(Ir)religiosity

I ran across this in Walter Kaufmann’s prologue to his translation of Martin Buber’s I and Thou (an introduction which stands as an excellent piece writing in its own right).

[W]hy use religious terms?  Indeed, it might be better not to use them because they are always misunderstood. But what other terms are there?  We need a new language, and new poets to create it, and new ears to listen to it. Meanwhile, if we shut our ears to the old prophets who still speak more or less in the old tongues, using ancient words, occasionally in new ways, we shall have very little music. We are not so rich that we can do without tradition. Let [those who have] ears listen to it in a new way.

Jesus’ phrase “let those who have ears hear” is perhaps one of the most fascinating and enigmatic expressions in the entire New Testament.  It is so pregnant with meaning and life.  Too often I am afraid we try to force old readings into new wine-skins and end up hurting or even destroying both.  I am convinced that is why Jesus often spoke in parables — because such a medium inherently resists a static, colonizing hermeneutic.  Parables simply cannot be reduced to simple, “in a nutshell” type meanings.  They are complex, multi-faceted, life-giving narratives that invite the reader to participate in birthing meaning, in doing truth.  Like prisms, parables — if we have ears to hear — channel divine dynamism in multiple ways depending upon one’s vantage point or angle.  They abduct us, catching us off guard if we let them, and rupture our usual, predictable mode existence with divine excess and presence (or is it absence?).  I find that it is in the parables that we learn to see the face of the Other thereby see ourselves as (an)other.

But we must have ears to hear.

I’ve been learning to do just that.  And I’m finding that it is not easy and often demands that I forsake my familiar and comfortable reading for something that is unknown — something that makes me uneasy and uncomfortable.

In the process I rediscovered some old friends and have fallen in love with them all over again:  Augustine and Kierkegaard being chief among them.

Who are you rediscovering and re-reading?  Who have you met again with new ears to listen?

Reposted from Open Table Theology:

For quite some time my approach to prayer was nothing more than a glorified exercise in narcissism laced with all the right buzzwords and religious jargon.  I treated God like some sort of cosmic gumball machine.  Through my prayers I inserted the proper coinage, twisted the handle, and hoped what came out of the tube was a flavor of gum I liked.  My prayers consisted of elaborate wish lists containing all sorts of petitions and requests.  To be sure, I would throw in something every once in while about starving kids in a third world country to feel less guilty and hopefully pad my persuasive capital with God — as if God were taking orders from me, or flipping some sort of epic prayer coin to decided whether or not my request should be granted.   God, for me, was a better version of a Genie in a Bottle: except there was no bottle because God was always there to listen (I always wondered how God could be there to listen to everyone, but I never let it bother me too much) and I had an unlimited number of “wishes.”  The only catch was I would never know if my wishes would actually be granted.  Some would, others wouldn’t.  Sometimes the minor ones were granted while other more important ones were not.  I just assumed God arbitrarily picked which ones to honor and which ones to table.  So it went.

I have long since rejected that very trivial theology of prayer, but as I reflect on its implications I realize how important our understanding of prayer actually is.  It seems to me that prayer is often sidelined as a second or even third tier “issue” subservient to more important and pressing theological questions like the nature of God or theodicy or soteriology and so on.  For example, if you go to a local book store book on prayer (the quality of such books notwithstanding) are almost always placed in the “Christian Inspiration” section rather than the “Theology” section.  However, if theology is primarily about developing a sound and coherent word (logos) about God (theos) — however limiting and finite it may be — what could be more important than prayer?  If I am feebly and delicately trying to develop ideas about God, about the divine, about that which is beyond me and that which consumes me — which is what I have devoted the remainder of my life to doing — what could be more weighty and significant than my ideas about addressing the divine, than my approach to communicating with God, than the way in which I, to borrow from Brother Lawrence, practice the presence of God?

This is what I am trying to get at: prayer says more about our theology and our ideas of God than we realize; indeed, I would go so far as to claim that how we view prayer in some sense determines what we believe about the nature of God and vice versa.  If God is a deus ex machina, a mechanistic deity, a Big Daddy in the Sky who pulls strings for good people and cuts strings for bad people, then we will pray in a certain way.  And, like my example above, how we pray will reveal an understood theology whether we overtly claim it or not.  If we really want to “do theology” well and uncover all those areas in which the residue of our tacit assumptions about God still remain, then we had better take prayer seriously. Read the rest of this entry »

Rather, to borrow from Oswald Chambers, prayer changes me, altering the very fabric of my being and empowering me to better participate in the divine life.  The goal is to radically restructure my life as an ongoing act of prayer, a continual outworking of my wrestling with the timeless Augustinian question “what do I love when I love my God?”, and a faithful response to the Event that lays claim to me.

That is the nucleus of the post I wrote yesterday on prayer for Open Table Theology.  It should be published sometime later this month.

In the meantime, add the feed to your reader and join the in dialogical experiment!