Such things seem recurrently popular - among Christians, and also in the New Age and occult world. Those involved in group prayer/meditation/ ritual almost-invariably seem to be emotionally satisfied by their activities - yet, as so often, anyone outside of the magic circle of participants sees only a kind of self-fulfilling psychology at work.
In principle, this could be because the change is at an imperceptible spiritual level of things; or it could be that actually nothing valuable has happened - but worse; I suspect that such attempts to do good by prayer or meditation often do actual harm.
This is because people nearly always seem to be asking for the wrong things.
Either they are asking for some outcome that is inferred from distorted or false information derived from the mass media-globalist bureaucracy; or else they are asking for something abstract that itself is an evil-motivated concept...
I mean something like "peace", "justice", "healing", "safety" ;or the triumph of some particular side in some dispute.
When it comes to matters outside of our direct experience, we are on shaky ground when we engage in attempted spiritual machinations.
It is more important to pray or meditate for the discernment to know what is needed; than to try and achieve by consciously-willed spiritual-force some particular outcome; concerning situations for which our understanding is derivative and insecure (the significance of which is often externally dictated)... Situations when we personally don't really know what is happening, nor what would be a better thing to happen.
The problem is not so much that group-prayer meditation does not work as that it does actual harm - because the harm of asking for wrong things is amplified by the "group dynamics" of the situation.
There is no such thing as value neutrality. When we are not working to sustain the side of God and the good; we will very probably be lending spiritual aid to the side of evil - and/or opening our-selves to demonic influence: inviting it in.
Note added: As so often, I think this problem is a modern one. In earlier eras of human consciousness, Men were (to a much greater extent than now) spontaneously immersed in both the group consciousness, and the spirit world of the divine. But one aspect of modern consciousness is that this is no longer the case: our freedom and individuality comes with the flip-side that we don't have a natural (and largely unconscious) connection with group, angels or God. We must make a conscious personal choice to attain knowledge of The Good - and positive groupishness tends to be rare and evanescent.
It's often hard to know exactly what to pray for, even in situations one knows well or of which one has personal experience. As well as asking for discernment, one can also simply pray for the good of the person or situation, without asking for some specific good.
ReplyDeleteI've always been made slightly uncomfortable when our church "prayer list" focuses so heavily on healing of people who often are elderly with cancer or something similar.
ReplyDeleteThere is so much in the Bible that it's easy to latch on to specific passages and use those as leverage to support one isolated and exaggerated Christian principle:
Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.
Elijah was a human being, even as we are. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and a half years.
James 5:16-17
Our pastor does an admirable job of abjuring worldly politics. Though our congregation is overwhelmingly conservative, he managed to include the attempted assassination in such a way as to remind us about worldly entanglements, but not so as to excite factional passions. A curious leftist-voting visitor would not have been incited to storm out of the church, whereas this is precisely what happened on numerous occasions when our old church was captured by the Left (many people felt compelled to get up and leave due to the hectoring leftism from the pulpit).
I'm straying a bit from Dr. Charlton's point, but it feels connected. I believe that praying for discernment is the safe harbour.
thy will be done;
on earth as it is in heaven
@NLR and Stephen - I'm pleased you both see the point.
ReplyDeletePeople too readily assume that all prayer is good if "well intentioned" and/or that it is "safe" to pray for vague abstractions such as "peace". Or else public prayer becomes a series of black box terms, into which the congregation members may each insert his or her own choice.
But if prayer is real, then it is not safe to pray for wrong things.
On the other hand, I'm not advocating neurotic worrying over prayer! But we really ought to pray about what we know experientially rather than by hearsay (especially in a society where public discourse is so thoroughly corrupted to evil ends).
And stay alert for "feedback" - if we are open to correction to erroneous prayers, it will surely come - and then we have *learned* something important. Which is (partly) the point of life!
The idea of "group meditation" in particular has always struck me as somehow inherently bizarre. The essence of meditation is precisely to silence the mind, doing it in "a group" just seems so irrelevant to its essence to the point of being contradictory. So much so in fact, that, very much as you say, it might actually be directly detrimental to the "desired outcome"
ReplyDeleteSuch prayer groups, in my experience, have a culture of their own -- one that is largely consistent from group to group -- and one which is nearly 100% worldly in its focus. They essentially reduce Christianity to a kind of voodoo cult focused around having God meet our demands. It makes this world, rather than the next, the entire focus on people's attention. These foci are exactly the opposite of what Jesus taught ("Yet, not my will, but thine be done." and "My kingdom is not of this world.") If that is what religion is for, there was no need for either Jesus or Christianity; any number of worldly religions revolve around manipulating the gods and reality to confirm to our wishes. Such prayers often both come from a place of fearfulness (i.e. fear of the world not being what we want; not fear of God) and tend to reinforce a mindset of fearfulness with regard to worldly matters that is antithetical, at root, to Jesus' message.
ReplyDeletePraying for things such as discernment, holiness, repentance and forgiveness may feel too abstract for people, who then want a more concrete goal to focus their (and God's attention on), but the prayers for concrete results in this world concerning, e.g. health, travel safety, finding a job, etc., are not - in my view - what Christianity is about.
A related phenomenon that goes hand in hand with the above, is the idea that adding the phrase "in Jesus' name" to any prayer somehow purifies that prayer and makes anything one asks for "fair game" because one has met the explicit condition that Jesus himself laid on us ("if ye shall pray anything in my name...")
To me, the modern approach, again, has it exactly backward: The injunction or reminder to pray in Jesus' name should lead us to ask whether the prayer we have just made is the type of prayer Jesus himself would have made. To "pray in his name" has to mean "to pray as He would pray". And we know how he prayed: That he discern and do his father's will, that he glorify his father through self-sacrifice, and that he be able to bear the trials put before him. To pray something "in Jesus' name", far from giving us carte blanche to pray for anything we desire, should make us circumspect about what we pray for, and cause us to ask ourselves: Is this something Jesus would have prayed for? Even if the institutionalized churches can no longer provide exactly what modern man needs, the above phenomena still lead me to the conclusion that Eastern Orthodoxy is far closer to and in-line with what Christianity "is about" than any form of Protestantism or of modern Catholicism.
(I know that the approach I am advocating for can be criticized from other angles: e.g., that God is a loving father who would want us to have good things in this life, that the type of prayer attitude typical of the Orthodox can come off as too negative, too self-abnegating, too focused on sin, etc. But I think these can be reconciled in a more Romantic Christian way, as opposed to the very modern Christian approach that I am critiquing which is fundamentally at odds with Jesus' mindset.)
Totally agree with everything stated!
DeleteThe Filioque controversy comes to mind. Western Individualism likely has roots in the stance western christianity took on the issue
I became very suspicious of praying for an outcome when at boarding school the prayer leader asked for victory in the Rugby that Saturday. Especially when the other school that weekend was the same denomination.
ReplyDelete@John - Not only Christians. In the Indian Premier League (cricket), whenever there is a tight finish the TV cameras will pick-out *many* people who are literally praying for their team's victory.
ReplyDelete