Founding Fathers ... of Self-Improvement

It has been said that America is a place for new beginnings and second chances. Americans, more than perhaps any other people, are obsessed with the ideal life, with the improvement of their very selves. The Europeans first to land in the new world, and the waves of immigrants ever since, have been people who were by definition looking for the grass to be greener on the other side … of the ocean in this case.

It should be no surprise then to find elements of this nationally characteristic – self-involvement? - fixed from the very beginning, evident even in the hearts and minds of the framers and founders. But reading David McCollough’s superb biography of John Adams recently, I was pleasantly surprised and somewhat amused to find the honesty and vulnerability of the subject as portrayed in his own diaries and letters.

“Oh! that I could wear out of my mind every mean and base affectation,” Adams once vented to his diary. And “conquer my natural pride and conceit.”

McCullough goes on to describe Adams’s frustrated state of mind: “Why was he constantly forming yet never executing good resolutions? Why was he so absent-minded, so lazy, so prone to daydreaming his life away? He vowed to read more seriously. He vowed to quit chewing tobacco. ….

On July 21, 1756, he wrote:

'I am resolved to rise with the sun and to study Scriptures on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday mornings, and to study some Latin author the other three mornings. Noons and nights I intend to read English authors .... I will rouse up my mind and fix my attention. I will stand collected within myself and think upon what I read and what I see. I will strive with all my soul to be something more than persons who have had less advantages than myself.'” (McCullough, p. 41)

Then, the next day, as one just might expect, Adams records that he had slept in late and accomplished nothing.

Oh! That this portrayal did not ring so true and cut so deep!

I don’t know how many similar reading plans and lists of goals I’ve formulated, but I do know roughly what percentage have met a fate similar to Adams’s. It’s pretty near to 100.

Perhaps it’s poetic then that this book has inspired yet another attempt on the part of yours truly, and only fair that I record it in this space – also being a product of an attempt at refocusing energies. This time, I’m renewing my goal to read more thematically, less sporadically. Yes, if you’ve been in my house lately and perused my shelves, I am already aware that I have stacks of unread books, representing half a dozen different reading programs, strewn about and gathering dust. But this one has inspiration.

I’ve already stated that McCullough’s biography is superb, and indeed it is. The story is transporting and the writing is transfixing. But that is just the means, the result is an in-depth look at the conversation of ideas alive in this one time and place told through the (mostly) men who moved them, and it is beyond fascinating. It’s, well, inspiring. Inspiration enough for a new reading plan of my own at least. Besides, I have needed for some time to return to study the Enlightenment so famously moved past in this day of obsessive ‘post’ prefixes. What better vehicle than a companion study of one of the clearest and most relevant outcomes: the society and government of the United States?

In this still-first week of the New Year, with resolutions everywhere already waning and falling by the wayside, I lustily and fool-heartedly toss my hat into the ring. Let it be resolved, therefore, that I do commit, here and now, to read at least one dozen books on, about or written during the 18th century having to do with the philosophy, politics or history of the time before reading anything else … much … anything else much. That is, maybe I could allow one or two books on the side, if need be and occasion arise.

(I already have a list of 20 and have started number three. Anyone care to take odds?)

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Scripture, Church, Service: Personal Disciplines III

I have done next to no reading of scripture on its own over the past few years. I read a lot of theological books that quote scripture or reflect on stories or themes from it. There are of course scripture readings and sermons every Sunday. There are scripture readings in my prayer book. My church small group has done studies of a book or two of scripture. But on my own, with Bible in hand, I have done very very little. I have spent more time reading books about books about books of the Bible than I have reading the Bible. I don’t know why this is.

Part of me feels that I need to know a certain amount more background, context or theory to be adequate to the task. But those are all just so many excuses. Maybe I just think it would be less enjoyable reading, that it would be just harder. But that’s not necessarily true either. There is no doubt this is something I need to change.

Church: I began attending my wife's church, Church of the Servant, from time to time as a matter of familial obligation before, and then during, our first years of marriage. We were also married in her church more or less because she wanted to and I didn't have any other ideas. The Sunday-morning ritual had its pleasures though. The preaching in the church (now ours) was (and is) incredible. I enjoyed the beauty and intellectual stimulation of the sermons even when faith wasn't anywhere in my sights.

