Brandon McGinley on Prayer as a Political Problem
Part 1: What are the prerequisites of prayer, and when is it private?
This month’s read is Fr. Jean Danielou’s “Prayer as a Political Problem” and my guest is Brandon McGinley, author of The Prodigal Church. I’ll be breaking our dialogue out into two parts, so stay tuned for part two next week. (And if you comment early enough, I may be able to weave some of your questions in).
Leah: Brandon, thank you so much for joining me for this month’s Tiny Book Club on the chapter “Prayer as a Political Problem” from Fr. Jean Danielou’s book of the same title. One of the clearest statements Fr. Danielou gives of his thesis comes early in this chapter:
The task of politics is to assure to men a city in which it will be possible for them to fulfil themselves completely, to have a full material, fraternal and spiritual life. It is for this reason that we consider that, in so far as it expresses this personal fulfilment of man in a particular dimension, prayer is a political problem; for a city which would make prayer impossible would fail to fulfil its role as a city.
This is the kind of claim that I’m most used to hearing in arguments that we should simply house the homeless unconditionally (which I support). Fr. Danielou is arguing that the ability to pray is similarly a prerequisite for a complete life. But what exactly needs to be furnished is more complicated than four walls and a roof.
Some of the barriers I can think of are the dearth of public transit to the Eastern Orthodox churches in Washington D.C., making it hard to attend liturgy without access to a car or a carpool. The erosion of blue laws makes it harder for people who work on Sunday to attend church (and there have never been corresponding protections for the Jewish Sabbath). High school (and even middle-school!) sports can make a totalizing claim on the weekend.
Where would you begin to help cities fulfil their roles as cities in Danielou’s sense?
Brandon: Fr. Danielou describes a problem of both time and space, with the modern city both failing to provide the prerequisites for a life of prayer for most everyday people and, often, actively frustrating the consecration of time and space. Specifically, he points to the lack of silence and solitude, which are essential to developing an integrated “personal existence” as opposed to the “relentlessly collective existence” encouraged by the organization of city life.
This is a problem, to get around to answering your question, that does not seem to admit of an incremental solution. The entire organization of our civilization is ordered to creating this exploitable “collective existence” while convincing us that we actually are being afforded all the consumer and political tools necessary to construct our own bespoke “personal existence” in the form of identity. But, in the absence of the relationship with Christ made possible by personal prayer and (foreshadowing the next question) the rites of the Church, that identity paradoxically resolves into a collective one defined by our reliance on the options—consumerist, political, racial, etc.—curated by the city (broadly speaking). Thus our sense of personal integrity and psychosocial well-being depends on a perpetual performance of identity (we recognize this academically but fail to do anything about it practically) that is, ultimately, to use Danielous’s word, depersonalizing. We will do and, importantly, buy anything that will build up our sense of self, only further cementing our reliance on that “collective existence.”
So, yes, as you say, there are some things we can do to make available more already-consecrated time and space: more transportation to churches and the liberation of the Lord’s Day from service to mammon. Less structural but perhaps with far-reaching consequences might be the intentional consecration of secularized time and space through, for instance, communal prayer (family rosaries, etc.) in public parks or liturgical processions on public streets. These actions, while not reforming the administration of the city, are little acts of rebellion that reclaim time and space for prayer, that remind us and passers-by in some small way of the universal sovereignty of Christ the King.
One more prosaic idea that just came to mind—and I’d be curious if you think my analysis of it is too cynical—is the setting-aside of “consecratable” time and space in the workplace: In our secular-pluralist city, this would presumably take the form of a “meditation room” or something. My suspicion is that the structure of such time and space would necessarily be captured by the self-obsessed language of the therapeutic (self-care, etc.) and become for most just another means of performing an identity (the kind of person who meditates), but at the very least it would be an acknowledgement that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our spreadsheets.
