Process theology and contemplative prayer: Seeking the presence of God

Encounter, Winter 2002 by Campbell, Nancy D, Steussy, Marti J

Christian theology and Christian practice have always reciprocally influenced one another, despite claims for the absolute priority of one or the other. The impact of practice upon theology and theology upon practice can be seen in theologian Clark M. Williamson's writings about prayer. Both Williamson's chapter on prayer in Adventures of the Spirit and his comments on the subject in Way of Blessing, Way of Life take the dominant prayer practices of his denomination, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), as an implicit framework of reference.' Both also raise theological challenges to certain of those prayer practices.

The authors of this essay share, in considerable measure, Williamson's relational and conversational theological framework. However, both also bring experience with methods of contemplative prayer that are seldom practiced in the Disciples tradition. Marti Steussy has practiced "waiting upon God" in both private devotion and her interactions with the Society of Friends (to which she belonged during her seminary years). Nancy Campbell has practiced contemplative prayer as a Roman Catholic laywoman and Benedictine Oblate who worships regularly with Benedictine and Carmelite communities. We will argue that although Williamson gives little attention to contemplative prayer in his writings, the practice fits naturally and productively into his theological framework.

We begin by agreeing with several of Williamson's key affirmations. We deeply agree with him that God's love is "receptive and responsive"; we do not pray to an impassive, unmoved mover.' We also agree with him that the particular practices usually referred to under the heading of "prayer" need to be undertaken in the larger context of a prayerful life. In particular, "a life of prayer requires to be accompanied by a life of usefulness to the neighbor," and "study and theological thinking" should be ranked "among the highest forms of prayer," a point Williamson often underscores with rabbinic references.3

While Williamson makes generous allowance for petitionary prayer (indeed, the petitions of Matthew's version of the Lord's Prayer structure his chapter on prayer in Adventures of the Spirit), he brings strong critique against some of the common forms of petitionary prayer. He says that we should not ask God to do things that we ought properly to do ourselves, nor should we suppose that either God's knowing or God's acting in regard to matters of concern are dependent upon our praying! With these points, too, the authors of this essay agree.

If the point of prayer is not to inform God of something that God doesn't know, or to elicit action from a God who would otherwise refrain from doing all that is possible for us, then what is it for? Though Williamson emphasizes that God is affected by our prayers, he suggests that the purpose of prayer is finally less for us to act upon God than for God to act upon us. Prayer "is not only our turning to God, but God's approach to us and a mode through which God accomplishes God's purposes." "Prayer is opening oneself to the leading of God's Spirit." "We pray, then, not to induce God to do our will, but to open ourselves to God's influence upon us that we may seek to do God's will."5

Williamson tells us that "even our praying that God's will may be done is possible only by the grace of creative interchange at work in and upon us." He goes so far as to say that "one of the chief problems with so much of our praying is that we are too full of ourselves when we pray." One might suppose that he would favor a form of prayer in which the human seeks to limit her own activity and wait instead upon the action of God. Yet Williamson tends to use very active verbs for the human role in prayer. He reminds us of Luther's dictum that we pray "to instruct ourselves" (note that he does not say, "to be instructed by God").' In prayer, he writes, "we praise . . . give thanks ... articulate our understanding ... and petition." "In prayer we re-present . we restate . . . we recall ... we respond."9 He particularly emphasizes, as noted above in connection with the Luther quote, the teaching function of prayer.

Didactic prayer makes good sense in a process metaphysic. In process thought, each of us, at each successive moment of our existence, is heir to the entire universe of the past." That past, primally "prehended," provides the foundational material upon which, in interaction with God's luring toward the best possibilities, we make the partly-constrained, partly-free decisions of our own concrete becomings.11 There is typically a great distance between our initial raw prehensions of the past and the highly processed structures of our conscious awareness (one reason why Whitehead coins a special technical term, "prehension," for the process, rather than using terms associated with conscious feeling or awareness)." We feel, highlight or repress, sift and organize our foundational experiences extensively before we ever consciously realize we have them. (Note the correspondence here to current models of human sense perception, which posit a large amount of processing of input through learned and perhaps also inherited paradigms prior to the point when what we experience as "raw" sensory data emerge in awareness.)