Crazy Catholic Question # 134: Prayer

Crazy Catholic Question # 134: I don’t “get” prayer. I just don’t feel like I’m doing it right. Any insights?

I think we all wonder if our prayer, with all its distractions and missteps, really “qualifies” or is effective. We have so many “shoulds” and “oughts” that derail us; we should be in the right “head space” (whatever that means) or we ought to be able to shake off all the stress brought by the umpteen things that battle for our attention every moment of the day. We think that unless we feel altruistic and pure and are able to muster up the appropriate reverence and attention that God deserves, that we can’t even begin to enter into true prayer.

Before coming to prayer we think we need to sweep away all our feelings of boredom, or exhaustion, and try to put out of our mind the anger we have about how our boss treats us, or how worried we are about our finances and future. We think these thoughts and feelings are somehow disappointing to God, breaches of our trust in His providence. Instead we try to muster up feelings of reverence. We murmur words of praise and gratitude, but they feel manufactured…contrived…and indeed they are.

God for us then becomes like a parent who only wishes to spend time with us when we are at the top of our game; on our best behavior. We treat God as a visitor, a distant figure of authority, someone who we only permit to see us in our most polished state (Rolheiser).

One of the oldest classical definitions of prayer is to “lift our hearts and minds to God.”  And what I have just described couldn’t be further from this practice. In fact it’s the direct opposite – it’s like masking the true content of our hearts and minds FROM God. In short, God cannot find us where we think we ought to be.

So, I imagine the first step is to shake the misconception that we somehow have to “shape-up” before we pray and rather fearlessly open ourselves up and believe that God welcomes, accepts and loves us without boundary or breaking point just as we are, not as we think we should be and that every feeling and thought we have is suitable to bring to God in prayer – no matter how irreverent – how full of doubt or anger – or how unholy we may deem them to be. We need to completely stop editing ourselves and trust that God is up for the task.

In a word, we need to be transparent and this makes it much easier to “pray without ceasing” as St. Paul urges us to do. “Praying always” doesn’t mean we should constantly be walking around saying Our Fathers in our heads all day, but is more like cultivating a certain awareness that we carry with us everywhere we go, in every situation we face in life. Like the businessman who travels with his work. Yes, of course he calls home in a concrete way a few times a day, but he carries an awareness of his wife and family everywhere he goes. Even amid his busy schedule and fast-paced meetings, he still remains anchored in the awareness that he is a husband and a father first - these relationships are the foundation of his life. 

So too with God. God is not so needy that He needs us to be explicitly thinking of Him every minute of the day. Rather to “pray without ceasing” is a way of being in the world, anchored in our relationship with God, aware of the love we are receiving and giving in everything we do.

Send your Crazy Catholic Question to Lisa Brown at dre@ctredeemer.org or read past columns via our website at www.ctredeemer.org.

Easter Bulletin: Crazy Catholic Question #133 - Dear C&E Catholics

Dear C&E Catholics (Christmas & Easter Catholics. Yes, you have a nickname),

We are aware that this might not be your first choice of where to be spending your time today. Perhaps you are here against your will. “Mom guilt” is a powerful force in the universe. Some of you may not even be sure if you believe in God anymore or that our spiritual life is real, or important, or worth investing time and energy into.

If this is where you are at, I hear you. Because truth be told: Jesus has officially been confiscated; His teachings twisted by corrupt politicians and wayward religious leaders for years. As a result, even the utterance of the name “Jesus” in any public forum is often received with disdain; perceived by most as distasteful and inappropriate; sometimes even more offensive than the strongest of curse words.

Even I – the Director of Religious Education here – sometimes find discussion about “religion” repellant. Talk of church is sometimes such a turn-off that it makes me queasy. No lie. Jesus, a hero by any measure (even for those who do not recognize him as God), is badly in need of a new Public Relations manager.

But here’s the thing. I believe with everything I’ve got that our relationship and understanding of God (aka: our spiritual life) whether it is strong and healthy or wimpy and ill-informed effects us more than any other aspect of our life. I believe that tradition is to a community what memory is to an individual. I value being part of the 2000 years+ long continuum of our faith tradition that continues to try and figure out what God is all about and why we are here. I enjoy our collective pondering of these big questions even though most days I think we have about as much insight as an ant trying to figure out astrophysics. Nonetheless, I find beauty and meaning here.