When things started shifting in my head and heart (who can say which was first?), I began to want to go more often and soon every week just for the reminder of what was so exciting about the faith and for seeing it come together in a worshipful setting. I was, and still am, torn at times about denominational and congegational affiliation. Fretting about theological subtleties and various mixed motivations for staying or going alternately. This conversation, like so many others, plays endlessly in my head lists of all the various bad reasons I could have for doing the right thing and good reasons I could have for doing the wrong thing.

What eventually convinced me that I should join this church as an adult member, and what convinces me to stay committed, was that it felt like home for me. To the extent that home is where family is, and family are those whom you do not get to choose, I would say that I felt this congregation's claim on me before I felt I could claim it. It seemed to both speak to me where I was, being part of the denomination I was raised in, but also to challenge me the way I was ready to be challenged since it is a unique congregation within the denomination. So i feel like it is a place to both put down and discover old roots.

I have made church-attendance fairly important. We don't miss too many Sundays unless we're out of town. Most Sunday mornings church is just where I want to be. I think it really does re-focus me, at least for a little while and I of course have a growing number of connections to people that I don't want to go another week without seeing. While we don't attend the night service like I did as a kid (few do these days) it could be that I'm just falling into the behavior of church-attendance I was raised for. I don't know, maybe that's not necessarily anything to be ashamed of anyhow. The view of Sunday worship I've tried to live up to is as a weekly training in seeing the world rightly, in getting priorities right, and of course as a time of learning through proximity from those further along in the way. Again the tension arises: do I force my will to do the action even when it is disagreeable, trying to keep the real goals in mind, or do I avoid the pitfalls of pride and Phariseeism by doing whatever I feel like at the time?

Service: I do not really do anything in the way of disciplined service. As I mentioned, I try to be more serving in my daily work and family tasks, or at least see them more as service. (Maybe the two are reciprical: seeing something more as service increases one's ability to serve through it, and serving more increases the ease with which the service in something is recognized.) But I'm not someone you'll see serving in a soup-kitchen line or other obvious do-gooder role these days. I idealize those stereotypical heroic front-line roles as the epitome of Christ-like service but have never really participated in them. I resented the near coercive ways these activities were encouraged in school for example, finding it easier to stay home with pure, though self-serving motives than to serve others with mixed ones. I suppose though that the recipients of aid don't much care about the motives of those bringing aid.

I have tried, especially over the last year, to start serving in and through the church itself, the place I think should be the focus of a Christian's service anyhow. So I started volunteering for whatever for whatever responsibilities advertised a need for help within earshot. I currently help out running the sound board one Sunday a month, I've taught a few Sunday-school classes and I just started a three-year term as Deacon. I don't know if any of these things are specially suited to any gift of mine, but they are all things that the Church needs done and I feel good in general about contributing to the daily running of or the institution that has and continues to do so much to serve me.

There are dangers, I think, to being active in the institutional life of an organization like a church. It is easy to either lose sight of the goals of the organization and focus too much on control and management or to become jaded by seeing the nuts and bolts operations and the flawed human beings who are trying to come together in the service of something beautiful; trying to be something beautiful. I think seeing the behind-the-scenes operations of my childhood Church contributed to my disenchantment with that Church and maybe religion in general. Though probably even the most sincere and humble Church in the world wouldn't have allayed my omnivorous doubts at the time.

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Work: Personal Disciplines II

I’ve been torn for some time, all along really, about work, both inside and outside the home. With all of the disciplines, drawn to theorizing as I am, I am not able to separate how I think the discipline should be thought of from how I actually experience it. My struggle is with how to get them to be one and the same.

With work this tension is the most obvious. On the one hand I believe one should perform gratefully, as God’s calling even, whatever work one finds oneself given to do. (I've found the clearest theological exposition of this view in the Benedictine and my own Reformed tradition.) So if I find myself working at an insurance company talking on the phone all day and chasing a toddler, rocking a screaming baby and washing dishes all night, then that’s what I should be happy doing. On the other hand maybe I have a real calling or gift in some other area that I should explore by going back to graduate school or seminary or at least by continually and intentionally developing whatever that gift might be in my 'free time'.