Leah: Your suggestion of consecratable time and space brings to mind an airport chapel—and I’ll admit I’ve never set foot in one. They always sound like a depressing proposition, though I may be underestimating their design. I’m suspicious that something intended to meet the needs of so many kinds of worship has a tendency to wind up too generic for any.
Then there’s this somewhat nauseating article about spiritual consultants for offices, who try to get workers to ground more of their identity in their jobs, and offer a menu of consumer friendly rituals for things like buying a domain name! I’d rather just see offices build expectations of time for prayer into the day, the way a lunch hour is an expectation (or was!). Having a set of paid days off for holy days of obligation, high holy days, silent meditation retreats, or reading philosophy at home would be lovely.
One of the questions that Jesse raised in the initial post was: Is it a mistake to talk about personal prayer as the most fundamental kind of prayer? I responded by sort of rejecting the premise, since the private prayer of a nun in a cloister or a hermit in a desert is united to the communion of saints in Heaven. I don’t know if Catholics can be said to believe in private prayer at all—just interior prayer. How would you respond to Jesse’s question?
Brandon: This is related to the subjective definition of prayer articulated by Fr. Danielou, which I found the least satisfying aspect of the selection. While the subjective experience of reaching out to divinity is essentially human and necessary for our comprehensive fulfillment, the incense that wafts (for instance) from a wiccan rite is different in kind, not degree, from that which wafts from a thurible during the Mass. We can scratch the itch of spirituality in ways that will satisfy the urge without satisfying our souls, and these can be not just neutral but destructive.
I’m going to try to be concise here, given all the moving parts, and we can get more precise later in the conversation if necessary.
First, the elevation of personal, interior prayer—especially for all the faithful—seems to me quite modern and not in keeping with the tradition of the Church. The liturgical prayer of the Church, culminating of course in the Mass, represents the complete integrity of prayer, personal and communal, supplication and sacrifice, etc. Like you, I reject the strict distinction. Which brings us to:
Second, I similarly reject the notion of “private” prayer in favor of “interior” or “mental” prayer (a discipline which does not come naturally to me and with which I struggle). I want to emphasize two things here: 1) Even as the Church elevates liturgical prayer and prescribed devotions, such as the rosary, mental prayer is still an irreplaceable support to maturation in holiness. 2) Even mental prayer has a political aspect—and not just in Danielou’s sense, which regards the organization of society to make such prayer as feasible as possible. Mental prayer is political because it is efficacious, because it is a participation in divine life that allows us to communicate that grace to others. This is not quantifiable or exploitable or harnessable, but it is real, and a political community that rejects this reality has rejected a fundamental support to its sustainability and legitimacy.
Leah: One thing I like about your book, The Prodigal Church, is that you talk about what it takes to renew the church at multiple levels: the individual, the family, the community of friends, the parish. How do you, personally, think about where to invest your efforts? Is one of these levels the best foundation to build out from, especially if you feel you are starting with only weak ties to any of them?
Brandon: It won’t surprise you that I think friendship is the lynchpin of renewal. The family is obviously essential, but everybody knows that already. And we can make an idol of the family, especially the nuclear household, that becomes isolating and fearful—a bunker mentality that preserves the security of the family at all costs, including the cost of social and spiritual well-being.
Friendship is where we learn and demonstrate that the virtues developed in the sharing of life natural to the family can, and must, be extended socially. Of course there are aspects of family life, in terms of property and intimacy, that are proper only to the family. But the habits of self-giving, of spontaneous hospitality, of ledgers of gift and gratitude rather than ledgers of credit and debt (and grievance) are the habits not just of familial love but of (as the popes say) a civilization of love.
This, I firmly believe in the context of networks of families, extends the grace specifically of the sacrament of matrimony, forming a kind of matrimonial matrix as families support one another in their missions. It demonstrates first to ourselves, and also to those around us, that a different, more open, more joyful, more gracious way of being in the world is possible. I think even on small scales—it doesn’t have to be “communes” or strictly-constituted “intentional communities”—this can be truly transformative.
