Poetry and prayer

I came across an interesting talk on prayer by Steven Shakespeare, a priest in the Church of England and the chaplain at Liverpool Hope University (hat tip to Jonathan). It's long, but here it is ....

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Speak to us of prayers
by Steven Shakespeare

(Given at "What shall we say?" at St Peter's Church Walworth: 9th Feb 2009)

As you might expect, I spend a lot of time on my knees.

Let me tell you about a couple of those occasions.

I am on my knees. Ben is not impressed. Poo has leaked out of his nappy up his back. I have it on my hands. I know I need to get his vest over his head and without getting poo in his hair and on his face. I know that I need to clean his bum and put a new nappy on. I know I need to stop him wriggling off the mat or putting his hands in the mess. I know I need something to wipe him with and a bag for the nappy and I know I got those things out before I started and now they are underneath me or underneath Ben or perhaps they have disappeared in the time space continuum. I know all this but I do not know, and I am panicking. 'O my God!' I say to no one in particular.

I am on my knees. Ben has managed to get the soap off me and then rub his eyes. This new sensation is really not all that much fun for him. He tries to stand up in the bath, screaming with pain and indignation. I am trying anything, duck impressions, funny faces, singing, it is like a children's TV show from hell. How's it going? calls Sally. Jesus Christ! I sigh.

I am on my knees. Ben is looking round expectantly. I start to chase him. He squeals with delight as he shuffles away then lets me catch and tickle him. He does the sign for more and speeds away again. My right knee hurts for some reason as I lumber off again. I wonder again about the wisdom of starting a family at nearly 40 years old. God help me, I groan.

Why am I telling you this? Am I trying to impress you with my parental credentials trying to convince you that I'm a good dad and a new man who gets his hands dirty. Hardly. I am sure that I am pretty mediocre as a parent. I am also sure that though I love Ben more than anything, there are times, oh God yes there are times, when I would rather be doing anything else than changing another nappy.

Of course I've not really dwelt on the many times in a day when we laugh together and get lost playing with his trains, or share a story, or go and feed the birds and have a go on the swings. It just seems that I don't really invoke God so much at those times.

'Speak to us of prayers,' I've been asked - and I feel I have to make a confession. I have to confess my unknowing. Do I, do we, really know what we are doing when we pray? Do we know whom we are addressing, or what language to use? Should we know? Is prayer about knowing those things? Or is it something else?

The time I spend on my knees with Ben, especially times I've described - they don't have much in the way of silence and serenity. They don't have much space for pebble stroking spirituality. But they have a power and a rawness and a fleshy, messy vulnerability, which, it seems to me, must be something to do with prayer. And so my little curses and complaints to God aren't just casual blasphemy. They really are prayers, even if I do not know it at the time.

They also say something to me about inclusion, and the process of writing what I rather pretentiously called Prayers for an Inclusive Church.

The most important thing I want to say is that inclusive language is about more than just changing the words. It is not about adopting a stance of neutrality, ironing out our pronouns, balancing our metaphors, whilst leaving the rest of the world unchanged. It is about a different approach to prayer, a different understanding of God, a different connection to others and to the earth. It is prayer embodied, wounded, desiring, touching, giving birth. A prayer with dirty hands.

Don't get me wrong. I think that language is vital. But language is more than a set of labels describing a world out there. It is creative. It shapes what we see and how we experience reality. It defines who is allowed to speak and on what terms. Word and world belong to one another. To change the way we speak and pray and promise is to change the way the world is. It is a risky business, because it unsettles our structures of power. It speaks another word, a word from elsewhere.

Christians should know this. After all, in our own myth of beginnings, in the story of genesis, it is the word that works with the Spirit and the welcoming womb of the deep to bring the world into being. It is the word made flesh which makes a new creation possible, flesh that is circumcised, touched, embraced, scourged, broken, renewed.

So I want to talk about how I think about writing and using inclusive prayers as a part of wider vision of what it means to believe in an inclusive God. I'm going to talk under three brief headings, and there will be a chance for you to reflect back your own thoughts, and time for some questions or comments at the end.

The three headings are: the wounded word; intervention and transformation.

The Wounded Word

I don't claim to write poetry. That would be far too pretentious. But I try to learn something from what poets do. Poetry dies if it is dissected, or boiled down to some trite meaning or moral. But there are ways of thinking about what poetry does which are perhaps more true to its power.