This might just be a tension I have to deal with but how I actually experience this does not feel healthy. I experience it by feeling resentful of the daily things I am given to do, the job that I should be more grateful for, the family that I should be more appreciative of and present to. This is obviously not a good situation, but how does one go beyond one's comfort zone and pursue a calling if it is not somehow away from one's normal, daily life. (Indeed, the very word calling seems to have the connotation of calling out of one life and to another life while the word gift seems to have the connotation of nearness and presence.)

Any possible way that I can imagine creating a life where my daily life and work involved my passion for education and the world of ideas, would necessarily involve years of sacrifice that I would ask of my family. How could I possibly do this just to satisfy my own selfish urges. Aren't I just ungrateful for all the comfort and ease I've been given and looking for even more by way of self-fulfillment? But then the other voice says: "Staying on the track you're on is just your allowing yourself to follow the path of the upwardly mobile, middle class. You're just justifying your trying to grasp the good life with the theology of everydayness." To which the other voice replies: "But really your describing your desire to pursue a career that involves your hobbies of thinking and reading and writing and calling it a vocation is just the theological justification of your own self-centeredness." Then the third voice comes in and says something to the effect of calling the whole interior monologue a sign of hyper-narcissism. The statement that "we should never have scruples about whether the state in life we have chosen is the most perfect or what sort of progress we are making. These are merely signs of excessive self-regard." [1] hits me like a punch in the gut.

It sounds trite but it really is anguishing to think about. I find it nearly impossible to compromise with myself. I feel like I either need to give up all desire for any change in my situation right now or I need to start changing it right now. The idea that I should be contented with my work for now with the possibility that another door will open down the road when the family situation allows it, doesn't satisfy any of the voices. It seems to validate the negative interpretations of all three.

How does one say that one way of life is right and another wrong when either judgement can be seen as self-serving? What does one do when one can't even discern one's own true motivations? How can the mind know the secret desires and motivations of the heart?

1. Prior Aelred, Singing God's Praises p. 304

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Prayer & Fasting: Personal Disciplines I

The first spiritual discipline I have worked at is prayer. I began with the assumption or conviction that prayer should be regular and as fixed in time as possible. I’m not sure what gave me this idea at the time, but I was sure that if Christian devotion meant anything it involved somehow submitting oneself to God, and submission can not happen in prayer if I only pray when and how I feel like it.

I came to understand it later in Benedictine terms as what Anthony Damron, O.S.B. calls “the sanctification of time.” He goes on to write that formal prayers are necessary because relying on spontaneous prayer would be too irregular and thus not useful for growth while also recognizing formal prayers have dangers too, that of becoming incantation. (Singing God’s Praises p. 43)

My attempts at actually going about praying, like I said, have been very mixed. I wanted a prayer regimen that was based in a book that was fairly easy to follow, that heavily incorporated the psalms, and that involved at least a few readings or offices a day. I leafed through the Book of Common Prayer a few times, but didn’t really get how it worked and didn’t know how to figure it out. (Outside the Abbey, I’ve only been to an Episcopal service a handful of times and don’t really know very many Episcopalians.) I came across a new prayer compilation, I think just about three years ago, still in the first year of my conversion, called The Divine Hours edited by Phyllis Tickle. It included four Offices a day, each with one complete psalm, a Psalm fragment repeated a few times throughout, some Collects from the BCP, a paragraph reading of scripture, the Gloria which I then recognized (this was also probably right about the time that I was brought to the Abbey for the first time), and also some other religious poetry or hymns.

When I started, I was very committed and read all four offices, one in the morning, one at lunch, then next right after work was through for the day and last, right before bed. I’m not sure how long I kept that up, but I think it was for a few months. Then I stopped for a few months after becoming disillusioned. One problem was that the book was rather large and thus a pain to haul back and forth to work. I then started back up for a little while doing all four, but soon left that off for an idea of my own devising. I continued using the prayer book for morning and evening prayers. During the day, I selected and memorized five Collects from the BCP to recite in place of a longer Office. The goal was to have a total of seven periods of the day, and I ordered them as made best sense for the rhythm of a workday. I couldn’t do them at fixed times, since my schedule varied, and I didn’t have five events to base them on, like meals and so forth. My solution was to recite them at fixed intervals, an amount of time that spread them roughly evenly between waking and sleeping (I think it was about every two and a quarter or two and a half hours.) I procured a watch that had an automatically resetting timer that also had a vibrate function, whenever it went off, the push of one button turned it off and started the countdown again. Wherever I was during the day, I would get a vibration every two and a half or so hours that no one else could usually notice, then at the next available moment recite the prayer mentally or verbally, depending on the setting.