So, the way I see it, it is my job is to make a good case for choosing to hang your hat here. That is what I’m hired by this community to do. So let me throw a piece of spaghetti on the wall and see if it sticks…

We Catholics hold a very strong conviction that God wishes to communicate with us. How and where? First and foremost, in what God has made; namely creation itself; all of nature, animals, plants, the stars and the incredible expanse of time and space of which we are a part.

Second, we hear God in the bible, which is more of a library than a book. Don’t start on page one or you’ll never make it. Rather, start with the Gospel of Matthew or Luke. You can read either one in its entirety in about an hour – and then you can say you have read the entire story of Jesus first hand, not filtered by anyone else.

Third, we hear God in the collective wisdom of the church; the living, changing, growing tradition of our community. Doctrine can and DOES change, but not if everyone with a brain in their head takes their toys and goes home.

Finally, we hear God by listening to our own experiences and inner workings: our mind, our will, memory, imagination, feelings, desires – all these are actually designed to sense the presence of God in our lives. So if we listen to our deepest longings, this is where God communicates with us. Our job is to get quiet (aka “pray”) and listen for that small, still voice within us.

So, if this resonates with you at all, call me or email me, Lisa Brown, at dre@ctredeemer.org and give me a shot at doing my job (a billable hour at Starbucks? Yes please!) Happy Easter P.S. There are worse motivations than pleasing Mom. Glad you are here.

Crazy Catholic Question #132 - Sacrifice

Crazy Catholic Question 132: Why did Jesus have to die such a brutal death for our sins?

Theologian Fr. James Alison describes our common misunderstanding of Jesus’ death like this: We sinned and offended God, so God was angry with humanity and demanded justice or some kind of payment for our blunder. But humanity couldn’t offer any kind of divine gift big enough to diffuse God’s anger since we are just lowly humans. So, God, needing to loose a lighting rod, sent Jesus and Jesus said, “you can loose it on me” substituting himself for us. Lighting rod strikes; Sacrifice is carried out; and God is again happy because He got his blood-lust satisfied.”

The problem is, this is a very pagan idea of sacrifice. It is NOT our Catholic understanding. This understanding of atonement goes back to the ancient Aztecs where the priest sacrificed a person or animal to satisfy a hungry God. But the Jewish priestly rite that Jesus grew up with was already way beyond that primitive understanding of sacrifice.

Jesus and his contemporaries would have understood that when the high priest entered the Holy of Holies in the temple once a year, put on the white robe, sacrificed the lamb and then brought the blood out of the Holy of Holies to sprinkle on the people, this was a liturgy designed to remind us of God’s divine movement towards US to set people free. The high priest was standing in for God who was coming OUT of that holy and perfect place to forgive and restore the flow of creation. It was NOT as we often imagine a priest satisfying a hungry, demanding God. The direction is the opposite. God is healing us, not us satisfying Him…

If we cling to the idea that God will not forgive us until his son has been tortured to death for us then God is a lot less forgiving than even we are sometimes. St Thomas Aquinas says that the mission of Jesus from the Father is NOT the mission to be crucified; God’s mission for Jesus was to love us right here in our own history and to show us a way other than violence; to encourage us to follow Him in being merciful. Complicated theories about the Father deliberately putting his Son to death to settle some kind of score are just nonsense. Rather the cross is the reminder of the world WE have fashioned where it is dangerous and sometimes even fatal to be a compassionate, courageous and loving person. God out love for us, His misdirected people,  sent His love, embodied in the person Jesus to live with us and show us the way and we murdered Him.  

The fact that Jesus never broke; never became bitter; never gave up or gave in to the violence; the fact that He never stopped loving us even as we were nailing Him to the cross but rather prayed “Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they do.” His endurance in this love is what saves us and continues to show us the way.

In other words “who is the angry divinity in the story? We are. We are the ones who think we need vengeance in order to survive. God was occupying the space of our victim so as to show us that we need never do this again…it is quite clear that Jesus' self-giving, and the “out-pouring of His blood” is the revelation of who God is: God is entirely without vengeance, entirely without substitutionary tricks; and that God was giving Himself entirely for us, towards us, in order to set us “free from our sins”…“our sins” being the way of death, vengeance, violence.” (www.jamesalison.co.uk/texts/eng11.html).

Send your Crazy Catholic Question to Lisa Brown at dre@ctredeemer.org or read past columns via our website at www.ctredeemer.org.