Maybe religion is rising to its task of spreading shared values of peace, justice, and solidarity in contrast to religious wars of the past, bent on conquest, domination, and forced conversions.
After years of reading progressive Christian writing, I have stopped understanding God as an all-powerful person. In fact, I don’t think God is a person at all, but the name we give to sacred processes of life, love, and connection. This wouldn’t be a problem, but I love the language in the Jesus prayer about seeking for God’s will to be done. What could it mean for God’s will to be done if God is not a person with a will? How can I continue to pray this prayer and mean it?
Dear Reader,
What a tender question! Personally, I have never experienced God as a being; the only way the sacred has ever made sense to me is as the ground of our being, the depth of our depths, or the love at our core. And I pray that God’s will be done in my life every morning. This doesn’t feel awkward or fake to me because, as I see it, the language in the prayer is metaphorical. Praying that prayer is a way I orient myself to the world, not a conversation with an entity who listens to my words and acts directly on them (or doesn’t).
In John’s Gospel, Jesus has a number of “I am” sayings, claiming that he is the bread of life, the light of the world, and the door of the sheep (among other things). In these passages, Jesus is not claiming that he is literal bread, a real candle, or an actual door. Rather, his way satisfies spiritual hunger. Living his teachings illuminates a way we can encounter the divine, And, if we follow him, we find wholeness and wellness (the term “salvation” is related to the term “salve” or “balm”).
For me, the Jesus prayer is similar. When I pray, “God, may your will be done in my life,” I am seeking to align myself with love, generosity, compassion, humility, hospitality, and all the kinds of goodness that Jesus taught and lived out. I’m acknowledging that however well-intended my own agenda is, there is a larger agenda out there, one in which love rather than my ego is the driving force, and I aim to have that larger agenda guide my beliefs, values, priorities, and work in the world. And I am striving to be open to what the apostle Paul called the fruit of the Spirit. For me, anyway, these aims don’t require God to be a Person-Writ-Large. They simply require spiritual reality to be bigger than my take on things. Which, on my best days, seems abundantly clear and undeniably true.
The progressive Christian author Anne Lamott wrote that the three essential prayers are “help!,” “thanks!”, and “wow!” For me, praying that God’s will be done in my life is a way of capturing all three of those prayers and connecting them to my intention about who, and how, I want to be in the world. I hope that helps.
~ Dr. Amanda Udis-Kessler
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