I was pretty proud of my solution because I felt it suited my goals and matched the needs of my schedule and abilities. I liked the idea of having the simple memorized prayers and their carrying me through the day, so that even if I worked late, or ate lunch early, the cycle kept me aware of my relative position in the day. I liked the idea of a call to prayer; my little watch mirroring a monastary’s bell. Of course, I chose the number seven also to duplicate a monastic day’s cycle even if my ‘Little Hours’ were very little, about thirty seconds.

Most of all, I wanted something on a fixed schedule (intervals being an adequate substitute for fixed times in my mind) because I was drawn to the idea of making prayer a kind of seasoning spread throughout the day, acting as a reminder that everything I was doing during the day should be done with an awareness of God and as an offering to God. Since the interval model could and did catch me literally doing anything and everything in my day it held the opportunity of drawing me out of my indifference and redirecting me to my present task with greater mindfulness. Well that was the goal.

My actual performance of the discipline of prayer seems to swing from extreme to extreme. Either I am praying a lot and wondering why, or praying very little and wishing I was. (I try to get insight into this wishing but it's slippery. I don't think it's just guilt, which would obviously not be a good motivation. But just as I'm not always sure that my prayers are genuine, I'm not even sure that my desire for genuine prayer is genuine.)

These days have been very crazy: a new baby, an illness, just all around unpredictable schedules. But probably none of that is really to blame. I've just been going through a period of low motivation the last few months. These things seem to go in cycles for me. A good day for me lately has meant just a brief prayer before bed, read from my prayer book, or not, depending on how late I stay up and when my daughter wakes up.

There are a few other practices I've experimented with around the general topic of prayer, the first was the rosary I bought sometime in the first year of my conversion. Now I wasn’t very serious about intending to use it, I was even a little wary of buying it, seeming as it did to fit into that old tendency of mine to focus on accessorizing hobbies over the hobbies themselves. I was at the store with my wife who wanted to buy a rosary because she had been studying it a bit and I just got one for the heck of it too. In an interesting foreshadowing, the rosary I bought, selected based on purely aesthetic bases – it looked fairly solid and simple – turned out to be a Benedictine one, having Benedict’s cross embedded in the crucifix and a Benedictine medal at the joining. I never really did much with it, but I had never really intended to. For a time I used it to do repetitions of the Jesus prayer punctuated by the Gloria and then an Our Father at the end. I never found this avenue very fruitful – I think I was too self-conscious about it – but I haven’t ruled out trying to use it again.

I’ve many times read or heard someone talking up the benefits of scripture memorization and whenever I do, it strikes me as just the perfect thing to do. The first place to start was obviously the Psalms which over a few months I memorized eight of, but I also memorized, as prayers, a few religious poems: one of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets, A Dirge Without Music by Edna St. Vincent Millay, and the first of the Eleven Verses to the Lord by John Berryman, then also some non-religious poetry. I did the majority of this about two years ago. I worked on them, and then employed them, going for long walks around the neighborhood with my then infant daughter on my shoulder. I have no good reason for having stopped this exercise. I found it very helpful to be able to call up these words, and the work of memorizing I didn’t find that difficult. I still retain what I had though, or if one Psalm fades if I haven’t recited it in a while, I can usually recall it with a quick reading or two. I know this is a practice I need to return to.

To aid in the use of Psalms in prayer, either memorized or as encountered in prayer books, I wanted to study them. Over the past few years I’ve read a handful of small studies: Bonhoeffer’s Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Church, Breuggemann’s Spirituality of the Psalms, C.S. Lewis’s Reflections on the Psalms, and I’m currently reading James W. Sire’s Learning to Pray Through the Psalms. In general I’ve found this study useful and definitely need to do more of it.

