Prayer and the Powers

We are not easily reduced to prayer. We who grope toward praying today are like a city gutted by fire. The struggle against injustice has exacted from us an awful cost. Albert Camus, in a similar period, wrote, "There is merely bad luck in not being loved; there is tragedy in not loving. All of us, today, are dying of this tragedy. For violence and hatred dry up the heart itself; the long fight for justice exhausts the love that nevertheless gave birth to it. In the clamor in which we live, love is impossible and justice does not suffice."

We have in our own experience discovered the mystery of the beast of the abyss: He can allow the righteous to destroy him because he is virtually assured that in so doing they will be changed into his likeness.

I will not attempt to make a case for the importance of prayer. Those who do not believe in its efficacy simply illustrate the effectiveness of the powers in diminishing our humanity. There are few rational objections to praying that carry any force, since they are all spin-offs from a particular myth. It is our myth, our worldview, that permits or forbids prayer, and no one arrives at a worldview on wholly rational grounds.

Those who pray do so not because they believe certain intellectual propositions about the value of prayer, but simply because the struggle to be human in the face of suprahuman powers requires it. The act of praying is itself one of the indispensable means by which we engage the powers. It is in fact that engagement, at its most fundamental level, where their secret spell over us is broken and we are re-established in a bit more of that freedom which is our birthright and potential.

Prayer is never a private act. It is rather the interior battlefield where the decisive victory must first be won, before any engagement in the outer world is even possible. If we have not undergone that inner liberation, whereby the individual strands of the nets in which we are caught are severed, one by one, our activism will merely reflect one or another counterideology of some counter-power. We will simply be caught up in a new collective passion and fail to discover the transcendent possibilities of God pressing for realization here and now. Unprotected by prayer our social activism runs the danger of becoming self-justifying good works, as our inner resources atrophy, the wells of love run dry, and we are slowly changed into the likeness of the beast.

The kind of prayer of which I speak may or may not involve regular regimens; may or may not be sacramental; may or may not be contemplative; may or may not even take religious forms. It is in any case not a religious practice externally imposed, but an existential struggle against the "impossible," against the anti-human collective atmosphere, against images of worth and value which stunt and wither full human life.

Prayer, in short, is the theater in which the diseased spirituality that we have contracted from the powers can most directly be discerned, diagnosed, and treated.

I will not attempt a comprehensive discussion of prayer. Others far wiser and more experienced have done so already. In this series we will focus only on one aspect of prayer, almost universally ignored: the role of the powers in intercessory prayer. We will begin in this issue with an examination of the role of intercessors in creating a desirable future. In the next issue, I will deal with the initiative God takes in praying in us.

Fire on the Earth

INTERCESSION IS SPIRITUAL DEFIANCE of what is, in the name of what God has promised. Intercession visualizes an alternative future to the one apparently fated by the momentum of current contradictory forces. It breathes the air of a time yet to be into the suffocating atmosphere of present reality. Those who have made peace with injustice, who receive their identity from alienated role-definitions, and who benefit economically from social inequities are not likely to be such intercessors.

There is a marvelous image of intercessory prayer in the book of Revelation. Here is the setting. Jesus Christ, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Lamb standing though slain -- this Lion in sheep's clothing is opening one by one the seals on the scroll of destiny (Revelation 4-7). As he opens the first four seals, the sorry spectacle of human violence is laid bare: The endless cycle of conquest, civil war, famine, and death is depicted by the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

When the fifth seal is broken, the murdered witnesses under the altar cry out, "How long, O Lord? Avenge our blood!" When the sixth seal is opened, the whole creation lurches and totters in agonized anticipation of God's wrath. Then, just before the seventh seal is opened, those who will be saved are marked off for the new "passover" of the angel of death and destruction. Everything is then in readiness. We await the final unrolling of the scroll. Toward this climax the whole cycle of the ages has turned.

Now when the Lamb broke the seventh seal there was silence in heaven for what seemed half an hour. Then I looked, and the seven angels that stand in the presence of God were given seven trumpets.

