An Examination of Prayer in Light of Metaphysical Reconsiderations of the Nature of God
Our Present Age
Vol. 1, No. 11
Jacob Patrick Collins
18 November 2022
An Examination of Prayer in Light of Metaphysical Reconsiderations of the Nature of God
Prayer lies at the center of the religious life. It shapes our imagination, demonstrates our faith, and, when God responds, directs us in the way we should go. Most modern Christians understand prayer as “talking to God,” and this is true in a sense. After all, Jesus of Nazareth tells us to pray in a rather ordinary sort of way: “Your kingdom come, your will be done,” and “give us this day our daily bread.” There is nothing extraordinary about this prayer.[1] But this is not the only way to pray. Contemplative prayer, or prayer through experience, remains a central aspect of Christian devotion. Contemplative prayer centers itself around God who is “being beyond being” in an attempt to consider the telos of the Christian life: union with God.
Clarification
What is God? “Being beyond being,” in the words of Dionysius the Areopagite, and so God stands wholly beyond us in every conceivable way. C. S. Lewis puts it well:
There is, in another way, a greater distance between [God and man]. We are approaching— well I won’t say ‘the Wholly Other’, for I suspect that is meaningless, but the Unimaginably and Insupportably Other. We ought to be—sometimes I hope one is—simultaneously aware of closest proximity and infinite distance.[2]
And while God is beyond us, he is not very far from each of us, for “in him we live and move and have our being... for we are indeed his offspring” (Acts 17:28). The incarnation, when Christ took on flesh, stands as a reminder of “God with us,” as the very heart of salvation requires this Being to become with beings to bring them back to Being. David Bentley Hart writes, “The mystery remains: the transcendent good, which is invisible to the forces of natural selection, has made a dwelling for itself within the consciousness of rational animals.”[3] Thus, while it is unfair to criticize the Eastern Orthodox Church and Muslims for only thinking of God as “beyond,” it is equally unfair to criticize Evangelicals and Sufis for thinking of God as “with us.” And so neither conception of prayer can stand without the other: God is wholly beyond yet wholly present. So prayer is not just “information transfer,” a data dump from our minds to God. It is in a sense just “talking to God”; after all, “give us this day our daily bread.” But this is not all there is to prayer, as prayer also can involve a penetrating participation. This is contemplative prayer.
Orienter: Rethinking Immanence
The transcendence of God requires that we recognize his immanence in unique ways, and this causes us to rethink what salvation actually is. The Bible uses language to describe the relationship between Christ and the Church as one between a man and his wife: “‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church” (Eph 5:31-32). The whole story of Scripture culminates at a Wedding Feast: not an ordinary banquet or holiday gathering, but the celebration of a marriage: “Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb” (Rev 19:9). The Scripture is laced with images of Christ as a bridegroom (Jn 3:29) and the Church as his bride (Rev 21:2) in a tradition going all the way back to the Song of Solomon.
And so while God is wholly beyond us, he is also coming to take his bride and become one flesh with her. The Kingdom of God is about Christ coming to defeat sin and death and suffering and saving his church.[4] And at the same time, since we “live and move and have our being” in him (Acts 17:28), he is upholding all things by the power of his word (Heb 1:3) and leading us into the fullness of Being.
It is in God alone that we know. He is the source of all knowledge, since he is the source of all being—and even of our very consciousness. We know anything only because God has placed the knowledge within us. And we hunger for the consummation of that knowledge, when we will become one with God. But for now, we must content ourselves with yearning for the very being of God. And this yearning for the “one act of being, consciousness, and bliss” is the only way to know the truth of things, and this is “the way of bliss.”[5]
All knowledge is a desire, a yearning, for something greater than anything on this Earth. It requires a sort of “standing forth” from the self to beyond, and this yearning cannot be satisfied by any finite object.[6] It is in God alone that we are satisfied, and this is only when we become one with him. This is when the line between subjective and objective becomes so blurred that there is hardly a distinction to be made: after all, what can “one with Christ” mean except we are lost in him?[7] Immanence is “God with us,” yes, but also “us in God.” As Bernard of Clairvaux writes, “How will God be all in all (1 Cor 15:26) if anything of man remains in man? The substance remains, but in another form, with another glory, another power.”[8] Immanence becomes then a longing for union with Christ, as a man is united to his wife, for he is Being drawing all beings to himself (Col 1:20).
Content: Rethinking Prayer
It is unfair to suggest that contemplative prayer is intrinsically superior to any other form of prayer. While contemplative prayer, or the prayer of the mystics, may be a higher form of prayer, “‘The higher does not stand without the lower.’ An omission or disdain of petitionary prayer can sometimes…[come] from a lack of faith.”[9] Thus, those Christians who affirm that prayer is “talking to God” are not altogether incorrect. Indeed, this is most people’s experience. Very few, if any, average Christians have this “mystic encounter,” nor is it required for salvation: ‘“If it were so, he would have told us.’”[10] And ultimately, what we see in the Scripture is not some sort of mystical encounter for every believer: after all, our Savior taught us to pray in a certain way, which is rather normal: “give us this day our daily bread.” If that is the way Christ taught us to pray, then it is fitting to stick with it, all the while recognizing God knows our every request before we ask for it.
However, this can lead us to believe God is some sort of cosmic vending machine, where we ask for stuff and he doles it out. God is beyond anything we could imagine, the source of all things. So it is helpful to remember other forms of prayer, such as the contemplative form, as a method of penetrating into the Divine Essence in preparation for our eternal participation with him, the sort of participation that is oneness. This is what the mystics were after, and it is the sort of prayer that recognizes God as “Being beyond being” and infinitely distant, but also recognizing man’s telos as radical union with God, with contemplative prayer as a foretaste of what that might be. Consider, too, that “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20). And since the Christian life is a pilgrimage to the Celestial City and the Being of God, we must search for him in the way he is to be sought after: “Any search, if it is to be successful, must be conducted in a manner fitted to the reality one is looking for….[when one is seeking God], one is seeking an ever deeper communion with a reality that at once exceeds and underlies all other experiences.”[11] This reality is God. And so contemplative prayer is a search for God in this life in an attempt to “get at him” in a way befitting what He is: namely, Being, and the source of all other being.
Prayer is meant to help draw us into union with Being, and there we experience bliss: “It is bliss that draws us toward and joins us to the being of all things because that bliss is already one with being and consciousness, in the infinite simplicity of God.”[12] This is man’s end, and it is through contemplative prayer, or the mind rising through beings to Being, and withdrawing from the “objects of consciousness to the wellspring of consciousness itself,” that we can gain a foretaste of what being one with Christ might really be. Hart defines contemplative prayer thoughtfully, and is thus worth quoting at length:
Contemplative prayer can be, I should point out, an extremely simple thing. It often consists in little more than cultivating certain habits of thought, certain ways of seeing reality, certain acts of openness to grace that one cannot presume but that has already been granted, in some very substantial measure, in the mere givenness of existence. It is, before all else, the practice of allowing that existential wonder that usually comes to us only in evanescent instants to become instead a constant inclination of the mind and will, a stable condition of the soul rather than a passing mood. There are also, however, more advanced stages of contemplation, which require one to enter into the depths of the self, into one’s own ‘heart,’ and here the final state that one seeks is nothing less than a union in love and knowledge with God.[13]
Hart’s picture of God reminds us to consider God as beyond us, but also the Being to whom all other beings are drawn. It is about seeing the glory of God in all things, or “seeing reality as it truly is.” Thus, it is contemplating this God alone, who is the union of being, consciousness, and bliss, that we have knowledge of ultimate reality. It is through contemplative prayer that we gain a foretaste of our coming bliss at our final salvation (2 Cor 5:5 WNT).
Conclusion
So what does this all mean? We have reconsidered God, and understood that he is beyond all being (totally transcendent). But this requires us to think differently about his immanence; and, within the Christian tradition, how this is specifically manifested in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. Now this is the metaphysical reconsideration of God. As philosophers, theologians, pastors, teachers we have to ask what to do about it. Singing, yes. And prayer.
As St Paul tells us, “Now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Cor 13:12). It is only through God that we have knowledge, as he is the source of all Being and Wisdom. At our final salvation, we will be in a “sea of eternal light and bright eternity.”[14] This is when we will become one with God, just as a man becomes one with his wife. The penetration of the Divine Being results in our participation with it, so that we are “lost in a sea of bliss”[15] as we participate in the being of God.
Petitionary prayer, or other forms of prayer, are not lesser forms of prayer; they are different, with different ends in mind. Contemplative prayer reminds us that our telos is union with God, and it offers itself up as a foretaste of what that might look like. For those able (and called) to engage in this sort of prayer, which may not be most of us: they are most engaged with him in whom they live and move and have their being. They have penetrated the Divine Essence and participate with God through prayer. This is another way to think about prayer to the One who is the union of being, consciousness, and bliss: the one who is all in all.
[1] Unless, of course, you consider that it is God himself praying!
[2] C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, 1964 (Repr. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2017), 14.
[3] David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 270.
[4] What is the gospel? The story of the one who died and received the prize: “Kill the dragon, get the girl.” Or in the story of Kierkegaard, the one unafraid to go out for the treasure on the ice “which everyone desired to possess.”
[5] Hart, Experience, 249.
[6] Hart, Experience, 241. See also p. 246.
[7] Hart, Experience, 230.
[8] Bernard of Clairvaux, “On Loving God” in Selected Works, ed. John Farina; trans. G. R. Evans; (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1987), 197.
[9] Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, 118.
[10] Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, 86.
[11] Hart, Experience, 320.
[12] Hart, Experience, 248.
[13] Hart, Experience, 321–322.
[14] Bernard, “On Loving God,” 197.
[15] Hart, Experience, 275.