We’ll continue the conversation next week, enlivened by your comments below.
Thanks for taking the time to answer my question! I love the way you talk about friendship, sociality, and (if I may extend it slightly) community as a foundation of religious life. I don't share some of your theology around marriage or grace, but the idea that living a religious life in relationship with other people is central to our relationship to God resonates deeply. Communal prayer, but also shared meals on the Sabbath and holiday gatherings are so central to a my religious life, and build a space where we are acting as servants of God in daily life. Especially as a person who moved to a new community shortly before lockdown began, I'm very much feeling the absence of those physically proximate friendships, and it has an impact on my religious observance in small powerful ways.
On the other hand, I'm still struggling with this idea of the city as hostile to religious life. I recognize that as a symbol of contemporary commercial, secular life, the way it commodifies identity and self, the city is very powerful. A place of loneliness among teeming millions, of spiritual isolation and poverty. And yet, this was not my experience of living in cities. Religious community in cities is some of the most vibrant and powerful I've ever seen. Cities are full of people looking for community, and for God, and they build spaces and relationships that reflect their search. Cities are full of communities, overlapping and fertile. The idea of the atomizing modern city, though not false, is only part of the story. In terms of creating time and space for prayer and religious life, cities are far more successful than suburbs (I've spent no time in rural communities, so I can't speak to those). I can only speak to my experience within Judaism here, so I apologize if this isn't universal (though I very strongly suspect that believers of other religious groups will have similar examples). Look at a block of office buildings in a city with a large Jewish population in the winter when the sun sets early and you will be able to find a prayer quorum praying the afternoon service. Search those same districts during the fall, and on the holiday of Sukkot (Feast of Tabernacles) you'll be able to track down a sukkah or two where observant Jews can eat a meal while observing the requirement to do so in a temporary dwelling. Obviously, this has to do with concentrations of observant Jews, and there are large cities where you won't find these things. But precisely because cities are large, dense and diverse they provide opportunity for like minded folks who care about building religious community to find each other and create their own space and time, whether with co-workers and office mates or neighbors. The administration of the city may not be as conducive as we would like to religious life and community (though I think it's far less hostile than you and Fr. Danielou's make it seem), but the space and structure of the city are extremely friendly to building them.
I love this formulation of “consecratable space.” I’ve definitely enjoyed living and working on a college campus over the past few years where meditation rooms and other contemplative spaces (including gardens and a nondenominational chapel) have always been available to me for prayer between classes. Much of the time that prayer was solitary, but occasionally I’d end up sharing prayer space with someone who’d come to the room to meditate, pray with a different tradition from mine, or just have lunch in peace. I came to really love that “airport-chapel” vibe and didn’t experience it as “generic” so much as ecumenical. Planning ecumenical encounters is hard, but facilitating them, it turns out, is actually pretty easy. But all of that is much more doable on a college campus than other types of workplaces - as Leah says, I’d much rather have an office job actually respect my lunch hour than provide a contemplative break room to eat it in.
Anyway, those campus spaces are all closed during the pandemic, so I’ve gone back to an older habit of mine: praying in cemeteries. Cemeteries, like parks, are free, open city spaces that lend themselves to solitary prayer, communal prayer, and sociality alike. They are also good places to invite people to perform the spiritual work of mercy that is praying for the living and the dead. I remember coming across an Orthodox Christian ministry that maintained cemeteries as a way of fulfilling the corresponding corporal work of mercy, burying the dead. You don’t need to have known somebody in their earthly life to clean off their grave, bring flowers and say a Rosary for their soul! And like I said, during pandemic times when we’re all thinking about death more than we might have, this is a good, concrete thing to do (a) outside (b) together (c) to face this moment head-on.
tldr memento mori. I honestly think grief brings people together in prayer more than anything else these days and I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing.