Formation for participraying

As I've been thinking about the difference between group processes for intercessory (rather than 'merely' petitionary) prayer meetings (see previous post if you've started on this one). It has been occuring to me that there are certain characteristics of behaviour and attitude that are needed by participants -this then is about Christian formation.

I've been aware too, as I wrote, that some of what I've been suggesting is quite like Quaker discernment practices -so that's a cross-reference point. I have long thought that part of the unspoken (!) underpinning for Quaker practice* is a set of internalised rules about conduct in a meeting. It is this sense of  the processes needing a good human habitus that I'm trying here to sketch out.

So, what is required, humanly speaking, for a group intercessory prayer process to work as well as it can?

Well, the things that most readily come to mind are as follows. They form a sort of core competency list which suggests some things that are necessary in initial Christian formation (discipling, baptism and confirmation preparation -probably). They are in no particular order. Though perhaps the first really is foremost.

Listening to God. As a gateway to this, I'd suggest a thorough grounding in lectio Divina or a robust version of the Quiet Time. It seems to me that the core of this discipline (I take they view that they are basically the same thing differently contextualised), is hearing the words of scripture with openness and sifting our own responses to note what in our own reactions may indicate God's Spirit drawing us to a particular word or phrase and being prepared to stay with that long enough to understand how and why it is settling with us.

Listening to others. This means not only hearing and understanding (which may in turn imply we ask some questions sometimes to improve our comprehension) but dwelling with what is said in such a way that we can suss out what it in resonates with us, unpick our own responses and so weigh up what is of God in it. It's rather different to listening for the next cue or gap where we can say our own piece. It requires patience and self-control (fruit of the Spirit). Asking clarificatory questions well will require gentleness and kindness (also fruit of the Spirit) in attitude to enable a genuine sharing and not trigger defensiveness or anxiety in our conversation partners.

Self awareness -related to the previous paragraph; being aware of our own responses and being familiar enough with our habits of response enables us to own our own 'stuff' and so refrain from projecting onto other humans or onto God.

Self examination. Being aware of our own motivations and being prepared to notice and take responsibility for our own reactions. This enables us to offer things to the group with less entanglement from the less worthy side of us. It won't go away except by us becoming aware and dealing with it appropriately. So we may want to set aside time to consider our participation and what drives it.

Becoming comfortable with silence. Much of what is written above requires us to be able to give attention to what our inner world is doing. This is likely to mean that we (and others) are quiet for periods of time to do so. We need to be okay with that for enough time to let things happen.

Loving challenge: kind and respectful speech. It is likely that from time to time, we find that we sense that something is mentioned or shared that for some reason seems 'off'. Obviously we need to examine ourselves to understand better why it may seem 'off' to us. However, if having done so we feel we should try to put things right or back on track, we will need to offer a corrective or at least a question. As we do so, we do well when we recognise that the person who shared has probably done so in good faith and may feel somewhat vulnerable having done so. Loving challenge recognises that and seeks to reassure that person that their effort is appreciated, that they are respected even while questioning what may have been shared. It may not always be explicitly said, depending on the level of trust and friendship in the group, but it should always be conveyed by the way that things are said and by choices of words that are not derogatory or shaming. We want people to feel that they can continue to be wrong sometimes without being derogated for it. Being wrong is a great way to learn how to be right more often. We'd want that encouragement for ourselves, so we should model it ourselves in relation to others. Having a meeting which is slow and thoughtful, will help in this since we are less likely to 'shoot from the hip' in such an atmosphere.

 

Starred Note

*I'm not a Quaker but I have long been interested in their origins and sympathetic to their historical roots. I dissent from their standing aside from the dominical sacraments. I value their conviction that there is that of God in everyone -I'd elucidate: the Spirit is at work in all. And I value their experience in  developing ways to listen to the movements of the Spirit in individuals and collectively. I think that churches could and should learn from their discernment processes.

Participraying processes

Following up the previous blog post...  which I nearly delayed posting because I wondered whether to write more. Instead I've opted to write this further piece having now published the previous one. Very near the end of the prior post, I set the agenda for this post:

how do we change a typical prayer meeting from a collecting of concerns in prayer leading to a serial presenting of requests (more or less elaborated), to a sharing, naming, listening and discerning mode in which we begin also to share what we think God is responding and discerning those promptings and tentative suggestions we begin to sense?

 In some ways the answer is there; implicit in the list: sharing, naming, listening and discerning. I think that there also needs to be a further stage about how we then pray after significant discernments. I think that list probably names some tasks, but not necessarily a step-by-step process.

Sharing is fairly typical in the conventional prayer meeting. Either a leader or leaders suggests some matters of concern or the members of the group are able to say what they'd like prayer for. Typically, this involves giving a bit of background and then usually anyone in the group can then make a prayer of that, usually that happens once everyone has had a chance to share what they would like prayer for*. This might be still a part of a more intercessory meeting but there needs to be consideration for the amount of work involved in processing a suggestion for prayer. So a way to sift suggestions (what would be "requests" in a conventional petition presenting meeting) is probably going to be needed. In fact group intercessory prayer might be best to try to focus on one thing at a time. And there may be need to processes to help centre in on one. So there could be a time of discernment and various ways to capture a sense of what people are feeling drawn to pray about if there are several possibilities on the table. One could be to delegate to a leader or leaders, possibly before the meeting. They would then present the matter at hand, perhaps with some background and perhaps with initial thoughts about the character and ways of God which might give clues as to how to start reflecting and dialoguing with one another and God. In other cases a process of quiet reflection on what has been brought to the meeting for potentially deepening of prayer, and listening to ones heart individually with a means to then share what seems to be 'settling' with group members. All this takes time.

Naming is perhaps not a separate item, really -I think it is the outcome really of the previous process of identifying what is to be held and explored in prayer. But we should be aware of how the way that we describe and term things can be helpful or unhelpful in directing our attention and our thoughts. A good naming enables insight, a less good naming may distract or frame our thoughts misleadingly. It would be wise, I think, also to consider naming in relation to discerning (see below).

Listening is where the nub of things begins to be identified. What are we drawn to pray about? What do we think God's stake and agenda might be? It's a process of hearing one another as we try to listen to God and to make sense of the various things that seem to be implied or relate to the matter at hand. Listening to the situation and context: what is actually happening and what does it mean? What is at stake to whom? What do we not know? Listening to God alongside all of this: are there things in what we are sharing and learning that seem to us to draw us, lectio-divina-like; things that seem to carry a mark of God with them?

Discerning -this is about becoming aware and more sure of what it is that God is pressing upon us or inviting us into. I'm envisaging activities of sharing 'weighty'** intuitions and insights -prophecy, if you will. I'm envisaging these resting on core disciplines such as lectio divina which (it seems to me) is pretty much what lies at the heart of the classic evangelical Quiet Time practice. Same rose, different name. Same rose, different traditions' gardens.

In a group context this means both attending to our own sense of what God might be highlighting to us and also sharing that with the others and then applying the careful listening and weighing up discipline to what is shared. This might look a bit like contemplative dialogue: people offer something in a gentle tentative way -after all this is offering a thought or possible insight for discernment, this is not the time for 'Thus says the Lord" but rather "I think God may be drawing my attention to...". The rest of the group sit with it, holding it before God. This takes time in quietness. In time others respond -or even offer further thoughts or insights.

In my experience of contemplative dialogue (which is not necessarily oriented to particular issues or questions), people share things that sometimes don't seem especially connected to what has been shared just before. However, over time threads and themes emerge. There is a degree of 'trust the process' -or, as I would gloss it: "trust the Spirit in the process".

In broad terms, then, a process of group intercessory prayer might go like this.

The group, or leaders beforehand, considers what is to be prayed about. There is some exploration of what is involved. This exploration itself is contemplative, that is it involves listening, questioning, weighing, getting a feel for the issues in relation to God, there might be sharing of scripture, theological perspectives and all of this (and more) in a quiet way giving time for people to hear and to weigh up what they hear before sharing further. There should be room for people to express how they feel before God and one another (this could be direct address to God -but resisting the habit*** of turning that into a petitionary prayer).

In time themes and guidance emerges. The group take note of these and there is an iterative process of receiving, weighing and discerning. Each time also expressing to God how we feel with honesty -think Abram at Mamre, or Amos's cry that Israel is too small! Processing those feelings in prayer is as important as the more cognitive dimensions. This kind of emotional honesty is also quite hard to acquire in prayer. At least I have observed it to be so both in myself and in groups I have prayed with. There's a tendency to take a message from the normal habits of not expressing how we feel (despite the example of the psalms). Well, certain things we feel: it's okay to show or express mild emotions and the Charismatic and Pentecostal movements have made some enthusiastic emotions almost mandatory in some circles. However, lamenting, expressing anger etc ... we tend to (self-) censor. We anticipate and move to the next stage without really allowing ourselves to sit with the difficult emotions. 

Yet again, scripture does actually model this. I've just mentioned the psalms and we can read again Jonah's responses, or Jeremiah's, or many of the prophets' writings. There's Elijah's post-competition depression, Jesus's weeping. Sometimes these things are described as taking 'many days'. Many days to process the enormity and the impact on ourselves. Perhaps this indicates that intercessory prayer groups need to factor in that their meeting together is not the only thing they do. There is work (self-work and God-relating) to be done between meetings. Which also implies groups need to spend time catching themselves up with one another and events in between.

The culmination point of this sort of (iterative) process of discerning may well be a sense of what is to be asked of God because this is what God wants us to participate in by praying. And maybe not just praying petitions but more bodily prayer, acting in ways that align with the prayer that is emerging from all the discerning and travail of heart.

And, I would suppose, that there comes a point of rest too. A sabbath before the next intercessory engagement.

I'm looking back at what I've written here and thinking that the clear process I thought I had in mind, does not seem that clear after all. I think this is because it is iterative and organic and may vary according to the kind of group and leadership involved. I hope it is clear that at the heart of it is making time for people to listen inwardly to what the Spirit may be pressing upon them and to find ways to allow people to share in a way that invites further discernment. And in addition to be open to the revelation that affective knowing brings as well as cognitive.

Next post in this brief thread.

Footnotes

*There's a whole other consideration that could be undertaken about the dynamics this creates around people remembering properly, about the fear of disrespecting someone because their request is forgotten, about an unwritten rule that the person who requested prayer shouldn't be the one to make the prayer, not to mention that the whole thing seems to suggest that God doesn't hear the prayer until the group has explicitly said it to God rather than to each other. I've written about this elsewhere.

**"Weighty" here is trying to indicate the sense that it has something of God's weight behind it: it seems significant and godly, wise or insightful. It has greater heft than a merely human thought.

*** A habit born of the normal format of prayer meetings that most of us have been socialised into. I've observed how deeply engrained this 'liturgy' is -to arrest it may require leaders or the rest of the group finding care-ful ways to stop themselves and each other running on into it as the habit is laid aside.

Participraying

 In a meeting earlier today, I was taking notes and in order to try to express a nuance found myself making a neologism in the phrase, "to participray 'your kingdom come'.

It was an attempt to capture the idea of praying but recognising that we are often called to be part of the answer to our own petitions. And indeed, to be engaged in an ongoing dialogical process around the petition -discerning different dimensions of what impinges on the petition and being open to nudges from God about what to pay attention to or to bring to the foreground of our prayer and action.

In this I know that I am indebted to explorations as a relatively young Christian in intercessory prayer. One of the big take-aways for me from those explorations was the idea that intercessory prayer might be distinguished from petitionary prayer*. In this schema of prayer, petitionary prayer is where a person names before God a situation and asks a particular thing: a desired outcome is commended to God; a request has been presented. Quite a lot of everyday praying is petitionary and this conceptualisation leads to the idea that God responds to such petitions with, for example, "Yes, no or not yet". This is often the kind of praying that is actually envisaged by many people when they talk about being persistent in prayer.

However, this is not what the kind of writers I was reading meant when they talked about intercessory prayer. In this sort of account, intercessory prayer involved more empathy, self-identification with the matter of prayer and a more dialogical approach. To unpack those a bit more ... empathy is about having a sense of fellow-feeling with the suffering, with the groanings of those who are the subject of the prayerful concern This correlates to an emotional connection and commitment to the matter at hand. By self-identification, I'm getting at that connection and commitment: we begin to make the concern our own and to hold it, as our own, before God. It is dialogical in the sense that I mentioned above in writing that it involves contemplating the matter and seeing it from different angles, finding out more about the context and entailments: it is dialogical with the context and the wider concerns involved. It is also dialogical in not stopping with presenting a request to God and simply waiting for a 'no' or a 'yes' or 'wait'. Rather, that request is a starting point for the kind of investigation just mentioned and also to listening to God: what does God seem to lay on our hearts or awareness in relation to our concern? How does God nudge us to develop our request? Does God seem to be keeping us focused on some particular element? Does God bring to us something new, a perspective or new development to incorporate?

And, I'd add 'participatory'. In inviting us to intercession, God invites us to share the Divine concern. A scriptural model for this might be Abram at Mamre. Abram offers the three figures (later named 'the Lord') hospitality. At the end of the visit (one of) the visitors asks whether they can share with Abram what they're about to do and there follows a haggle in which Abram appears to beat the Lord down to sparing Lot and his family from a disaster about to befall Sodom. That dialogue might be regarded as a kind of prototype of intercession. Intercession is being drawn into God's concern and learning to share it and to share the playing out of what happens. 

'Participatory' also, to my mind, is about the possibility -even likelihood- that in some way or ways, we seek to be part of the 'answer' to our own prayers. At a simple level this could be exampled as praying about just trade in the world would go along with promoting and buying fairly traded goods. Or, presenting concerns for climate change would tend to suggest that we should be seeking changes in lifestyle to downsize our carbon footprints.

So, my question beyond these considerations is how we do this not just individually (the prayer-warrior model, perhaps) but in company? In practice, how do we change a typical prayer meeting from a collecting of concerns in prayer leading to a serial presenting of requests (more or less elaborated), to a sharing, naming, listening and discerning mode in which we begin also to share what we think God is responding and discerning those promptings and tentative suggestions we begin to sense?

I think that this implies a different way of organising prayer meetings than I usually see. I think it also implies a re-founding of Christian shared prayer such that our default understanding and practices are reformed.

Next post in this (short) thread.

Notes

* Obviously people's use of terminology may vary. So I sit loose to the terminology. This is how the terms and ideas lodge in my brain. Please do adapt and adjust if yours differs.

Witch in the Wardrobe

 Quite a clever title, I thought. Connotations of 'in the closet'. I was partly drawn to read this book by the suggestion in the question in the blurb: "Was C.S. Lewis a Secret Mage?" I could well understand where that came from. CS Lewis did keep company with an eclectic mix of people including some who were interested in 'esoteric' religion in the mid 20th century. And among them some Christians who were interested in the way that some Christian spiritual themes had parallels in esoteric speculations and thinking and of course people whose interests related to story-telling and ancient stories which often involve magic and strange creatures. Bear in mind too that Lewis had an idea about myth becoming incarnate in Jesus and indeed to the bold idea that the cross is the 'deep magic' (a phrase from The Magician's Nephew as well as the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, I  think) of the universe. But of course this preparedness to do what the apostle Paul did is not shared by some more uptight versions of Christianity. Paul was prepared to borrow terms from the wider religious and spiritual culture of his times, -so was the author of the fourth gospel, come to that. By contrast there are Christians whose go-to place in such cases, is to suspicion and heresy hunting. Usually without giving any attempt to understand what is really meant and what is actually going on with other people's world-views. The dialogue in the book goes over some of this ground as characters explain their different positions at various points.

And it is this fracture in mainly USAmican evangelicalism that the novel uses to drive plot and tension. On the one hand, those who are comfortable that Lewis was an orthodox Christian (albeit one who was somewhat high church -though many don't really notice that) who had a helpful approach to imagination, apologetics and faith. On the other hand, there are those who are deeply suspicious of anything that even hints at the occult.

From the explainer I saw: "When a mysterious document suggesting C.S. Lewis had occult connections surfaces in Belfast, it triggers a deadly chain of events that brings together an unlikely duo: a former IRA sniper seeking revenge and a Christian college professor guarding his faith." So it is easy to grasp how the suggestion of proof of membership of an occult society (making him a "witch") would be a big blow to the reputation and marketability of CS Lewis.

 The plot moves fairly briskly and is engaging. I would say that this is a plot-driven story. And I quite liked the way that against a very sectarian background of both Northern Ireland on the one hand and on the other of deep differences in the Christian world of North America, there was some degree of learning to work together and to begin to understand that the religiously other might not be as bad as they're cracked up to be. The parallel between Irish sectarian violence and the latent violence portrayed of 'christian' militias in north America was not lost on this reader. For me this is the most uncomfortable part -being confronted with the way that too many people bearing the label 'Christian' are ready to resort to force of arms to defend their faith Even against other Christians -the apostles and church fathers and mothers would spin in their graves.

Personally, I sometimes felt that some of the characters were portrayed speaking in ways I didn't always find convincing: unlikely vocabulary or turns of phrase. I also felt that I didn't really get to know the characters properly -the plot and length of the novel didn't give me enough time to get to know them. That said, I did feel for the central characters and their tragedies as they unfold and was happy to see some bitter-sweet resolution.

An oddity in this book: Rather than C.S. Lewis, the typesetting consistentely has "C.    S. Lewis" -at least in the edition I had to view.  I kept wondering whether this was significant, -maybe there'd be an explanation later in the story. There wasn't. There was also something intriguing going on with some of the names. Notably for me, Simon Magister whose name seemed to nod towards Simon Magus and Magister itself has been a title used by occultists of higher grades or statuses of magician. I wondered whether this was merely a co-incidence or would have some other significance. It was almost Dickension a name, I thought. But Simon remained far from a Simon Magus or some sort of covert occultist which his name had made me suspect he might be at first.

"... Controversial aspects of C.S. Lewis’s legacy are also ingeniously woven into the story." (Lasse Heimdal, general secretary, Kirkens SOS) I guess I'd say that it's more than woven-in -it's the central hinge of the story. It's interesting because there's enough of a hook there to tie in the struggle for influence between over-anxious heterophobic evangelicals on the one hand and a commercially sensitive USAm' ican publishing industry on the other.

“The strongest element of this narrative is how seriously it takes books—there is something thrilling about the idea that books, and their interpretations, can be matters of life and death.” —Kirkus Review   -That's true; it's central and probably this is a fair point of comparison with Dan Brown where it's religious documents at stake that could shift the way people think about things. I think I prefer my thrillers to be a little more this side of the believable. I didn't quite believe UNIKORN or even the booksellers' cartel, in the end. Though it is this close to believability [indicates small distance between thumb and forefinger].

L.D. Wenzel’s Website
L.D. Wenzel Interview on The Author Show
A Witch in the Wardrobe YouTube character shorts

#WitchInTheWardrobe