Jesus Brand Spirituality

Publishers apparently like to sign multi-book contracts. So mine offered me a two book contract. Which I gladly signed because I felt as though I had two books in me, and the one after Jesus Brand Spirituality: He Wants His Religion Back has as it’s working title, The Praying Brain: Mystically Wired.

After seeking to pursue a discipline life of prayer for the past thirty odd years I’ve come to the happy conclusion that we’ve been approaching prayer bass-ackwards. It’s a happy conclusion because at least some of the excruciating experience that people have when they pray is unnecessary. There’s enough necessary excruciation in life that we can afford to get rid of what’s unnecessary.

The perspectives that inform The Praying Brain are the ones I wish someone had given to me when I started to pray in a more disciplined way. So the book would be aimed at myself back then, knowing what I know now.

Prayer is a form of neediness not holiness. Like eating. There are things to be learned, disciplines that help, things to avoid, ways of doing it badly, even harmfully, but as a whole it’s according to, not against nature to pray. We pray because we are human. We can’t help but pray. Atheists pray. Which is not to say prayer is not an endeavor that doesn’t benefit from effort. It’s just that effort really isn’t the key.

The human mind, according to some exciting new research seems to be mystically wired. That is, it seems that the human brain has an intrinsic capacity for what has been called mysticism. We have the capacity to transcend ourselves within ourselves. It’s probably part of what happens when we fall madly in love, what happens when we go ga-ga over a beautiful sunset; it may be part of the thrill of work, when we find ourselves absorbed in a project so that we experience simply being ourselves rather than being aware of ourselves.

When you tell people this, it helps them view prayer as something they might actually have the capacity to learn how to do. Which is implicit in the disciples asking Jesus to teach them to pray and his obliging them.

The mystics of old were taught to pray in monasteries. Then for a long time people stopped teaching each other how to pray in these mystical ways. It still happened, but less frequently perhaps, or less frequently within the experience that people called prayer. The people who were labeled as “mystics” were probably the ones who were able to teach themselves how to pray. Now that’s about to change and big time.

Christians mustn’t be afraid of all this but learn to pray along with the rest of humankind, informed, led, empowered by Jesus.

Prayer is more than simply an activity, like knitting only spiritual. It certainly is that, and without the activity part there’s no getting anywhere. But there is also a where to get when one prays.

Prayer is an exploration of realms that are not immediately apparent, especially to the older modern worldview that perceives the material world as something other than a mystical place. But that worldview is shifting and the shift is opening up a way for us to think about prayer as somewhere we go as much as it is something we do. It’s an inward experience, as are all experiences, as our awareness of them is located in the brain. But it’s also a beyond inward experience, if the biblical worldview has any merit at all. There are realms which intersect the ordinary here and now, like wherever it was Jesus slipped into when he ascended, and prayer is a way to get there, or to be aware of it’s intersection with the realm we occupy.

This is darned exciting stuff. Many more people than admit it have had these kinds of experiences, in an out of what they call prayer. When you give them a framework for understanding the experiences and offer vocabulary to describe it, they get excited about it. They are able to recognize experiences just out of their previous worldview lenses, be encouraged, and as a result have more experiences.

I’m thrilled about his because it’s happened to me, by sheer dumb luck. I went through a stretch in my own life where my prayer became too arduous for my energy level and I could feel it slipping away. Not good if you are a pastor. (This has happened to many pastors, however. Talk to them about prayer and at first they look crestfallen because most of them feel terrible about how little they pray. Including pastors in churches that value experience.)

Several years ago, I began to explore other means of prayer that I considered cheating like using prayer books; this led me to fixed hour prayer, which put me in touch with Phyllis Tickle, the most prominent compiler of such books. I read her memoir, The Shaping of a Life, and noticed she spoke often if obliquely about prayer as a “going somewhere” experience. The dumb luck part is that I emailed Mrs. Tickle and our church became the host on the web for The Divine Hours and we began to converse about prayer at the same time that my experience of prayer was going through a kind of tipping point from arduous to embarrassingly easy.

