Our September Read: Prayer as a Political Problem
Our featured guest is Brandon McGinley, author of The Prodigal Church
Thank you all for a lovely inaugural month. For me, the greatest pleasure of Tiny Book Club is getting to keep thinking about an article or essay that lingered with me. I really appreciated your comments and musical suggestions.
I’ve turned on the option for paid subscriptions for this newsletter, though, for the next few months at least, there will be no additional benefits to paying for the newsletter. It’s intended purely as a tip jar, for anyone who is interested.
I want to keep this project going, and (with my time limited by chasing down a baby who’s nearly walking) that’s easier if this project also brings in some income, as I portion out creative time between this and paid writing.
On to our second month!
Our reading is an excerpt from Fr. Jean Daniélou’s Prayer as a Political Problem. The book was published in 1967 and is long out of print in English. We are reading the second chapter, also titled “Prayer as a Political Problem” and available as a pdf here.
Fr. Daniélou writes from a Catholic perspective, but the excerpt below is my enticement for non-Catholic Tiny Book Clubbers, since the chapter makes a strong case that a society that doesn’t leave space for prayer doesn’t leave space for persons. (And for the Catholic readers, you may find he reminds you of Robert Cardinal Sarah).
Thus we have a problem of rhythm, of the pace of time. We also have the problem of the socialization of our lives. Even as prayer has need of a certain minimum of time, so also it has need of a certain minimum of solitude, a minimum of personal life. In the actual conditions in which men have to live today, this is practically impossible. Urban life sucks people up into a relentlessly collective existence. Père Depierre once said that one of the reasons why working men went to the cinema was to seek silence and solitude. It was only there that they could be free of the necessity of self, who no longer knows who he is, who has had to meet this never-ending barrage of demands from outside himself and who has ended by becoming depersonalized. The problem with which we have to deal here is not simply that of prayer. In a more general manner, we are concerned with the possibility of personal existence. This is not a problem for only the religious man alone. It is of interest to all men, for all are threatened with becoming mere units in a collective existence. It is obvious that some measure of solitude is essential for prayer to the extent that prayer is the meeting of faith and spiritual experience, the possibility, that is, for faith to become really part of a man. To the extent that faith fails to become an inner part of man, it tends to be nothing more than an external practice; and this is the danger that now threatens.
Our guest for this month is Brandon McGinley, the author of The Prodigal Church. I can praise the book by repeating my blurb for it: “a bracing work, rooted in a fierce love for the Church and Christ’s people.” And I can praise Brandon himself by saying what a pleasure it was to visit him in Pittsburgh, where his children gave me a tour of every toy in the basement. Brandon’s family and several other families in the area have built up a strong community that I look to as a model and an inspiration for my own family life.
The comments are open for your thoughts and questions to shape my discussion with Brandon. I’ll plan to post our full back-and-forth in the third week of September.
Ex libris,
Leah
This is a fascinating read, on any number of axes. I apologize if this comment is a bit premise rejecting, but reading this essay from a Jewish perspective, certain things jumped out at me, despite Fr. Daniélou's specific claim to universality . As I read him, he's understanding prayer as rooted firmly in the personal, as "service of the heart," as the Babylonian Talmud refers to prayer. His definition makes this sufficiently clear: "By prayer in this connection I mean spiritual experience orientated towards God." The social elements of religion are necessary to cultivate spiritual personalities which can pray with the appropriate devotion.
This understanding of prayer is, while not foreign to the Jewish tradition as I understand and have lived it, nevertheless somewhat marginal. Jewish prayer, though understood as service of the heart, has historically nevertheless been fundamentally and profoundly social. Specific required words are recited, ideally with a group of people (the larger the better, for "the glory of a king is in a large gathering), at specific times of day. There is space for personal prayer (Nahmanides argues that it may be biblically required to cry out to God at moments of crisis, independent of the standard liturgy, but this is an edge case), but personal prayer is a secondary type of prayer. Rather communal prayer, the act of standing in solidarity with one's community in front of God and meeting your obligations to Him, arranging one's life in terms of his commands and demands and building community around that, is primary. The personal isn't ignored in this, of course. Questions of how to find personal meaning in communal prayer, strategies of connecting with God through the mandated liturgy, of assuring that following the external forms leaves space for "service of the heart" are all important to Jewish thought around prayer. However, they rarely displace communal, public prayer from the center.
So, with this in mind, two thoughts/questions:
1) By asserting that social religion is at best the handmaiden of personal prayer, Fr. Daniélou writes off prayer as typically understood by one major non-Christian religious tradition, and I suspect more than a few others. He also fails to see the power of communal, mandated social prayer, independent of personal expression. The ways in which it creates community, ties individuals together, and builds a shared reality between worshipers, regardless what they may be feeling personally in the specific moment or act of prayer. Can this model do anything to address the larger issues he places front and center in this essay? I suspect so, but I'm curious what others think.
2) The second thought is just how profoundly political communal liturgical prayer inevitably is, in a way that personal prayer is not. It's an assertion of identity, of belonging. It's an act of building community and creating solidarity, all specifically done on the context of the relationship between human and God, independent of the subjective experience of prayer. In the context of Jewish communities, at least those that maintain the traditional liturgy, it happens three times a day, and so also requires building one's life around it. Personal prayer may cultivate certain attitudes, but communal prayer cultivates action. Can this be harnessed to build political culture? How?
There is much here for fruitful reflection, and in such a variety of directions. One spark that stood out for me was when I read, "If politics does not create the conditions in which man can completely fulfil himself, it becomes an impediment to that fulfilment." (p. 2) It made me think of John Rawls' idea to (if I remember this right) put comprehensive systems of belief outside of politics. Because these systems create intractable conflict, they cannot be used as a way to form or judge a political framework. And religion is often cited as an example of such a system.
But if Fr. Danielou is right, Rawls' approach is self-defeating from a human level because it prevents our flourishing. It forces us to bracket an essential part of who we are as merely interior. In a sense, our prayer is not allowed to be social because it would be too politically disruptive. I wonder if the outburst of strongly moralistic political ideologies on the left and the right is the result of the repression of the social dimension of prayer, as broadly conceived here by Fr. Danielou. He speaks again and again of how hard it is for most to pray when the environment works against it. Perhaps our environment has not simply made prayer difficult, but has perverted the impulse into something angry and hateful out of frustration.