Charting a New Reformation
Part XXXIV – Thesis #10, Prayer (continued), Prayer is Being not Doing
Prayer does not bring a theistic God to our aid. It does not protect us from danger, sickness or death. Life confronts us with the truth of that reality time after time. What then is prayer? Is it anything more than pious smoke and mirrors? I think it is, but before I could see that the paradigm by which we understand prayer had to be turned upside down. That is what happened to me in an experience I shall now describe. This story does not define the nature of prayer, but for me it served to illustrate its meaning. Prayer is not about the attempt to change reality, it is about approaching reality in a dramatically different way. The time of this story was around 1970. Its meaning, however, became for me not just memorable, but timeless.
I had been the rector of St. Paul’s Church in Richmond, Virginia, for less than a year when I had a phone call in my office in the mid-morning. “Jack,” the voice said, “this is Cornelia. I am in the University Hospital in Charlottesville and I wonder if you could come to see me. It is fairly urgent. I would like to talk with you as soon as possible.” I recognized this person immediately. She was an active member in the diocese where I had previously served, working with me closely on a couple of vital projects. She lived in a small Appalachian town in southwestern Virginia. She was in her early forties, the wife of a country doctor and the mother of three children, who ranged in age between 9 and 14. About five years older than I, she was a lovely person in every way. Her home in the Appalachian region of Southwestern Virginia did not offer this well-educated woman many activities for intellectual engagement, so she met this need by becoming deeply involved in the life of the diocese that centered itself in Roanoke, Virginia’s largest western city. It was in the pursuit of these goals that Cornelia and I met and developed a friendship. I responded to her opening words on the telephone by saying: “What’s wrong, Cornelia?”
“I would rather not talk about it on the phone,” she said, “but if you could come and soon, I would greatly appreciate it.” Of course I could come and I did. Clearing my calendar for the next day, I left about noon for the hour and a quarter drive to Charlottesville. By the time I parked, made my way into the hospital, navigating the usual entry and directional procedures and arrived at her room, it was about 2:00 pm.
She greeted me with a smile. Her dark hair contrasted with the white sheets and pillow cases on her hospital bed. There was an ominous mood in the air that did not lend itself to small talk. So I immediately pulled up a chair to the side of her bed and prepared to listen to her story. “Tell me what’s going on,” I said.
It was not easy. It started with a lingering cough, she said, followed by a lack of energy. Finally, following her husband’s advice she made an appointment to see her doctor, who lived and practiced in Roanoke. He examined her in a routine manner and then ordered some diagnostic tests to be done. When the results of these tests came back, alarm bells were set off. Additional, more sophisticated, tests and x-rays were ordered. These confirmed a metastatic carcinoma. The primary lesion was located, however, in her pancreas. The diagnosis of pancreatic cancer is almost always one that offers little hope. It is a kind of hidden malignancy that reveals no overt symptoms until it is already too late to treat them. Doctors then, as now, do not like to put time limits on life expectancy for every disease and every patient is different. There was, however, an inexorable sense about this diagnosis and she was already embracing the fact that in all probability she had a short time to live, possibly six months or less. I reeled emotionally under the impact of what she was saying and tried to imagine how this young woman, her husband and her children were coping with this news. Choking down my own emotions, I spoke softly to her and asked only one question, “Tell me what this does to you.” That question opened the door to what was probably the most remarkable and meaningful conversation I have ever had with anyone in my entire life.
There is a radical honesty that engulfs both the person and all of his or her relationships when the conversation moves to the far side of a fatal diagnosis. All pretending ceases. It is as if every barrier is lowered and the people meet in a way that is rare indeed. I listened while she roamed over the terrain of her life. Her husband was the kind of doctor whose style of practice took him all over that part of Appalachia. He was a solo practitioner, who was deeply involved in the lives of his patients. He thought nothing of going out at all hours of the night to deliver a baby, to set a broken bone, to attend to one having a heart attack or to treat a sick baby with a raging fever. This type of medical practice depended on his wife. She kept the children safe and got them off to school in the morning. Her death would necessitate radical changes in his life. She was at that moment embracing this reality. Then she turned to her children and told me about the pain of wondering how they would cope without a mother. They not only needed her, but they depended on her for their stability. She was also dealing with the sense of loss that she would experience. She would never see any of her children graduate from high school or a university. She would never know who they would marry or how their lives and careers would develop. She would never know or see any of her grandchildren. The emotional landscape on which she was walking in this conversation was incredibly painful. She neither ignored nor repressed any of her feelings.
