Exploring Prayer

A while back, I sent an essay on the theme of Praying for Democracy to Robert (Silky) O’Sullivan, a friend of mine from all the way back when we were both going to a Lutheran high school and two year college studying to be Lutheran ministers, and he sent me back an audio book by Mathew Fox called Radical Prayer: Love in Action, which I listened to.

I knew Matt early in this century because my business partner Joe Gross and I served on the board of the university he founded, The University of Creation Spirituality, as representatives of the Oakland community. (Our Communications Technology Cluster, Oakland’s first business incubator/accelerator, was located across the street from the University of Creation Spirituality.)

Original Blessing. Since I was on his board, I figured I better read Matt’s most influential book, Original Blessing, which challenges the traditional Christian doctrine of Original Sin. He points to the first two chapters of Genesis as the source of the concept of Original Blessing in contrast to the traditional focus on Genesis 3 (the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden).

In Genesis 1, God is described as a creative and compassionate force. After each act of creation, God sees that it is "good," and on the seventh day, God finds creation "very good." According to Matt, this biblical account of creation as inherently good, supports his view that humanity begins with a blessing, not a flaw.

Matt reinterprets the story of the Garden of Eden not as the story of a "fall" into sin, but as a parable about the human experience. Instead of seeing it as the origin of a corrupted human nature, he views it as a story about the challenges that come with living out our inherent goodness, or Original Blessing.

The "forbidden fruit" is not seen as an evil in itself, but as a symbol of humanity's move into a dualistic worldview – the "knowledge of good and evil." This dualism leads to judgment, self-criticism, and a separation from the holistic, awe-filled, and interconnected reality described in Genesis 1 and 2.

From this perspective, the "fall" is not an event that destroyed our original goodness, but a description of our human tendency to stray from our true, blessed nature. Our work is not to atone for a sin we inherited, but to heal from our shame, overcome dualistic thinking, and return to our original, creative, and compassionate selves.

According to this view, Jesus serves as a guide who can show us how to live fully into our Original Blessing, by modeling what it means to live in a state of grace, goodness, and love.

Original Blessing offers quite a different perspective on Christianity than the one Bob O’Sullivan and I learned in our Lutheran prep school.

However, at that time I was on his board, I did not explore Matt’s thinking and teaching more deeply – my loss. On the board we dealt with strategies for recruiting students, enrollment figures, budgets, and funding. Eventually, when the Communications Technology Cluster moved, Joe and I left Matt’s Board. So, when I began to listen to the audio book Bob O’Sullivan sent me, I finally realized what I had missed by not connecting more deeply with Matt back then.

But now, I have embraced Matt’s work as a spiritual philosophy that provides a framework for coming to a deeper understanding of prayer, so I am going to briefly share my understanding of his perspective as a way for us to advance our understanding of prayer.

Myth: In Radical Prayer, Matt asserts that the basis of all prayer is a myth, a story. The story he tells is of the evolution of humanity through our long pre-modern history, our relatively short, few hundred year, modern period, and now our difficult transition into an emerging post-modern reality.
In the West as we move into the post-modern era, we are working on graduating from a scientifically naive materialism, an ethically and ecologically challenged capitalism, and a destructive, tribal nationalism. We are rediscovering the spiritual and natural participation that characterized the pre-modern era but freed from its mythic determinism by the discoveries of science.

According to contemporary science, we are the expression of 13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution. At the most basic level, the energy and matter that make up our bodies first emerged out of the Big Bang’s microscopically tiny fireball 13.8 billion years ago. Our whole universe has evolved since, moving through a succession of evolutionary leaps.

The Big Bang produced energy, which then coalesced to form matter as sub-atomic particles with electromagnetic and gravitational forces organized as fields. The sub-atomic particles coalesced further to produce atoms which eventually agglomerated to produce stars and galaxies of stars.

The stars had life cycles, exploding at the end of their lives to create the more complex chemicals that led to planets. On our little planet, Earth, life formed from one cell to the vast multiplicity of one celled organisms and then multi-celled organisms of increasing physical complexity and increasingly complex and powerful consciousness, currently culminating in our evolving human consciousness.

