prayer lacks clarity. Some think of prayer as distressed cries to the heavens; others as a formality before meals and meetings or an experience on mountain tops. Prayer for some is a spontaneous emotional discharge; and for others a fixed rational formula to be recited. However, prayer, as the word is used here, is a generic term to describe every aspect of our conscious relationship with God. Prayer represents the spiritual life—daily existence lived in relationship with God—or piety, the daily activity of living in the presence of God through adoration, confession, praise, oblation, thanksgiving, and petition/intercession. To live in adoration is to focus our life upon the heart and mind of God, asking nothing but to enjoy God's presence. It is the life of the lover, the dreamer, and visionary, which makes possible viewing every aspect of life as a miracle. Confession is life lived under the judgment and grace of God. It is the life of those striving to bring their individual, interior experience and belief into harmony with their social exterior practice and action. The life of praise is a life alive with the memory of the mighty acts of God. It is a life of ecstasy, lived dancing, singing, and praising God even in evil days. Thanksgiving is our celebrative awareness of God's continuing actions in our historical midst. It is the life that can still spy burning bushes, hear the voice of God, and grasp the presence of Christ in contemporary culture. Oblation is an offering of ourselves, our lives and labors, for the purposes of God. Petition/intercession is the continuous striving to bring our wills in line with God's will. It is life lived in conscious loyalty to the conviction that Jesus is the Lord, who passes moral judgments on what it means to be faithful. The Christian life focuses upon the Spirit of God in us and in the world; its quest is for an active unity with the God of history. The climax of the Christian life is not enlightenment, but unification with the will and activity of God. Christian prayer assumes both an historical awareness and the integration of the receptive and active modes of consciousness. Numerous examples of prayer in the Bible support this understanding. The Scriptures assume a historicist perspective. Operating from that perspective, the prophets used their intuitive abilities to hear the voice of God; they used their intellects to proclaim judgment on the people for their lack of righteousness and on the nations for their lack of justice. Moses' experience with the burning bush led him to bring to his people a vision and message of liberation. Jesus' struggle at Gethsemane led him to make a conscious decision to choose the foolishness of the Cross. The awareness of the presence of Christ in the breaking of bread at Emmaus led the disciples to lives of apostleship. Paul's experience on the road to Damascus led him to change from persecutor to defender of the faith. None of these experiences or their resulting actions were purely rational or intuitional. Each represents a worldly intuitive experience which, through the complementary use of the intellect, led to new sorts of moral behavior. Each represents finally a new worldly consciousness of God and praxis according to God's will. Each is an example of prayer. Let me, therefore, suggest that catechesis for prayer requires first that we help people to regain their God-given ability to wonder and create; to dream, fantasize, imagine, and envision; to sing, paint, dance, and act. It requires that we help them to recover their natural capacity for ecstasy, for appreciating the new, the marvelous, and the mysterious; for sensual and kinesthetic awareness; and for expressing themselves emotionally and nonverbally. Technological knowledge plays a dominant influence in our culture. Mostly analytical, verbal, linear, and rational, it has tended to deemphasize and devalue other modes of consciousness. Its concern for verbal, intellectual knowledge and its focus upon planning, organizing, and doing have served to screen out other sorts of knowledge and life. Each of us arrives in the natural world as an unfinished product. Within the limits of nature, we collectively build a human world in which we can live and grow. Through largely unconscious means, we are socialized into valuing particular modes of consciousness, thereby determining our understanding of the world. Our culture has tended to place a greater value on one mode of consciousness—the intellectual. Our educational programs in both church and society have focused, therefore, upon verbal, analytical, logical, thinking skills. The emphasis on the signative, conceptual, and analytical aspects of human life and the benign neglect of the symbolic, mythical, imaginative, and emotive aspects have limited our spiritual development and crippled us as a people. A whole person living the spiritual life should fully develop both the receptive and active modes of consciousness. However, a new awareness of the visual, artistic, imaginative, associative, and relational activities of the brain cannot be permitted to dull or limit our concern for speech, logic, cognitive reasoning, analysis, and linear activities. The religious life of activity and the interior life of experience must be united.