The philosopher Derrida writes of a paradox at the heart of the poem. On the one had it is something very particular. It is the product of an individual voice, which sounds from a very specific date and context. The very nature of poetry defies translation, because part of its essence is to draw our attention to the music and rhythm of language. The poem is a material process, something we feel beneath our tongue, not just a gateway to an abstract or spiritual truth. The poem is never pure.

However, there is another side to the poem, because it is also an act of communication. Although it is marked in its very being with its time and place of origin, if it is to speak to others, it must have an openness about it, it must reach out beyond itself. It works not only through the harmony of words, but through the spaces and silences between them, through the tensions and ruptures that create a new space in which to read the poem and the world differently, in ever new contexts.

Derrida compares the poem to the wound of circumcision. Circumcision happens at a particular date, a mark left on the body of a single individual. But its meaning escapes the possession of any one person, even the one to whom it happened. The mark is also a wound, an opening of the body to what is other.

I suggest that prayer shares this dynamic with poetry. I am not a fan of prayers made up by committees, or by any process that makes them, flat, abstract and disconnected from life. If prayers are a product of a collective process, then I think it is best if they come from a group that is self-aware, self-critical, committed to a vision. Otherwise, I think that prayer needs an individual voice. Why? Because it is about a relationship and a faith which can never become just another item of public knowledge. There is always something scandalous and particular at the heart of prayer: that I at this moment, in all my limitation, should address and be called by the infinite and the unconditional. Prayer is the moment when I am awoken, called - but the call only ever comes to particular flesh and blood people, with lives and loves and stories of their own. The otherness of God speaks to the otherness of each and every one of us.

The written prayer has to preserve something of that otherness. But in the process it must also reach out beyond the particular to engage with the lives and stories of others. It needs to offer a kind of space, in which others can find a lodging, in which they can hear the echo of a call addressed to them. Prayer by its very nature escapes the rules laid down by any church. Of course it is part of a tradition, and it will borrow its language and imagery. But if the prayer is also to be a little like a poem, it must express something unique, a truth that cannot be reduced to a dogma, an idea, a moral. A truth in relationship.

So I value those poets who write about prayer, and whose writing becomes a kind of prayer. I want at this point to draw your attention to the poems I have reproduced on the handout, from two favourite poets, R S Thomas and Carol Anne Duffy. I am drawn to them by the way in which the prayer they articulate breaks out of its containment in religiously approved channels. It becomes dispersed into the world, broken and offered under different forms and names. It is perhaps no coincidence that each poem speaks of darkness and the night: we are not dealing with the clarity of light, knowledge and certainty. There is an unknowing which is essential to the most faithful prayer.

I'll read the poems, and then I invite you to talk with one or two of your neighbours. What does each poem say to you about the nature of prayer? Where does it ring true What might be lacking?

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Prayer by Carol Ann Duffy

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child's name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer -
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.


The Other by R. S. Thomas

There are nights that are so still
that I can hear the small owl calling
far off and a fox barking
miles away. It is then that I lie
in the lean hours awake listening
to the swell born somewhere in the Atlantic
rising and falling, rising and falling
wave on wave on the long shore
by the village, that is without light
and companionless. And the thought comes
of that other being who is awake, too,
letting our prayers break on him,
not like this for a few hours,
but for days, years, for eternity.

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May the other come to you this day.
Let your prayers and hearts break upon him
as he is broken for you.

The word is wounded - language becomes eucharist: embodied, both strong and vulnerable, broken and shared. For me prayer is an invitation into that sacrament of the word made flesh.

Intervention

But what does prayer do? you may be asking. What difference does it make? It's a good question, though we often look for the answer in the wrong place. Perhaps because we think that it is a matter of getting an answer.

I find myself increasingly at odds with the idea of a God who intervenes arbitrarily in the world because certain people or enough people pray for this or that to happen. I've heard people pray that the traffic might not be congested so others can attend a prayer rally, and I picture God dividing cars on the M25 like the waters of the red sea. I've heard tell of prayer for money, and the next day an envelope drops through the door with just the right amount. I have tried this myself and the only answer I get is that the cheque is in the post.

I have heard much more personal and moving stories of recovery from illness, of new purpose and direction all attributed to the power of prayer. I do not doubt that lives have been changed, but I wonder about this kind of power. As a symbol on which to focus gratitude I can understand it. But as a theory about God, it leaves a lot to be desired. It conjures an image of the divine controller, pulling the levers to determine what happens on earth. And always there is the resounding silence that settles over those whose prayer is not answered, those who do not recover. Always the individual successes are dwarfed by the reality: mass rape in the eastern Congo, genocide in Darfur, kids addicted to knives and drugs in our cities, a finance system driven instance by its own excess, children blown to bits in Gaza. The litany seems endless. No wonder we cling to crumbs.