Next she turned to other relationships of both family and friends and described to me what she thought her death would mean to each of them. What happens when a relationship of love and friendship is suddenly removed? Life shrinks for the remaining ones. The pain of loss creates a vacuum in the lives of both her family and friends, who once encircled her with love. Who, she wondered, would fill the places she had once occupied? How would each adjust? It is always harder for some to adjust to loss than others. Would there be some of those whom she loved the most, who would not be able to adjust at all? Would there be some who might never quite recover?
For almost three hours, we walked over the peaks and valleys of her life. I felt her hurt and tried as best I could to enter into and to share in those feelings. A sharing of life that reaches this depth creates a bond that one cannot describe. Those hours would forever remain indelible in my life. The time had flown by, it seemed, and looking at my watch I noted that it was 5:00 PM. I had already violated one of the primary rules of pastoral ministry. One does not spend three hours in a patient’s room! I was emotionally drained and I suspected that Cornelia was also. So I began to draw the conversation to a close and prepared to take my leave.
At this time, I also found myself shifting gears away from my role as her friend and into my professional role as a priest. “Cornelia,” I said as I stood to leave, “may I offer a prayer for you and with you?” She did not object. If I had some need to pray, she could deal with that. Perhaps she felt that she owed me this religious favor, since I had spent an inordinate amount of time with her. So, she acquiesced. Taking her hand in mine, I strung together a series of religious clichés that I had used many times before. I knew how to do that. These words clearly met some of my needs, but they added little, if anything, to the meaning or to the depth of this visit. Then promising to see her again, I departed and made my way back to Richmond feeling strangely ill at ease. It was a slightly longer trip returning because of the traffic, so I had more time to think. On that journey home I compared the significance of our conversation, during which I had entered so deeply into her fear and anxiety, which made it at one and the same time both profoundly painful and profoundly real, with the shallowness of my “prayer,” which was so mundane and so perfunctory. Which part of that visit was the “prayer,” I asked myself. Was it the conversation that opened both of us to the shared experience of our common humanity, or was the “prayer” those pious words that I addressed to a theistic deity, whose help I desperately needed?
I felt that the conversation had expanded and enhanced both of our lives. I sensed that the activity that I had once called “prayer” had contracted us both and had forced us back into the stance of wearing our defensive shields and our security blankets. Clearly the conversation in which we had engaged each other and a painful reality on that day was holy time. The conclusion seemed so obvious. The conversation was in fact the real “prayer,” while the thing I had called “a prayer” was little more than a pious triviality. It had been the conversation, which was the time in which the meaning of God was shared between two people. It was in the conversation that the boundaries we erect to keep ourselves safe from the threat of another were transgressed. I vowed that day never again to engage in the activity that I had previously called “prayer” until I could pray with the same depth of honesty that I had been able to share with that special person on that day.
It was a turning point in my life and in my pilgrimage into learning to pray in a non-theistic world. To be able to live the meaning of prayer, rather than just “to pray” became the goal of my lifetime and indeed the goal of my priesthood. Prayer is the sharing of being, the sharing of life and the sharing of love. That experience became a starting place for me in regard to the meaning of prayer. “Prayer” understood this way became profoundly real, while the form that “prayer” took began to shift dramatically. From that day to this “prayer” has been far more about “being” than it has been about “doing.” This was for me a radical, but necessary shift, which gave me a new starting place to enter a great and even transformative adventure into the depths of my faith. Experience always trumps explanation.
John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online
here.
