The response was surprising. I received consistent feedback that these small prayers were useful to those who read them. The prayers were helpful reminders of the good efforts underway, tiny rejoinders to the onslaught of bad news. A community began to form. It was geographically, racially, and socio-economically diverse, and it included people with multiple religious backgrounds and spiritual commitments. People began to send me prayer requests, identifying resisters to lift up. For many, it became a daily devotion.
I confess that some days I was sick, or traveling, or too tired from other commitments to post a prayer. By then end of the year, I also found the necessary amount of news reading onerous. I needed to skip a day or two of reading three newspapers to find positive examples. By January 23, 2018, I was grateful to pass the torch of daily prayers for resisters to Rev. Joanna Hipp, a friend and former student.
Each of the prayers was topical, sparked by an event of the day. In this way, they serve as a record of sorts—what happened in the first year of the Trump administration, seen through the lens of how we resisted. More importantly, this year of public, political prayer is an opportunity to reflect on prayer itself.
Theology
Even our most esoteric theological concepts begin with what actual people do in their lives of faith. For example, the doctrine of the Trinity—that God is three in one—developed out of attempts to articulate why early Christians baptized “in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” The lived practices of the faithful come first (sometimes called first-order theology) and then theologians reflect on these and articulate something of their meaning (sometimes called second-order theology). Sometimes, theological reflections lead to new insights, questions, or challenges for the community in whose practices they began.
The theology that follows is a reflection on the practices of prayer in the midst of political turmoil. While my own faith is located within the traditions of Christianity, and therefore these are the resources upon which I draw, the community that prayed together in 2017 included many who live within other religious traditions or do not identify with any religious tradition. It is my hope that this theology of prayer can similarly be of use in expansive contexts.
Prayer as Relating
Prayer takes many forms, including focused contemplation, silent listening for the Holy, participating in political demonstrations, styles of reading sacred texts, ways of dancing and music-making, ritual actions, the communal recitation of traditional prayers in liturgy, and the desperate plea for help. Yet within this diversity there is a common thread of seeking connection with the Holy.
Theologian Marilyn McCord Adams frames all types of prayer in terms of relationship with God, writing, “prayer is simply a way of being in the world with God.”1 The lens of relationship allows McCord Adams to draw analogies between children and parents or romantic partners. We build relationships with one another through “wordless presence,” “carnal knowledge,” “articulate speech,” and “joint activities.”2
Being in the world with God person-to-person is just as multifaceted as children’s growing up in their parents’ home and life partners’ sharing a household. Here below, togetherness sometimes takes the form of wordless presence (as with mother and child, or lovers staring into one another’s eyes) and carnal knowledge (as with a mother nursing her baby or the lover’s invasive and enfolding touch). Other times, the medium of exchange is articulate speech—from greetings and compliments to trading information (what needs to be fetched from the store, which parts of the house or car need repair), from vigorous debates and deliberative conversations and angry quarrels to make-up apologies. Still other times, life together takes the form of joint activities: digging the garden and planting the flowers, raking leaves and cleaning the gutters, hiking in the woods, throwing a party, organizing with others for political action. Life together builds a history of shared memories that constitute the narrative of who we are.3
McCord Adams’s analogies honor the significance of many different ways of praying. The category of wordless presence has room for meditation, centering prayer, attending to nature, and many other practices. Carnal knowledge makes space for liturgical practices such as the Eucharist, rituals, and the many ways we relate to God in the bodily relations of care, passion, and compassion that we have with other human beings. It could also include the feeling of sun on one’s skin or the routine of swimming every morning.
The category of articulate speech might seem more limited, as it does presume a person is speaking directly to God (or the saints, in some traditions). However, it is still expansive. Much corporate prayer—prayers of a whole group together—is articulate speech, such as hymns, prayers written out in the church bulletin, and memorized prayers recited together (such as The Lord’s Prayer or The Serenity Prayer). Articulate prayer can also be individual, from saying the Rosary to a child reciting “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep” at bedtime. All of the articulate prayers I have mentioned so far have been scripted, but of course spoken prayer includes spontaneous words, either in a group or individually. Perhaps the prayers with which we are most familiar are the whispered pleas for help, the gasped words of gratitude when danger passes, or even the desperate deals we try to strike with the Divine. Unlike most of the scripted prayers printed in church bulletins, our spontaneous prayers to God can be angry, demanding, questioning, accusatory, and argumentative. McCord Adams emphasizes that this is part of learning to live with someone, like a parent or a partner, and says that God takes even angry prayers as positive steps towards relationship. God desires relationship with us and welcomes all our efforts. Fran, a prayer-mentor of mine, describes some of her spoken prayers to God in ways that remind me of text messaging with my closest friends. She tells God what is going on in her life, including the important stuff and the minute bits of joy, disappointment, and humor. She talks to God like an old friend.
McCord Adams’s final category, shared activities, is particularly relevant to the topic of praying in a time of political strife. In 1965, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Alabama. Afterwards, he said of marching, “I felt my legs were praying.”4 The phrase “praying with our feet” has been embraced by many politically active people who understand their efforts at creating a better society—particularly through political change—to be a form of prayer. McCord Adams’s category of shared activities conveys this sensibility, that those who work for the common good, for the well-being of their community, for justice and kindness, are engaged in an activity in which God is also involved.
As any parent or partner knows, being in close relationship with another person is hard. It ideally involves all four forms of togetherness. Likewise, McCord Adams’s analogies imply that prayer works best when it involves a variety of practices—silent, felt, spoken, and physically enacted.
Of course, these analogies are imperfect, for God is neither a human parent nor a human spouse. God does not, in my experience, change diapers or unload the dishwasher. God is not so neatly contained nor so reliably recognizable. McCord Adams is convinced that God is personal, but this does not mean that God is a big human being in the sky. God exceeds all our human categories and comprehension. This leads to a general rule among Christian theologians, going back to Augustine: if anyone is confident that they completely understand God, then they are not talking about God at all.
God is not obvious, is mysterious, is portrayed in multiple and competing ways. The hard evidence around us does not easily lead to the conclusion that we are in relationship with the Holy, let alone with a loving God who intends goodness for all of us. The beautiful creation of which we are a part includes meanness, suffering, pain, futility, and evil. This leads to questions of who God is and how God operates. These questions are vitally important. And we don’t get to figure them out before we start.
Perhaps it would make the most sense to first sort out exactly if God exists and what characteristics God