I’ve experimented with fasting for the last three Lenten periods. The first year I did a kind of sunup to sundown fast, eating a small breakfast, a regular dinner and nothing in between for most of Lent other than Sundays. The past two years I started with 24-hour fasts, having just a small lunch each day, then building toward longer fasts – 36, then 48, then 72 hours - at the end of the week and eating normally, perhaps more than normally - feasting, on Sundays.

I tried to talk about it as little as possible (Jesus' explicit instructions right?) but there were immediate and some extended family that had to know, the latter because we were living with them. Mostly it just felt kind of embarrassing to own up to. It wasn’t the kind of thing I was raised with. There were certain insights I was looking for or expecting based on what I had read about the discipline. I was hoping at the very least for a kind of increased awareness of my own weakness and an openness to God. I may have gotten that but it was mixed with the self-certainty that I could do this, could make it through x number of hours or days without food. C.S. Lewis writes that while self-mastery is the goal, one of the inherent dangers of will-focused disciplines like fasting is pride. What you could really call the pride at risk here is an idolatry of the will.

Then again there were days that were utterly humiliating, where I didn’t do what I had told myself to, where I came home at the end of the day depressed and tired and just sat and snacked. Emotional eating I’ve heard this called. Maybe seeing that this was obviously what I was doing on a ‘failed’ fast day was itself instructive in that it pointed to what I was probably doing during normal eating periods. Be that as it may, it still often felt like my ‘successes’ and ‘failures’ were counted for the wrong reasons.

I believe strongly that fasting is something that Christians are called to but at the same time I sometimes feel it is something that I have absolutely no business dabbling with. Maybe it's just the lack of guidance. But maybe it's my doubting my own faith that causes me to feel conflicted about my experience with such disciplines.

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Cool Calvinism & Fixed Hour Prayer

Here is an interesting article by a (former?) Calvinist on why he (used to) think Calvinism is cool. It focuses on the Reformed tradition as antidote for the mushiness of American Evangelicalism.

I also recently stumbled on this great essay about fixed hour prayer with a few personal stories.

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Etiquette & Prayer: Matters of Practice

---What follows is my response to a friend, edited and made anonymous, who wrote me a sincere note about, among other things, his struggles with feeling genuine empathy with someone like myself in the midst of serious illness. It turns into a reflection on the relationship of a loss of faith and feelings of inauthenticity in spirituality. ---

There is always an element of uniqueness or incommensurability to any kind of grief or suffering. This uniqueness makes a truly empathetic response difficult. I think at the core of this difficulty is not just the awkwardness that doesn't know what to say in a given situation, but has more to do with the difficulty of mustering a truly heartfelt and sincere response, a response that would feel as though it did some justice to the weight of the matter at hand. It is really a question of the place of politeness and etiquette vs. pretending and hypocrisy.

We all know there is ample reason to be wary of excessive emphasis on any code of conduct and plenty of evidence for the worst kind of hypocrisy hiding behind them.

That said, I don't think one should be too quick to dismiss etiquette. As I argued before, in the case of the responses that are expected to news of an illness: no matter how formulaic and repetitive the messages, a genuine sentiment really can penetrate the surface, even though sometimes merely mouthing the appropriate words can be just plain wearying.

As I talk about this question of etiquette vs. hypocrisy, I will also explore interesting resonances in the question of authentic vs. inauthentic actions in general but especially in regards to the spiritual life.


I take the position that even simple rules of etiquette: saying "please" and "thank you" or greeting someone with a smile or at least greeting them instead of ignoring them etc. etc. are a basic lubricant for the gears of civil society. Imagine navigating a complex civilization where nobody observed these rules, or rules like them. It would be maddening and utterly depressing. It would be a world where every interaction felt like a day at the DMV. (I'm picturing here especially Marge's sisters in the Simpsons.)

On the other hand, I do understand the impulse that rejects the seeming inauthenticity of surface politeness. I think, if we're honest with ourselves, we all struggle with feeling fake, or just plain false in situations where we're expected to make such-and-such a response. (I think this is most intensely felt in adolescence when we first peer behind-the-scenes of the adult world and see that they're not all they're cracked up to be.)

