I was doing some reading recently on spiritual direction and came across these lines from the late pastor, teacher, and writer Eugene Peterson and I thought it was apropos to our theme for the year in The Human & the Holy (H&H). In his book The Contemplative Pastor he writes:

“The assumption of spirituality is that always God is doing
something before I know it. So the task is not to get God to do something I think needs to be done, but to become aware of what God is doing so that I can respond to it and participate and take delight in it.”

One of the results of a rigid anthropomorphizing of God1 is that it tends to diminish God, prayer, and us all at the same time. It diminishes us to self-centered, atomized individuals. It reduces prayer to asking for things we want or think we need. It reduces God to a sort of cosmic bellhop who, often without so much as a coin tip, is expected to fetch, carry, or bring what we deem we need when we need it. It reduces religion, or if you prefer, spirituality or faith, to the satisfaction of human needs. Rabbi Heschel is a great one for suggesting that we’ve got it all backwards.

The great teachers and practitioners of prayer tell us that true prayer involves a “recentering of subjectivity” from the self to God. Here we not only “see” that we are not the central attraction but also willingly realign ourselves or allow ourselves to be realigned so that the centripetal and centrifugal force in our lives is the Divine. Poet T.S. Eliot suggests not only that this is the “still point of the turning world” (i.e. of all that is) but also that “at the still point, there the dance is” and that “there is only the dance.”

In one sentence Peterson manages to use three of my favorite words to describe the heart of any authentic, passionate spirituality:

respond, participate, and delight

Rather than reducing God or religion or spirituality or faith (take your pick) to the satisfaction of our needs and wants, the spiritual life is embodied in our response which is our participation in the action of the Spirit alive in our lives and in the world. This is the dance we are invited to dance. And the dance is our prayer. And our prayer is our delight because we do not dance alone.

When in contemplative prayer we open ourselves to this fundamental restructuring at the center of our being, we experience a radical shift of perception. We begin to see from a divine perspective. It’s no longer simply or solely about “me,” about my needs and my wants and instead about being on the lookout for where the Spirit is moving, and then joining ourselves to that grace-filled movement (however awkward or painful the dance).

The governing preoccupation — “What are you doing for me [God}” – becomes the inquisitive concern — “What are you doing God (and how can I participate)?” It is this radical shift toward life and prayer as response and participation that brings us the truest delight. The delight is this new or renewed intentional commitment to see, sense, hear, taste, where God is acting, exiled, singing, suffering, gestating, or dancing in the world and then to respond accordingly in love. To be a person of faith, to lean into the Mystery that is dancing in and through all that is, is to dare to believe that the something that God is always doing – in the end, always plants love, always offers liberation, always brings life. For this reason prayer is not just what enlivens us but whatever we do to enliven others and this resplendent but broken world.

Extravagant Blessings,

Dan

1 Ascribing human attributes to God.