Question
What titles do I use for God when I pray? Does prayer do any good?
Answer
Dear Fred,
My son, many years ago, came from school with an assignment he was required to complete. The creative writing project asked for one hundred different ways to say “said” other than, of course, “said.” At first glance, it seemed a daunting task but within minutes, the lines were filled and the list compiled. The truth is that, although mostly oblivious to the fact, those of us who read fiction are exposed to many, many different ways an author indicates that someone has just “said” something. The hours and hours of bedtime story reading his dad had shared with him had embedded those many words in his vocabulary already.
So, when writing my first book With or Without God: Why the Way We Live is More Important than What We Believe, I challenged myself to come up with one hundred words that could be used instead of the word “god”. I didn’t want to suggest that the concept of god had any power to act in the world, but included words that could be interpreted by the reader in whatever way was helpful; that is, with or without agency.
I encourage you to do the same. There may be words that are quick to come: “grace”, “courage”, “love”. And there may be words that require more thought. For me, the word “god” lays out a broad terrain that cannot be limited by a single person’s perspective. I understand god to be a concept rather than a being, a word I once used to convey an amalgam of our best and highest ideals. I now no longer use the word as it too readily invites ideas of the supernatural, of blessing or judgment, of a privileged or capricious intervention, depending on whether the hearer’s own life has weighed out on the side of privilege or blight.
My understanding of god necessarily impacts on the concept of prayer, a topic I go into in depth in my second book, Amen: What Prayer Can Mean in a World Beyond Belief. Whether the person engaged in the act of prayer believes in a supernatural deity or force or the benevolence of the universe, we are the only answer we’ve got to the challenges facing our world. Some will work toward solutions compelled by the god in whom they believe. Others will work toward solutions compelled by theirs own sense of compassion and responsibility. Goodness comes into the world through our own hands, voices, and actions.
I believe prayer is a very important component to a balanced and engaged life though I do not believe there is a god listening to us. We listen to ourselves. We sort out what is happening in our lives. We honour the beauty we’ve encountered, express gratitude and awe. We trouble ourselves toward making a difference wherever we are able. We sit within the reality of our lives and explore them.
Even believing that no deity exists who cares a whit for us, we can enrich our lives by the daily practice of prayer or, as I prefer to call it – again, to avoid confusion - meditation. Using the four broad categories around which much Christian liturgy is built, we can craft a daily ritual that invites us to perceive awe (adoration), reflect critically on our relationships with our own self, others, and the planet (confession), recognize how fortunate we are even in the midst of adversity (thanksgiving), and lament that we and those we love still suffer want, pain, sorrow (supplication). Traditional prayer grew up around human need, not the other way around. Acknowledging each of these aspects of our lives is an important facet of well-being.
There are many practices that can be powerful additions to one’s life and take the place of meditative prayer. Some prefer to journal, finding their own way to solutions by writing them out. I write poetry and often only understand what I was saying to myself hours or days after getting a poem out onto the page. Some find vocal music, chant, drumming or tonal vibrations help to balance their attentions and calm their minds. Mindfulness has proven to be an incredibly helpful way to tend to one’s mind and well-being. I encourage you to look for what works for you, trying this or that, rejecting what doesn’t “feel” right and leaning in toward what resonates with you.
~ Rev Gretta Vosper
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
The Bible, Corporal Punishment and Human Guilt - Part 3
In the most deeply patriarchal part of our male-dominant Western history, women were also considered to be fit subjects for corporal punishment at the hands of their husbands. This exercise of power was carried out with the full approval of both State and Church. In that day a husband could beat his wife whenever the husband deemed it necessary. She was, if not his property like a slave, at best his ward with no more status than a dependent child. Physical abuse of one's spouse is not unknown today, but it is now called "domestic violence" and is recognized as a crime for which both arrest and incarceration are deemed appropriate. That, however, has not always been the case.
Reading a book written by Suzannah Fonay Wemple, a medieval historian, was the first time I was made aware that one of the primary functions of nunneries in the early Middle Ages was to be a safe haven to which abused women could retreat. Not even the power of the male in a rigidly patriarchal society could invade the domain of the Mother Superior! Modern people, whose sense of history is rather short, blink in disbelief when reading of the accepted domestic violence during this period of history. Perhaps they need to be reminded that the word 'obey,' as a part of the bride's sacred vows to her husband, was in almost every wedding ceremony in every part of the Christian Church until early in the 20th century. The word 'obey' is a word that implies dependent submission to the authority of the one who requires it, and it carries with it the implicit threat that the failure to obey will bring upon the disobedient one the power of the authority. Society in that day deemed physical discipline the necessary means of enforcement. The word 'obey' was not removed from the wedding ceremony in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer until 1928. It was mandated for the bride alone, since it was inconceivable that the groom would take a vow of obedience. Because the 1662 Prayer Book of the Church of England is still in use in both England and throughout the nations that once constituted the British Empire, the word 'obey' is still, to this day, required of the bride in many English speaking marriage ceremonies. Wherever it is used, wherever obedience is assumed to be appropriate, the subservient person is deemed to be dependent, childlike and by implication an appropriate recipient for discipline. There is no question that the definition of a woman, as a dependent child subject to her husband's authority, is one of those legacies from the Christian past that had to be challenged first and dismantled second before women could be free.