Then another angel came and stood at the altar, holding a golden censer; and he was given a great quantity of incense to offer with the prayers of all God's people upon the golden altar in front of the throne. And from the angel's hand the smoke of the incense went up before God with the prayers of his people. Then the angel took the censer, filled it from the altar fire, and threw it down upon the earth; and there were peals of thunder, lightning, and an earthquake. Then the seven angels that held the seven trumpets prepared to blow them. (Revelation 8:1-6)

Heaven itself falls silent. The heavenly hosts and celestial spheres suspend their ceaseless singing so that the prayers of the saints on earth can be heard. The seven angels of destiny cannot blow the signal of the next times to be until an eighth angel gathers these prayers -- prayers for justice, vindication, and victory -- and mingles them with incense upon the altar. Silently they rise to the nostrils of God.

Then from the same altar the angel fills the same censer with fiery coals and hurls them upon the earth. The earth convulses. The silence is shattered. The heavenly liturgy is complete. Now the seven angels who have the seven trumpets make ready to blow.

This scene reverses the usual unrolling of fate, where heavenly decisions are acted out on earth. Human beings have intervened in the heavenly liturgy. The uninterrupted flow of consequences is dammed for a moment. New alternatives become feasible. The unexpected becomes suddenly possible because people on earth have invoked heaven, the home of the possibles, and have been heard. What happens next happens because people prayed.

The message is clear: History belongs to the intercessors, who believe the future into being. This is not simply a religious statement. It is as true of communists or capitalists or anarchists as it is of Christians. The future belongs to whoever can envision in the manifold of its possibilities a new and desirable possibility, which faith then fixes upon as inevitable. That is the politics of hope.

Hope envisions its future and then acts as if that future is then irresistible, thus helping to create the reality for which it longs. The future is not closed, though there are forces whose interactions are somewhat predictable. But how they will interact is not.

Even a small number of people, totally committed to the new inevitability on which they have fixed their imaginations, can decisively affect the shape the future takes. These shapers of the future are the intercessors, who call out of the future the longed-for new present; they believe the future into being. In the New Testament, the name and texture and aura of that future is the reign of God.

AS A RESULT OF THE INTERCESSIONS of the saints, the seven angels trumpet calamity. Hail and fire rain down, mixed with blood, which burn up a third of the earth and trees and grass; the sea becomes blood, and a third of its creatures die; a third of the fresh waters become bitter with wormwood; a third of the heaven's light is darkened -- and these are but the first of the woes to fall on humankind (8:7-13).

John is clearly not referring to the ecosystem. He has in mind the destruction of a wholly different system: the world-system of the Roman Empire. "The kingdom of the world" (11:15) is, for him, not a geographical or planetary term. It refers to the alienated and alienating reality that seduces humanity into idolatry -- the worship of political power as divine. The Roman Empire has made itself the highest value and the ultimate concern, arrogating to itself the place of God. Whether it be the Pax Romana or the Pax Britannica or the Pax Americana, empires can only maintain internal cohesion across racial, ethnic, linguistic, and national lines by creating a bogus solidarity. This they achieve by demanding the worship of the spirituality of empire.

The Romans were a model of lucidity on this point. They did not, at least during most of the New Testament period, worship the seated emperor, but only his "genius." This Latin term does not refer to the emperor's intellect but to his inspiration, the daemon or god or spirituality that animated the incumbent ruler by virtue of his being "on the throne." His "genius" is the totality of impersonal power located in an office of surpassing might.

The British, for their part, spoke reverentially of their empire as if it were a holy burden and obligation, a carrying of Anglo-Saxon light to a darkened world. Americans, however, had rebelled against the British Empire and its spirituality. We could not therefore admit to having an empire (and concurrently, the nature of empire had begun to shift from political sovereignty to economic hegemony). So we found a scapegoat -- communism -- against which we would organize and police the world. This anti-communist crusade and its attendant Cold War policies masked the spirit of empire from no one except Americans themselves.