I think, though, that there are two different responses to this feeling of inauthenticity. One is to reject the rules of etiquette because they apparently lead to inauthentic actions. This is the response of the surly teenager who won't smile at a stranger or wish anybody a good anything if they don't good and feel like it, (unless, of course, they're being paid to do so by their fast-food employer). What this response really is, is the absolutizing of one's ego, the dwelling on of one's own feelings above all else. This is the response encouraged by most all of American culture. It is the Disney philosophy of following one's dreams, whatever the cost and regardless of whom it affects.

An alternative response might be to really listen to the source of this feeling, to try and learn from the fact that one's response feels as though it falls short of some standard, and do something to cultivate the character trait that would naturally give rise to the desired response: friendliness, gratitude, empathy etc.

Someone reminded me today of one of the slogans of Alcoholics Anonymous which is to "Fake it till you Make it." The idea of faking something in order to make it is really an insight into character development and parallels neatly with the history of spiritual disciplines and also with what I've been trying to say about the proper response to false-feeling etiquette. (I wrote before about a similar parallel between moral and spiritual development here.)

I think, generally, the same things could be said of proper civil behavior and proper religious behavior. There is a kind of performance of "proper behavior" that is aimed at manipulating what others think of one, which is hypocrisy, and there is a kind of performance of civil or religious duties which recognizes how short one's own impulses fall from one's ideals, but which persists in the activity in order to mold and shape one's own character, to become the kind of person one wants to be by doing what that kind of person does. The behavior might be the same. The difference is in the attitude with which the behavior is undertaken.

Another way of putting this is in the words of Aristotle who said "We are what we repeatedly do." So if we want to be grateful, we should act with gratitude; if empathetic, with empathy; if pious, with piety. This is not to reduce these virtues to simple automatic outcomes of external activities like the bouncing of so many billiard balls. As I've said before, there can be different motivations and intentions behind performing the same activity. There is a politeness that crassly covers up hatred and there is a politeness that strives for deference to and respect of one's fellows, just as there is a piety that aims at reputation maintenance or the manipulation of others as well as a piety that persists through the feeling of the absence of God in order to make oneself available for the God who speaks in silence. From the outside these vastly different actions would look identical.

Which brings me to my last point on the topic of etiquette. The very fact that one is aware of the inadequacy of one's own feeling towards another's grief says that they are in no danger of hypocrisy, and the fact that one is troubled by that lack and open enough to admit it, says that they would be putting themself in a position to grow through these experiences.

I think there is a connection again with the spiritual life, especially in the basic practice of prayer for example. I wrote before about the idea of praying even when one doesn't feel like it and I think the same thing goes for the feeling we often have of not knowing how. I certainly don't believe that not wanting to pray, or not knowing how to pray, has anything to do with genuine prayer. I believe this for exactly the same reason that I believe things like friendliness or empathy don't always require the interior emotion first and the action second in order to be genuine.

At the beginning of prayer is the desire to pray. Knowledge of how to pray comes later, if at all. As with the dynamic of the virtues where action is born out of desire which develops into character which affects future desires, so too with prayer. The "authentic" prayer that is a goal of the religious life can only be reached by means of prayer. To learn to pray, one must just begin praying.

Thomas Merton, a man of prayer if there ever was one, wrote in a very famous prayer: "I believe the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing." Merton is referring to actions in general, but this layering of motivation - action, desire, hope - applies as much, if not more so, to prayer. This picture then gives us not one degree of removal between the "authentic" prayer and the muddling activity we mortals or even monks undertake, but two: not only does one desire to pray, but even while praying, one hopes one is desiring to pray. This is, in fact, to be expected.

Prayer is a vast, deep and complicated subject I am not really capable of doing more than touching on. I mean just to say that prayer is not merely a matter of lists of requests and thanks, though it probably essentially involves these. Christian prayer is a very different matter from prayer in general, if there were such a beast. Centered as it is in the Trinity, Christian prayer is nothing less than the means by which the creature is invited into a participation in the divine life. One does not need to look to mystics to find an expression of this mysterious truth. The Bible itself says that "we do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express."

I know there are often people who, maybe feeling they have outgrown or lost their prior faith and the ability to sincerely pray, but who might feel this as something genuinely lacking in their life. Might this not be because they were frozen in inaction with regards to a spiritual life in the same way one can feel at times in regards to simple matters of etiquette - because the uncomfortable feeling of "inauthenticity" has allowed the perfect to become the enemy of the good?

