Praying for and with
When prayer is self-implicating
I attend an Anglican parish in Lisbon, Portugal, where I now live. This past Sunday, one of the biddings during the prayers of the people was as follows (I am paraphrasing from memory):
“For the people of the United States, especially those held in detention camps, and for the repose of the soul of Renee Nicole Good, killed by an I.C.E. agent in Minneapolis.”
To my friends in the U.S.: let that just sink in for a minute.
It hit me hard as I heard it. I was grateful for the naming of this awful truth and its inclusion in the Church’s intercessions, but it also cut right through my myopia and privilege. So often, I have prayed for other people suffering in far-away places; mindful of their need but not really directly affected by it or much willing to think about my complicity in it. I prayed for them but not with them; my prayer was not self-implicating.
This felt different.
Now, I was praying for those suffering in a far-away place who were “my people.” I feel viscerally the pain and the hope carried in their bodies. I know my connection with the history, the choices, the failures that have brought them to this place (again): terrorized, disappeared, murdered. I feel both the limitations of my capacity to address their plight and my responsibility to do so. I pray with them, not only for them.
I don’t mean to minimize the importance of my previous prayers for those suffering in far-away places – or anyone else’s. The simple act of naming is the first step in acknowledging reality. Sometimes, it even pierces my defended heart. I am capable of being moved, sometimes to tears, by the plight of people I have never met. There is nothing wrong with praying for people. It makes us more aware, more human.
But praying with them is next level prayer. It can open apertures of divine action, facilitating energetic shifts that can support positive change. It does so, in part, because it is self-implicating, because it changes the one praying. But it also creates new opportunities for God to act. This was the great insight of Walter Wink when he wrote,
No doubt our intercessions sometimes change us as we open ourselves to new possibilities we had not guessed. No doubt our prayers to God reflect back upon us as a divine command to become the answer to our prayer. But if we are to take the biblical understanding seriously at all, intercession is more than that. It changes the world and it changes what is possible to God. It creates an island of relative freedom in a world gripped by an unholy necessity. A new force field appears that hitherto was only potential. The entire configuration changes as the result of the change of a single part [emphasis added]. An aperture opens in the praying person, permitting God to act without violating human freedom. The change in even one person thus changes what God can thereby do in that world.[1]
Praying “for” is an act of sympathy. Praying “with” is an act of empathy.
Happy is the monk who views the welfare and progress of all men with as much joy as if it were his own. Happy is the monk who considers all men as god – after God.[2]
In praying “with” them, we perceive the neighbor, however far away, as another self – as “my people.” We realize our inherent connection and intuitively knowing how to respond – or not to respond; to make a decision about how I am called to act or not to act, rather than react or simply ignore what is happening. This calls for discernment.
For us to be this open and vulnerable to both the pain of the world and the anguish of God is unendurable, unless it is matched with a precise sense of divine vocation. We must let all the pain picked up by our receptors pass through us. But then we must not attempt to mend it all ourselves, but to do only what God calls us to do, and not one more thing.[3]
My experience on Sunday also reminded me that people are and have been praying for and with me, for and with us, for a long time. People far away. People we will never meet; some of them since before we were born. Our siblings across the whole wide world are praying for us and with us, and the saints and angels and realized beings continue to pour their energy into us and through us and urge us to become the answer to our prayers. The whole creation groans in longing for the revelation of the children of God – for us and with us.[4]
We are not alone. It is not all up to me. But I must do my part, trusting that you will do yours, with God’s help.
I will continue to pray for people, and I hope they pray for me. But I hope to pray with them, too, and to extend the circle of “my people” until the whole creation is made new.[5]
[1] Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), p. 302.
[2] Evagrius Ponticus, Chapters on Prayer 122 -123. Evagrius was a Christian monk writing in 4th Century Egypt. To pray for others is to pray for God and with God-in-us.
[3] Wink, p. 307.
[4] Romans 8:19-23.
[5] Revelation 21:1-5.
Amen!
Barbara