Doug Muder’s notes on Why Christianity Must Change or Die by John Shelby Spong

9. The Meaning of Prayer in a World With No External Deity

Can we still pray if there is no theistic deity who can respond personally to our prayers? -- p 135

Spong describes his personal struggle with the idea of prayer, going back to his seminary days, and continuing into his career as a priest and then a bishop.

Yet, despite this sometimes frenzied, but at least persistent, effort, I could not make prayer, as it has been traditionally understood, have meaning for me. The real reason, I now believe, was not my spiritual ineptitude, but rather than the God to whom I had been taught to pray was in fact fading from my view. -- p 137

He points out that the nature of prayer has always been changing, and that in fact the Lord's Prayer was Jesus' attempt to redefine prayer for his day.

The definition of God implicit in the Lord's Prayer cannot be the operative definition for us today. -- p 140

When his wife had cancer, the churches in their diocese began praying for her, and some people gave those prayers credit for the fact that she lived longer (6 1/2 years) than expected. But Spong realized at some point that these prayers were directed at her because he had the social status of being a bishop. Did he want to believe in a God whose actions were influenced by human social status? He describes this as a "final nail in the coffin" of his old beliefs about prayer.

In my attempt to rebuild and to recreate the experience of prayer, I begin by asserting that there is something deep inside me, and I suspect deep inside ever other person, that requires us to commune with the source of life. -- p 142

[The presence of God] calls me into wholeness. It is something powerful that impinges on my consciousness and seems to invite me beyond the barriers of my security and even beyond the barriers of my humanity. It is something that nudges me into community and into caring for others. I address this presence as a Thou, not because it is a personal being, but because it seems always to call me into a deeper sense of personhood. -- p 143

"This is what God is," I want to say, "and prayer is that experience of meeting God." -- p 143

So praying and living deeply, richly, and fully have become for me almost indistinguishable. -- p 144

I can only imagine, I could never guarantee, that when life is lived this way, an enormous amount of spiritual energy is loosed into the body politic of the whole society. I can imagine that this energy is an agent in bringing wholeness and even healing. But I do not trust anyone's effort to explain exactly how it works or to take credit for its effectiveness. -- p 144

The deity I worship is rather part of who I am individually and corporately. So praying can never be separated from acting. -- p 147

Prayer is the recognition that holiness is found in the center of life and that it involves the deliberate decision to seek to live into that holiness by modeling it and by giving it away. -- p 148

Is that enough to justify my self-identity as a person of prayer? I can respond only by saying that it is for me. I invite others to test it by trying it, living it, risking it, for that is the only way that I now know that one can learn how to pray. But my conviction is that holiness is there to be found. God is the presence in whom my being comes alive. -- p 148