Perhaps that helps to explain why it was that the conservative parts of the Christian Church resisted so deeply the women's liberation movement with its goal of the total emancipation of women. In the Catholic tradition women are still treated as second-class citizens. The embarrassment of this attitude in a world, where consciousness has been raised on this issue, has resulted in some rather convoluted rationalizations that hint at an ecclesiastical version of the old racist slogan "separate but equal" as this Church seeks to defend present anti-female practices. In the evangelical wing of Protestant Christianity Pat Robertson accused "women's lib" movements of being "home breaking, family violating, godless and lesbian assaults on traditional values." At every stage along the way, from the suffrage movement that won for women the right to vote in 1920, to the battle to make birth control and abortion legal, the Christian Church has been a vigorous opponent. Only in an ecclesiastical setting would it ever have been deemed appropriate for an all male group of clerics, mostly in the middle or post-menopausal years of life, to sit in solemn assembly, dressed in vestments called 'frocks,' to pontificate in the name of a God called 'Father,' about what a woman can do that is moral with her own body.
The Women's Liberation Movement has sought to free women and their bodies from such domination by males, a domination that at one stage in our history gave men the right to punish physically the bodies of women. That movement declared that women are not children, that women are not dependent or subservient and that women are not designed to be submissive to men or to anyone else. The power to define oneself as adult, competent and independent became the ticket out of a world where discipline and physical abuse were considered to be appropriate patterns of interpersonal behavior.
Other adults who were subjected to corporal punishment during the days of Christian history were members of religious orders. Once again, the justification for that violence was found in the vows of the religious life in which obedience joined poverty and chastity as sacred obligations. Obedience lends itself to the creation of a childlike and dependent person, who is subject to the discipline of his or her superiors. That understanding of human life has led to the abuse of the bodies of those in religious orders in some form of corporal punishment. When that understanding is combined with the religious sense of universal human sinfulness, then physical discipline offers a 'therapy' for an evil situation. If God's revealed word in the Bible called for such discipline to be administered to children and to those under authority as an act of love, and if this discipline was regarded both as a virtue and a sacred obligation owed to one's religious superior, then all arguments against it were stifled. So corporal punishment has often marked the relationship of the religious superior to the monk, nun or penitent. Sometimes this punishment of the body was ordered by the superior, but was self-inflicted by the penitent. It made the penitent feel more noble, more virtuous.
In the 14th century in response to the bubonic plague, known popularly as 'the Black Death,' a movement arose among Christians who called themselves 'the Flagellants." They walked through the streets of the cities of Europe sometimes in numbers 10,000 strong, lashing themselves with whips in an act of public penitence. It was an age in which people knew nothing about viruses, germs or bacteria that might bring sickness. They only knew that they were living through a fearful period of history in which up to one fourth of the adult population of Europe was to die in this epidemic. The common explanation for this devastation was that God was angry with the people for some real or imagined sin. The hope of the Flagellants was that by brutally lashing their own bodies with whips they could punish themselves so severely that God would withdraw the divine punishment of the plague from their families. It was a strange practice based on a faulty, but deeply believed, premise; namely, that punishing their bodies would somehow win for them divine approval. The idea was that if they punished themselves, God would not have to do it. Yet this practice grew out of and reflected that belief so deeply in the Western Christian world, that God was a punishing deity and those who were disciplined by God deserved it because of their sinfulness.
That was long ago we tend to say, until we read a more contemporary writer like Karen Armstrong. This brilliant woman who has authored such best selling titles as A History of God, and The Battle for God spent the first years of her adulthood in a convent in England, leaving as recently as the late 1960s. In her autobiography she described her experience as a Sister going to confession. On occasions, as her penance, she would be given a small whip and told to go to a private place and there to lash herself for her sins, if she deemed that appropriate. There is ample reason to suggest that corporal punishment was practiced in the religious life and that disciplining the body physically was taught by the Church to be an act pleasing to God, since the body was normally judged in religious circles to be sinful.
The path followed in our own religious history started with a definition of human life as fallen or sinful. Step two would involve developing the practice of combining that definition with the appropriateness of punishing the sinful body physically. Step three was to validate the practice by pointing to a text in a book called the "word of God," that would demonstrate God's approval of these tactics. Step four was to expand the definition of the child to include all the powerless and thus child-like adults: prisoners whose behavior had caused society to strip from them adult rights and to relate to them as those in need of punishment; slaves who had no rights at all and who by law and custom were required to be obedient to their masters; women, regarded as inferior, not fully human adults, who were childlike and dependent and incapable of maturity so they had to pledge to be obedient to their husbands; and finally religious figures who lived under the authority of their superiors and who believed themselves deserving of physical discipline because of their own sins or in order to force God to withdraw the divine wrath which was believed to be causing their suffering.
Next week I will seek to lift that portrait of God into full consciousness so that it might be banished along with the terrible texts from the "Word of God" that have been used to justify abusive behavior for far too long.
-- John Shelby Spong
Originally published June 30, 2004
TMI– too much information, albeit most true! A personal saying of mine is, “too many irons in the fire make the fire go out!” Ineloquent as I may be, occasionally I make a bit of sense. The ecologic/ ethical/ economic and other human factors show increasingly that either we must be accountable unto a higher power than our selfish behaviors, or succumb to the ignorance we are collectively encumbered in. The convenience of electricity has become just a part of an insidious dependency- mindset and, while we’re contemplating the interrelatedness of material living, consider the total failure of people’s having a clue if required to gravitate to an un-anthropomorphic G-d! Regarding world resources and demands, there was a mathematics professor from Boulder, Colorado, which provided a you-tube primer course about one theme: “EXPONENTIAL”. Readily on, he clearly shows how, both in decreasing resource and increasing demands, we’re being totally blind to Reality/ G-d/ and Necessity. Hope you check that out. But in the mean time, government of all kinds needs to answer to a higher power– than money.