Praying 'vertically' and 'laterally'

I've been meaning to flag this up and mention a few things about it for a couple of weeks now. The interest for me is in the fact that it is dealing with something I've been writing on and off for a handful of years now. The working title is 'Unholy Praying' and the aim is to write up, give rationale for and reflect a bit on a series of group prayer experiments in prayerful conversation which doesn't go all holy on us. It comes out of noting that we talk the talk of taking our 'religion' into the secular, but actually just end up creating mini bits of 'sacred' within the secular rather than truly bringing the two together; and our praying together -'just talking to God'- is no exception: we have a whole set of unwritten rules (which may vary from group to group) -a set of conversational pragmatics, if you will- which have to be learnt and which would mark out a bunch of prayists in a secular setting as doing something a bit wierd.

So I'm right with Kester in asking further questions about what is actually going on, beyond our theo-ideological justifications for 'group prayer' and its typical formats and conventions. One thing he notes: "praying aloud in a group functions to give permission to words that would otherwise be too difficult or awkward to say directly." The thing is that it is talking to God that is deliberately overheard. This actually drives some of the conversational pragmatics (like not interrupting) - actually this is analogous to what I and fellow dog owners do when we talk to our dogs while walking them in the vicinity of others: we say stuff to our dogs that acts as interpretive comment for overhearing dog-walkers and passers-by. (Dog - God; not a deliberate palindrome thing going on there, but, well, perhaps the old subconcious is up to tricks there). But it's okay; we do it all over the place, we are skilled at taking note of our 'audience' actual and ostensibly-addressed and talking to both. Perhaps it's not surprising we do this with God stuff too.

If you want to follow this angle up check out the sub-discipline of linguistics known as pragmatics. It's one of the things I've been brushing up on in odd moments as part of thinking about this UnHoly Praying thing.

What I want to ask, though, is how we can just involve God in conversation and what the obvious physical difficulties with that (God's lack of somatic presence and accompanying vocal tract being the most notable) actually mean for potential practice of a truly 'unreligious' way of prayer. Some of the issue lies with the 'fictive' attribution of presence and how we handle that. By "fictive attribution of presence", I mean the way that we sometimes treat God as if They was* a finite presence: so we suddenly 'agree' God is there and listening and so repeat to Them everything we've just discussed as if They wasn't in the room until just then. (Of course, we're also doing things, quite often, like affirming the concerns of the others and strengthening social bonds). Or we 'locate' God in the sanctuary and bow ... Can we manage to pray together without indulging in these fictive strategies? Should we? Or should we recognise more readily that God is also beyond personhood and learn to do more 'mystical' prayer together?

Referring to: Kester Brewin � “Lord I just…” | Do you believe in Prayer? | Speaking into the unknown
*Just experimenting with pronouns for God. Taking a leaf out of the Hebrew Bible where the word for God -Elohim- is plural in form but singular in the verb forms it takes. I reckoned that a triune God might be worth mixing the forms for, especially as English for about 5 centuries has used 'they' to refer to unspecified or unknown antecedents ("That person ... whoever they are ...") so I'm just experimenting to see if extending the range a bit could begin to sound sort of alright once we got used to it.