Fr. Martin's Book on Prayer

 This is the book.

The book may be useful to you. I do not begrudge you that. For myself, I left this vision of Christianity behind many years ago. Maybe you believe that God has specific things he wants you to do, that you should always be seeking his will the way a servant seeks the will of king, the way an employee asks the boss what he's to do next. I have no authority to tell you God doesn't work that way.

But I don't think so. The problem I always had with that way of thinking, this minute-by-minute attempt to discern God's will, is that it doesn't in fact require the existence of God to work. One is always interpreting "signs." And interpretation being what it is, one can always say "this is God and that is not" according to the system of interpretation. God becomes an interpretive system, nothing more.

The metaphor that supports this is "personal relationship." It's a disarming metaphor, not false necessarily, not thoroughly false, not false for what it says but for what it doesn't say. My "relationship" to God has so little in common with anything else I call a relationship, that to call it even that, let along personal, is too thoroughly anthropomorphic. God can't be my buddy. If he were, he'd talk to me with the clarity of words if he were saying anything that words could make clear.

I believe that God's will is a general will if it exists at all. It is this: love yourself. Love your neighbors as yourself. Love God? Yes, by the expression of love for all of God that is around you: what God brought into being.

Then what about prayer? Pray all you want. Pray anything you want. I will give any more specific advice to anyone about what to pray or when to pray or how to pray. (That is by no means a criticism of Fr. Martin or anyone who does give you instruction on prayer or of you for listening to it.) But I will not expect God to find my car keys. I won't even ask him to. And if I ask him to bless those I love, I know I'm really telling God I'm afraid of losing those I love. I don't expect him to heal my disease. I wouldn't ask him not to, but as I can't understand the logic of healing my cold or my Covid only to let me fall apart and die, as we all know he will, I don't know how to ask for it. I don't think God is in that business. I think we know God better when we understand that he's not in that business.

We can experience the divine in this life, I believe, in many ways. Contemplation is one. Quiet reflection, peaceful observation are among the ways. Helping those in need, all acts of charity are other ways. Even if God doesn't heal your cancer, if I as a doctor can heal your cancer, I have loved you. I can experience God in that. If I as a citizen can help you to food or lift you out of poverty, I can experience God in that. It's because God doesn't that I must. God will let each of you die. You will live your life in deep uncertainly about when or how or in a false sense of assurance that it can't be now because God loves you. The God who allowed his own son to be crucified does love you, as he loved him. But he let him be crucified. And he will let you die as has let everyone who has come before us die, often horrendously, often tragically, always too soon, often much too soon.

The divine surrounds us like a mist. We are enveloped in it. We can always pay attention to it, always breathe it in, always find God in it. But I do not believe it pushes us. It invites us. It leaves us free to love as we see best.

That said, I find even from my point of view some value in this book. Not all prayer is petitionary prayer. Not all prayer is about fostering a "personal relationship." A lot of prayer is about experiencing the divine. Fr. Martin knows that. And a good deal of what he says fosters it. Reading the book was a good use of my time. I won't read it again very likely. It took my back over 30 years to the time when I would have read this book enthusiastically and nodded at every page. It made me glad that time is gone.