That spirituality -- which included as one of its chief tenets the denial that it even exists -- has literally threatened to rain hail and fire mingled with blood to burn up a third of the earth and trees and grass and turn the seas to blood and fresh water to radioactive wormwood and darken a third of the heavens. And all to preserve the privileged position of the richest nation on the face of the earth.

John unmasks the spirituality of empire, with its self-justifying burden of protecting others from chaos. Empires are "unnatural" systems. They cannot exist for a moment without the spiritual undergirding of a persuasive ideology that sanctions them. No wonder John was exiled to Patmos by the powers-that-be. A seer whose vision cuts right through the atmospherics of imperial legitimation is a far worse threat than armed revolutionaries who accept the ideology of power and merely desire it for themselves.

Churches, which continually complain about their powerlessness to induce change, are in fact in a privileged position to use the most powerful weapon of all: the power to delegitimate. But it is a spiritual power -- spiritually discerned and spiritually exercised. It needs intercessors, who believe the future into being.

God Wants To Be Importuned

IF THE FUTURE IS THUS OPEN, if the heavenly hosts must be silenced so that God can listen to the prayers of the saints and act accordingly; then we are no longer dealing with the unchanging, immutable God of classical Greek metaphysics. We are in the presence of Yahweh of Hosts, who chooses most circuitous paths in the desert and whose ways are subject to change without notice. This is a God who works with us and for us, to make and keep human life really human.

And what God does depends on the intercessions of those who care enough to try to shape the future more humanly than it is. Faith operative through prayer is, in the words of Mircea Eliade, "absolute emancipation from any kind of natural 'law' and hence the highest freedom" that one can imagine -- "freedom to intervene even in the ontological constitution of the universe" (The Myth of Eternal Return).

The formality and reticence of ecclesiastical prayer is utterly foreign to the Bible. Biblical prayer is impertinent, persistent, shameless, indecorous. It is more like haggling in an outdoor bazaar than the polite monologues of the churches. Abraham is an example.

God could have gone straight over to Sodom and destroyed it for its iniquity without giving Abraham a thought, even though Abraham's nephew Lot lived there with his wife and two daughters. But the Lord considered: "Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do, seeing that Abraham shall become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall bless themselves by him? No, for I have chosen him."

So God confides in Abraham: "Because the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is great and their sin very grave, I will go down and see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry which has come to me; and if not, I will know."

God turns to go. But Abraham remains standing in God's path. Finally Abraham speaks: Are you really going to destroy the just person along with the sinner? Perhaps there are 50 just people in the town. Will you then destroy the place and not spare it for the 50 just people who are in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing: to kill the just person along with the sinner, treating the righteous and sinner alike! Far be that from you! Shall not the Judge of all the earth act justly?

And God says: If at Sodom 50 just people in the city, I will spare the whole place for their sake.
Abraham replies: I am bold indeed to speak like this to my Lord, I who am dust and ashes. But perhaps the 50 just people lack five: Will you destroy the whole city for five?
And God says: I will not destroy it if I find 45 just people there.
Again Abraham says to him: Perhaps there will only be 40 there.
God answers: For the sake of 40 I will not do it.
Then Abraham says: Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak. Suppose 30 are found there.
God answers: I will not do it if I find 30 there.
Abraham says: Behold, I have taken upon myself to speak to God! Suppose 20 are found there.
God answers: For the sake of 20 I will not destroy it.
Then Abraham says: Oh let the Lord not be angry, and I will speak again but this once. Suppose 10 are found there.
God answers: For the sake of 10 I will not destroy it.

When they finish talking, God continues toward Sodom, and Abraham returns home (Genesis 18).

And yet God does spare Lot and his family, though they are but four! Moral: It pays to haggle with God. Martin Luther understood this well: "Our Lord God could not but hear me; I threw the sack down before his door. I rubbed God's ear with all his promises about hearing prayer."

Scripture is full of this motif of spirited give-and-take with God. When Israel makes the golden calf, impatient from waiting 40 days for Moses to return from Sinai, God says to Moses: You'd better get down there. Israel has made a golden calf, and I'm fed up with dealing with them. "I have seen this people, and behold, it is a stiff-necked people; now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and consume them; though of you I will make a great nation."