But I think we have got things the wrong way round. As I put it in the introduction to my book, perhaps prayer is the intervention it asks for. Prayer is the point at which our words, our bodies, our communities express their longing and are addressed by God. God's call is not a guarantee of success or a plan that rides roughshod over our freedom. It is invitation. There is judgement in that invitation too, a judgement upon our preference for lies over truth, exclusion over hospitality, indifference over commitment. But it is the judgement spoken by the wounded word who offers his body and blood as food and drink.

Prayer opens our particular words, our bodies, our stories, to the other who cannot be contained by our definitions and preconceived ideas. God is not a bigger and better reflection of our own dreams to have control and domination over life (and one another), but a wholly other way, a wholly other kind of power.

It seems to me that an inclusive way of praying needs to be rooted in an inclusive theology. Of course, inclusivity is itself just an idea, and one that is open to abuse. If by inclusive I just mean that I have the truth and you are welcome to join me on my terms, then I am peddling the inclusion of empire. If I mean that all are welcome as long as everyone stops harping on about what makes them different, then I am selling the inclusion of the marketplace, which reduces everyone to the level of sameness, to being a consumer.

The inclusion I suspect is wanted by those of us here today is different: it is an intervention. It has to be worldly and incarnate and challenging, which is why it will focus on specific issues from time to time: what does it mean that my flesh is coloured white? Why have I been so unwilling to see that? What does it means to associate blackness with what is evil and negative? Why do I pity or deride those whose bodies depart from what I consider to be the norm? Why do I associate women with a fixed set of characteristics which stops me hearing what they say when they speak for themselves? What fear drives me to set up ideas of straightness, against which any other form of sexuality is judged deviant?

Inclusion intervenes. It is the process by which those at the margins redefine what it means to belong, what power is, what humanity is. It puts the time out of joint and identities under threat.

Prayer is the place where that threat comes home to us, and we discover that it is a gracious invitation to be challenged and changed. Our prayer life has to draw on many particular voices. A collection like the one I have written can be a help, but obviously it is only a partial resource, and many will find it does not work or resonate for them. The process of selecting, using and creating prayers needs to be a shared one, so the life of a community becomes enriched by new strands woven into the tapestry of its worship.

In my own case, I chose a certain set of constraints: to write prayers that reflected the set gospel readings over the common three year lectionary, along with extra material appropriate for a celebration of the eucharist for each season. It was a conscious decision. For one thing it made the collection more readily usable by those following the lectionary. But it also meant I had soil in which to root my own responses, in which my own voice could have a chance to engage with themes in the gospels that connected with where people find themselves in the world.

I have been enriched a great deal by theology and liturgy that comes from people and groups with a commitment to what I would call an inclusive vision of God. Many of you will know and use the prayers written by Janet Morley, Jim Cotter, the Iona Community and so on. They are all very different. What they share is a refusal to see prayer and faith isolated from the life of the body and the senses, from friendship, sex and desire, from real experiences of poverty, injustice and liberation. They also engage on a deep level with the Christian tradition, in a way which is both critical and creative - a living testimony to the call to proclaim the gospel afresh in every generation.

These are both resources and inspiration, for they invite us to reflect on the kind of communities of faith and prayer we are part of. Can we take the risk of sharing out the creation of liturgy, without our worship just becoming a hotch potch of personal preferences? This where I believe we need to hold on to a vision of inclusive theology. It will be a dynamic work in progress, not a set of fixed positions. But it will orient us, because it will focus on the God who lets life come into being without controlling it, who sets us free from the slavery of having our nature defined in advance, who crosses over the boundaries between male and female, slave and free, white and black, who is embodied in a form that is not perfect or normal, whose love resists the hold that all the empires of death claim to have over us.

Prayer is an intervention, because it opens us to the coming of this God, a God embodied in the earth and in the face of every other person we meet, a God therefore whose faces and names are many. This is not relativism and anything goes, but a costly faithfulness to what takes hold of us in grace and revelation.

For those of us who are part of churches which call for us to use authorised prayers in worship, there is of course a question as to how far we can go in using or creating other resources. Common worship does have a positive role to play in providing a shared language of prayer and protection from small cliques of clergy or others who wish to impose their own ways of worshipping on whole communities. However, common worship can never be a settled thing. And risks have to be taken. Without risks there would have been no rebellion against slavery, no votes for women, no end to an all male priesthood, and there will be no end to institutional homophobia.