I said above that it seemed to me the very fact that one was troubled by inadequacies in their own response to grief could put them in a position to grow through these experiences towards a perhaps more genuine ability to share in grief. I guess what I'm wondering is this: If one were troubled by the loss of prayer in one's life, could it be that there is an equal opportunity to be open, through that very sense of lack, to genuine prayerfulness which would always only be through imperfect attempts at prayer, no matter how inauthentic feeling.

I have come to believe that there is. Indeed, I can only hope that there is.

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Everday Mysticism

It seems like everybody wants to be a mystic. The mystical way is usually taken to be that of the extreme ascetic: your stereotypical bone-thin, gaunt-eyed, cave-dwelling kind of saint. That way may well have its place, but a path for the more everyday mystic is pointed to by Richard Mouw who writes in his Praying at Burger King that:

"I seldom find myself in a praying mood while sitting in a restaurant. But I typically don't pray because I am feeling especially 'spiritual.' If I had to wait for those moods to set in, I wouldn't pray very often!" [1]

Mouw goes on to draw the analogy between greeting or recognizing the presence of a person and recognizing the presence of God, noting that when we see someone we know, we don't usually ignore them because we don't feel like greeting them, but bring ourselves to greet the person because their very presence obliges us.

How does this relate to God? If God is everywhere all the time, we should be continually recognizing his presence. True, we should. This is clearly the impulse behind the scriptural imperative to pray without ceasing and the various forms of life that have tried to take this seriously. But alas, most of us struggle to focus on God for more than a minute without distraction.

Michael Himes writes in The Mystery of Faith: An Introduction to Catholicism that the basic idea behind everything from corporate worship to prayer is what he calls the sacramental principle: the idea that if something is true at all times and in all places one must pay attention to it at some time, and in some place. A finite human being just cannot attend to the infinite but in a timely way. (Moreover, this 'condition' of human experience should not, from a Christian perspective, be seen as simply negative but part of their originally good createdness. [2]) This picture of trying to recognize the infinity of God in some particular way is exactly what is given us in the image of someone like Professor Mouw trying to reach a momentary awareness of God sitting in a restaurant - a 'worldly' distracting Burger King of all places.

But isn't this type of activity, either greeting an acquaintance with a smile when you really wish they'd go away, or bowing one's head and praying when one's mind is anywhere but with God, just what we call hypocrisy? Well, it can be. The trap of hypocrisy is an ever-present danger for any of humanity's higher aims whether they be moral or spiritual. It is just false though to say that the choice is between either hypocritical pretending to be what one really isn't and just doing whatever the heck one feels like.

The other option is to act the way one wants to become. [3]

So a spiritual activity becomes hypocritical then, not when one has mixed feelings about it - otherwise spirituality would be only for the already perfect, but when it becomes the end in itself. Jesus compared people who evinced this kind of religion to white-washed tombs. But spiritual actions can also be a means to an end, a way of exercising an impulse one wants to become more and more spontaneous. It's no accident we call something like prayer a spiritual practice, because it is nothing other than training oneself to be aware of God's presence more fully and more consistently. [4]

This is why the discipline of prayer at fixed times, according to the clock or events like meals or waking and sleeping, is so important. It recognizes the infinity of God by immersing oneself more consciously into time as a way of reaching beyond it, and growing in awareness of that which is outside of time. The other option, of being 'spiritual' when one feels like it, far from getting us to God, just makes us more in thrall to ourselves and our own agendas.

To return to the comparison with a friend: we all recognize the difference between a friend we only like to see when we're in the right mood, and the deep friendship that is as important and as appreciated in the hard times as in the good. (Marriage should embody the ideal of the human relationship here.) What kind of a god would it be that was only there when we felt like turning to him? Truly that god would be one of our own making.

1. p.4

2. see Smith, James K.A., The Fall of Interpretation

3. I think there's a lot that could be said, if it hasn't been already, relating Christian ethics of character as in Hauerwas, and the theology of spiritual formation.

4. For further reflection on the spiritual life as training, see Willard, Dallas, The Divine Conspiracy

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