Now, in our post-modern era we coming to realize that we are an aspect of this cosmic evolution and that we have a responsibility to participate consciously in its next emergent evolutionary leap.

We all need to accept that we are aspects of a unified evolution guided by an overweening purpose. The trillions of stars in billions of galaxies have evolved within the very narrow and very unlikely limits that are necessary for the evolution of life as a whole and human life in particular. God is one name for the unification, the fine tuning, and the purpose underlying the evolution of the universe. (See The Return of the God Hypothesis, by Stephen C. Meyer.)

It is time for us all to recognize that we now need to grow out of our self-destructive adolescence as a species and come together as a whole species to create a planetary society that works for everyone.

We need to realize that we are all connected, all linked together in one system. We humans all came from the Big Bang. We humans all evolved from the one cell that began all life. Our species has evolved from a very few ancestors, such that 99.9% of all human DNA is the same and only 0.01% of our DNA is the basis of all the diversity of human characteristics. And we are all embedded in a unified faster-than-light Spiritual Domain.

The Mystic and the Prophet: In his book, One River, Many Wells, Matt describes 18 different spiritual traditions, the many Wells, which reach down into a deep common spiritual reality that we all share – the One River. He suggests that the Mystic and the Prophet come to experience the One River. This is an experience of a transcendent unified loving reality manifesting through all of the different aspects of our evolution from the Big Bang to the present and continuing to evolve on into the future.

According to some esoteric traditions we humans combine a sub-conscious dimension, a self-conscious dimension, and a super-conscious dimension.
Our sub-conscious dimension connects us with all aspects of the physical universe. Our super-conscious dimension connects us with the whole faster-than-light Spiritual Dimension all the way out/in to God, the divinity, the One, the Nameless, the Creator.

Our self-conscious dimension brings together the integration of the super and sub conscious dimensions, integrating them into our succession of conscious present moments that make up our lived experience.

Mystics are able to expand the boundaries of their succession of conscious moments to include much more of the Physical and Spiritual Realms. What the Mystic finds is a profound unity in diversity, with the diverse sub-parts linked to the larger whole in love and in a joint evolution toward a destination. The Mystic can also see into the future to experience our potential for manifesting the wonderful reality toward which physical and spiritual evolution is pointing.

The Prophet is able to focus the Mystic vision on a current reality and call for and act to create some important next steps on the road to realizing the Mystic vision of our amazing potential future.

We are in the dark night of the soul right now, challenged by social and environmental dislocation. But, from an evolutionary perspective, this is a tiny moment of static as we grow up as a species and create a unified planetary civilization based on the truth that each of us participates in the full Universe. Each of us is a manifestation of the Divine. And, each of us is called to make our unique contribution, as co-creators with the divine, to building the planetary civilization that works for all of us, enabling all of us to live healthy, prosperous, fulfilling lives.

A Deeper Understanding of Prayer: So, on the basis of this line of thought, we can say that a Mystic view of prayer is grounded in the fact that we are connected to the whole cosmos, both the whole physical dimension and the whole spiritual dimension. To some degree, we consciously integrate these connections into our succession of present moments, but the real connections are there whether we are explicitly conscious of them at any given moment or not.

According to Matt, when we pray, we are called to pray as Mystics, connecting to all that is and was and will be. When we pray, we are called to pray as Prophets, envisioning what can come next and acting to accomplish this on the road to the realization of the Mystic vision of our magnificent destiny.

Of course, we don’t have to be fully developed as Mystics or as Prophets to pray and to pray with great effect. But it helps to open to the Mystic vision and the Prophetic revelation to the degree that we can, and to know that whatever we cannot access explicitly is still there as an implicit context and foundation.

So, as best as we can, let us Pray for Democracy as Mystics focusing all that was and is and will be on our present moment. And let us Pray for Democracy as Prophets calling for and acting to create the Democratic vision and reality that our future can offer us – manifesting as respect and love for the Earth and respect and love for each other and respect and love for creating ways of life that work for all of us, our children, and our children’s children.