Under the influence of prayer – a reflection.
Author: John Schofield
John Schofield is a former Chair of St Mark’s CRC, and past Principal of an Anglican Ministry Training Scheme. |
When we pray, are we influencing God, or is God influencing us? This reflection seeks to examine this question, as it is one which often lies behind questions about what are we doing when we pray, and specifically what are we doing when we are engaged in petition and intercession. It boils down to asking: how influenceable is God? And how much influence does God have?
These are not idle questions. And at a time when the world is on edge because the conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine are playing on our minds, and when we are being urged to pray about the situation – most usually, though not always – praying for peace, these questions take on greater urgency as the reality of conflict creeps ever closer geographically.
Prayer has often been used as a quasi weapon of war. However, one of the outcomes of the first world war was that the futility of the belief that ‘God is on our side’ was, when Christian European nations were at war with each other, fully demonstrated. Coincidentally this was also a time when a sacramental sensibility took hold because of its more visceral than verbal nature; though equally it was a time of many people’s loss of faith.
It is perhaps significant that Process Theology arose after the first world war and the breakdown of former certainties. In the understanding of Process Theology God is in the processes, as the influences of the past meet the possibilities of the future in each present moment, working for our well-being, luring us to a more Christlike being.
This understanding fatally undermines the idea of a static God that still haunts the Christian imagination: a remote God, the unmoved mover who is neither influenceable nor influencing events. It also challenges another common approach to prayer which casts God as the all-powerful One who will intervene to grant us our wishes if we pray hard enough.
Yet it is interesting the number of times I have heard – or read about – people who while saying that they are not believers also admit that they find themselves praying in times of great anxiety or stress. I suppose that they are tapping into an unacknowledged, even unconscious, source of energy, strength and wisdom, the need for which is not normally evident to them. It’s the same with the phenomenon of people saying to a priest: ‘Say one for me, Vicar’, a turning to prayer which Wesley Carr suggests is because the minister becomes the one
‘behind the church’ who lurks in people’s semiconscious.[1]
In John’s Gospel, the evangelist has Jesus use, more than once, the phrase ‘in my name’:
Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father. I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If in my name you ask me* for anything, I will do it.
(John 14. 12-14)
and again
I appointed you to go out and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name.
(John 15. 16b)
The point I take from this is that prayer should be rigorous. If we cannot pray in Jesus’ name – that is, if we cannot pray as Jesus would pray – then our prayer is not just lacking, but potentially pointless. But if we pray in Jesus’ name, prayers that Jesus himself could pray, then we will be both glorifying God, and equipping ourselves to ‘do greater works than these.’ The idea of greater works is not something that I have heard mentioned in many sermons, and some would say that it is one of the harder sayings of Jesus, something to be glossed over quietly. But what greater work in our world can there be except the quest for peace?
Perhaps the way prayer ‘works’ is akin to a mirror, which reflects our prayers back to us, causing us to change? God 'listens' to us, influences us the pray-er, in making us listen to ourselves.
So we can say that as God gets caught up in our prayers so God 'uses' our prayers to influence us and our praxis. But God also becomes capable of more, not the more of omnipotence or omniscience, but the more of equipping us to be agents of love, that powerful love which seeks the good of the other whether that be an individual, a community, a nation, the world. In this understanding, prayer is in a sense its own answer, prayer is the change in us that makes it possible for us to pray that selfless prayer in the first place, and that manifests itself in our changed lives, our behaviour, our intentions, our understandings.
Thus there is an element of changing and influencing God because our prayer, our actions, let God move more freely and more fully because God is influencing us in the processes of our lives.
‘In an interdependent relational world our releasing of prayer to God makes a difference to what God can do’[2],
as God works with the world as it is to lead it to what it can be,
‘wooing us to become a people acting with God the Creator toward the well-being of the world’.[3]
Most of what I have written is about the individual. What happens we look at the communal sphere, at the church community at prayer? I think that it all still applies, though the transformative aspect of intercessory prayer meets more barriers because the relational, collaborative aspect of prayer necessarily involves the transformation not only of more individual lives, but also of the corporate life of Christians gathered together. We should remember that the promise is that
'where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them'.
(Matt 18.20).
So the church, gathered in Christ's name, interconnected and relational, finds that the mirror of prayer has the same potential as it has with the individual, and perhaps in a sense, more, because the influence of the church at prayer influences not only the church itself but also the world in which it is set.
All this demands that we recognise the element of cooperation that exists when we pray, or when we are under the influence of prayer. Here we see prayer being like the way we sometimes can be with close friends, colleagues and family members. Often there is an intuitive tuning into each other’s concerns, which allows for more agency to be released than would have been possible from either party in isolation from the other. So it is with us and God: prayer as relational is mutual, its influence enriches and enhances the mutual agency that is released in prayer. As Gerard Hughes notes:
God is a God who invites all of us to be collaborators with Godself. If we do not collaborate, God's will cannot be effected.[4]
But how do any of these approaches to prayer and its, and God’s, influence act out in situations such as those noted at the very beginning of this reflection?
One way is obvious: we cannot pray for peace unless we have peace in our own lives. God’s mirror accosts and transforms us. The more people are true peace lovers and peace makers, the more room there is for peace to worm its way into the situation. But this is intangible and long term.
I still vividly remember a conversation I had soon after the dismantling of apartheid with a Christian from South Africa who spoke passionately about how a major contributory factor in the peaceful ending of apartheid was the combined prayer of many millions of South Africans from all racial groupings, that this should be so. Unprovable. Certainly intangible. But who are we to reject this understanding? It seems to be of a piece with that understanding that Marjorie Suchocki writes about:
Suppose our prayer is openness to the God who pervades the universe and therefore ourselves, and that prayer is also God’s openness to us. In such a case, prayer is not only for our sakes, but also for God’s sake. This would make prayer essential to God as well as to ourselves. What if prayer increases the effectiveness of God’s work in this world? God’s invitation to us to pray – indeed God’s gracious command to pray – suggests the possibility that our prayers make a difference to God, and therefore might make a difference to what God can do in the world.[5]
I have called this reflection Under the influence of prayer in the hope that we can start seeing that there is an element of our prayers influencing God, in the sense of letting God move more freely and more fully in us and in God’s world, influencing us and those for whom we pray, in the process.
[1] Carr, W, (1997) A Handbook of Pastoral Studies. London: SPCK
[2] Suchocki, M H, (1996). In God’s Presence, theological reflections on prayer, Chalice Press, St Louis MO
[3] Suchocki, M H, (1996). In God’s Presence, theological reflections on prayer, Chalice Press, St Louis MO, p21
[4] Hughes, G, (2014). Cry of Wonder, Bloomsbury Publishing, London
[5] Suchocki, M H, (1996). In God’s Presence, theological reflections on prayer, Chalice Press, St Louis MO, p18
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John Schofield
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