Prayer is part of that risk-taking. I believe it should not just confirm us in a common and given identity, it should expose us to the other and to the limits of our generosity. As Kathy Galloway puts it, communities of hope are always being broken open - otherwise hope dies, community becomes conformity, faithfulness becomes submission to a hierarchy. When we pray, if we pray, empires should tremble and primates should not sit so comfortably on their thrones.

Even when we use the authorised words, of course, they offer rich resources for re-imagining our life together. Inclusive prayer needs to be inclusive of music, symbol, movement, colour, to ways of incarnating worship in the life of the world.

Time doesn't permit me to talk about this as it deserves. So let me ask you to reflect instead on some very short examples of (irregular and unauthorised) prayers that I have written, which are included on the handout.

One is a set of responses composed for a small prayer group of which I'm part. We meet monthly, and take it in turns to create a liturgy or reflection. Then we eat together. With the right marketing, it could be as big as the Alpha course.

This particular example I've offered is from a liturgy that reflected upon the surprise, mystery and new possibilities that are part of our encounters with others, in which we also experience a trace of the divine presence. The quote from the philosopher Luce Irigaray and the responses which follow are put together to suggest different ways to think about God - not just a change of image, but an invitation to change ourselves in the light of God's otherness.

The second prayer is one from Prayers for an Inclusive Church. It is the one for the second Sunday in Lent in year A, for which the set gospel is John 3.1-17, the story of Nicodemus coming to Jesus by night. It tries to draw on the imagery of that story to invite us into a place of transformation: the darkness in which we desperately seek knowledge becomes a welcoming womb, frozen idols are bypassed by a Spirit wild in its passion. In its brevity, I hope it intimates something of the open horizon for which we are born anew.

I invite you to read the prayers and then again discuss with your neighbour what resonates with you and what does not. You might also like to ask yourself: how would I articulate the otherness and freedom of God? What images or words would strike that chord?

From the opening of a small group prayer service on the theme of openness to the other:

Life always opens to what happens . . . A future coming not measured by the transcendence of death but by the call to birth of the self and the other. For which each one arranges and rearranges the environment, the body and the cradle, without closing off any aspect of a room, a house, an identity. (Luce Irigaray)

You will come like a thief in the night
And our hearts will be stolen away

You will come dancing on the other wind
And we will reel from the straight and narrow

You will come with strangeness in your touch
And our flesh shall long for your difference

You will come without a single name
And we will be unmade, unfinished, a wonder to ourselves

From Prayers for an Inclusive Church, Year A Lent 2, based on John 3.1-17

Holy God,
Whose wild Spirit's breath
Defies our frozen idols;
Take the night time of our fear
and make it a welcoming womb
for us and all the world.
Through Jesus Christ, in whom we are born anew.
Amen.

Transformation

I said I would talk under three headings: the wounded word, intervention and transformation. However I find that in addressing the other two themes, I have been talking about transformation all along.

Prayer does not leave us unchanged. On a level deeper then words, it embeds in us a way of relating to God. Unless we reflect on what we are doing with prayer, it would well deposit in us ways of relating to God which are unreal, alienating and oppressive. If God takes the risk of incarnation, it is not just to gave a thumbs up to the status quo, but to change it: from the margins, turning the world upside down and inside out, the word assumes and heals our whole humanity. All of it.

I am not saying we should make our prayers didactic, finger wagging exercises in saying the politically correct things. Nor should they become shopping lists of every social issue that we face. Such prayers risk remaining on the surface, alienating us further from grace. Inclusion too can become a doctrine and a dogma. Prayer always should open us to the other, test the boundaries of what can be known and said, and invite us into a space of deeper transformation. Of new birth, midwifed by the Spirit.

Earlier I mentioned the philosopher Derrida, who had a long and complex relationship with religious ideas and themes. He wrote once that he rightly passed for an atheist. However, he also confessed that he prayed all the time and that the constancy of God in his life found other names. At a conference, he was once asked about what prayer meant for him. He replied that his experience of prayer was always divided. On the one hand there was the child imagining a just father or forgiving mother. But on the other hand there was the sceptical adult, always asking what is this God? Is there such a God? Derrida argues that this questioning is not the opposite of prayer. He says 'these questions are part of my experience of prayer, and 'the suspension of certainty is part of the prayer'. It keeps open the otherness of God, stops us fixing God in advance. We might add that it stops us deciding in advance who reflects God's image

Prayer suspends our certainty. Not because we are paralysed by indecision, no: but because only in unknowing can we meet the other and be set free by their difference from us. By grace.

Prayer is this encounter. May it always surprise us.

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