For about fifteen straight months I emailed Mrs. Tickle almost daily about what was going on in my prayer experience because she was a wise listener with whom I could be candid.

We shared experiences and I learned more about prayer than I ever imagined possible. With Mrs. Tickle’s help, I think I taught myself to pray in a much different way than I was used to.

I was able to open up a new conversation about prayer within my church and circle of friends—those who were most open and interested. My brother in law came to faith during this time after decades of cynicism. He is a high level executive in a big technology firm but his training was in poetry. He studied under Donald Hall at the University of Michigan and then got a doctorate in fine arts. So he’s a thoughtful fellow. He found himself having mystical experiences of a sort different than but complementary to the ones I was having. By sheer dumb luck we found a way to talk about these things in depth, partly because he was adept at articulating them.

During a ten-part sermon series on prayer, I invited listeners to email me their experiences praying. I received a number of emails detailing extraordinary experiences from unlikely sources. I found that many people had stumbled into deeply intimate forms of prayer through Alcoholics Anonymous, and that people who have suffered severe trauma have often accessed similar realms of prayer. Some people seem to have slipped into something like an ongoing conversation with God through the day, others finding very different ways to make conscious contact. Though our church tradition places a high value on experience, I was surprised by how many emails began or ended with “this is the first time I’ve ever shared this with anyone; please don’t think I’m crazy.” This told me that entire realms of God mediated experience for which people have little framework or vocabulary, including those informed by the sensibilities of the charismatic movements.

The continuum of prayer that is part of our shared humanity includes brown paper bag prayer all the way through to mystical prayer. Different people may or may not choose to explore the entire continuum. Different people may or may not have varied capacities. But I think we all share the same humanity and that the whole continuum is available to all. Unless we find some new and better ways of talking about prayer, we’ll never find out.

I approach this with a sense of urgency. We’re at stage of church and human history that needs the full God experience mediated through Jesus. Religion is about establishing boundaries: moral boundaries, and even more boundaries of the self, a center that is able to say Yes of No and to enter into relationship with another self. But religion is also about transcending boundaries. Jesus is a person distinct from the Father, but also one with the Father. He’s about communion and union, despite the fact that these seem mutually exclusive categories.

The transcending boundaries (of self/tribe/etc) part of religion is the one that’s been dormant for too long; it’s needed now to balance or to work in harmony with our need for boundaries. Transcending boundaries seems to be intrinsic to the mystical experience of prayer. Unless we make room for mysticism again, we’re not going to be able find our way faithfully through the thorniest issues we face: concerns of tribalism, nationalism, relating to enemies, concerns regarding sexuality, inclusion-exclusion, etc.

By now, of course, I’ve read some books about prayer. Oddly, I have found that many of them don’t enhance one’s appetite for prayer or leave one more hopeful about prayer. The book on prayer that I’d like to write is the one I’d like to read.

It would not an encyclopedic attempt to cover all the bases. It would not be a survey on prayer. It would spend little energy (none would be best) seeking to impress the reader with the importance of prayer.

How to put this? The books I like best are the ones that feel as though they are letting me into a fascinating conversation, as the though the writer had assembled a really interesting group of people with diverse perspectives whose conversation he or she is now channeling through the book.

The conversation that informs the book on prayer I’m interested in would include the following voices: an evangelical voice not enamored with what’s going on currently in his movement, but unable to shake the conviction that Jesus means something that saves people from something; an ecumenical voice eager to learn from others; a voice of scientific curiosity, thrilled by the way of seeing that the scientific method provides; a pastoral voice concerned with making things doable for those who don’t consider themselves good praying material; a secular-friendly voice who has found religion outside the camp. If an author could produce a manuscript informed by that conversation, I’d buy the book and read it.

So that’s the one I’m trying to write.