[on prayer] "what do I love when I love my God?"
[I posted this to WGC about a week ago but never crossposted it here.]
In reading Blake Huggins' recent blogpost "Prayer (still) does not change things," I found a lot which resonated with me (and some that didn't fit with my personal journey) and a lot to chew on.
Excerpt:
In reading Blake Huggins' recent blogpost "Prayer (still) does not change things," I found a lot which resonated with me (and some that didn't fit with my personal journey) and a lot to chew on.
Excerpt:
if theology is primarily about developing a sound and coherent word (logos) about God (theos) — however limiting and finite it may be — what could be more important than prayer? If I am feebly and delicately trying to develop ideas about God, about the divine, about that which is beyond me and that which consumes me — which is what I have devoted the remainder of my life to doing — what could be more weighty and significant than my ideas about addressing the divine, than my approach to communicating with God, than the way in which I, to borrow from Brother Lawrence, practice the presence of God?
This is what I am trying to get at: prayer says more about our theology and our ideas of God than we realize; indeed, I would go so far as to claim that how we view prayer in some sense determines what we believe about the nature of God and vice versa. If God is a deus ex machina, a mechanistic deity, a Big Daddy in the Sky who pulls strings for good people and cuts strings for bad people, then we will pray in a certain way. And, like my example above, how we pray will reveal an understood theology whether we overtly claim it or not. If we really want to “do theology” well and uncover all those areas in which the residue of our tacit assumptions about God still remain, then we had better take prayer seriously.
What can we do, then, in developing a theology of prayer but return to St. Augustine’s age old question in book ten of the Confessions: what do I love when I love my God? Is that not the ultimate question of prayer? Does that penetrating question not guide all our prayers and all our tears, all of our weak attempts to address that which calls us into being? To paraphrase Jacques Derrida, what can we do but re-inscribe that question into our own context and our own language?
[My note: See also Blake's earlier post in which he talks about (among other things) relationality in reflecting on the question "what is it that we love when we love our God? Who is it that we love when we love our God?"]
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