Moses refuses to let God destroy Israel: "Yahweh, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? Are you now going to let the Egyptians say, 'Ah, it was in treachery that he brought them out, to slay them in the mountains and to wipe them off the face of the earth'? Turn from your fierce wrath and repent of this evil against your people."

And we read, "The Lord repented of the evil which he thought to do to his people" (Exodus 32:7-14). Moses made God repent!

Or we could talk of Jacob's wrestling with the angel until it blessed him, or of Jonah's sulking over God's change of heart about Ninevah. Of the latter, Ernst Bloch notes "the amazement of the prophet Jonah, who failed to grasp the difference between Cassandra and himself. For Jonah had indeed been sent to inform Ninevah of its destruction after 40 days, but when the city did penance and the evil did not occur, he was wrongly but exceedingly displeased (Jonah 4:1) -- as if he had told an untruth to the people of Ninevah, whereas it was the change in them that had caused a change in Yahweh (Jeremiah 18:7; 26:3; and 26:19) (Man on His Own).

Nor is this theme confined to the Hebrew scriptures. We see it in Jesus' parables of the importunate widow and the friend who came at midnight, both examples of how we are to hammer away in prayer until a breakthrough comes (Luke 18:1-8; 11:5-13). Rudolf Bultmann is speaking not only for Jesus but the whole Bible then when he says, "Prayer is not to bring the petitioner's will into submission to the unchanging will of God, but prayer is to move God to do something which [God] otherwise would not do" (Jesus and the Word).

NO DOUBT OUR INTERCESSIONS SOMETIMES change us as we open ourselves to new possibilities we had not guessed. No doubt our prayers to God reflect back upon us as a divine command to become the answer to our prayer.

But if we were to take the biblical understanding seriously at all, we'd find that intercession is more than that. It changes the world, and it changes what is possible to God. It creates an island of relative freedom in a world gripped by an unholy necessity. A new force field appears that hitherto was only potential, because of a lack of faith. The entire configuration changes as the result of the change of a single part. An aperture opens in the praying person, permitting God to act without violating human freedom. The change in one person thus changes what God can thereby do in that world.

"Wherever we cast our eye," wrote Karl Barth, "the dynamite is prepared and ready to explode ... For impossibility is, as such, nigh at hand, ready at our elbow, possible. Impossibility presses upon us, breaks over us, is indeed already present. Impossibility is more possible than everything which we hold to be possible" (The Epistle to the Romans). Miracle is just a word we use for the things the powers have deluded us into thinking that God is unable to do.

"I believe in a world," exclaims Nikos Kazantzakis in Report to Greco, "which does not exist, but by believing in it, I create it. We call 'non-existent' whatever we have not desired with sufficient strength."

I affirm belief in miracles in full recognition of the misuse to which it is subject: manipulative magic, superstition, Utopian fanaticism, spiritual greed, New Age naivete. Against such perversions I know of no preventative. But the alternative -- supine acquiescence in the spirit of the age -- is no more desirable. Let us join hands then with faith-healers and speakers in tongues. Let us take as allies a few ranters, raving with the vision of a society of justice, health, and love.

For intercession, to be Christian, must be prayer for God's reign to come on earth. It must be prayer for the victory of God over disease, greed, oppression, and death in the concrete circumstances of people's lives, now. In our intercessions we fix our wills on the divine possibility latent in the present moment, and then find ourselves caught up in the whirlwind of God's struggle to actualize it.

That is why the Lord's Prayer is not indicative but imperative -- it is ordering God to bring the reign near. It will not do to implore. We must command. We have been commanded to command. We are required by God to haggle with God for the sake of the sick, the addicted, and the weak, and to conform our lives to our intercessions. Gandhi could thus write, echoing Ephesians 6:10-20, "My greatest weapon is prayer."

Praying is rattling God's cage and waking God up and letting God free and giving this famished God water and this starved God food and cutting the ropes off God's hands and the manacles off God's feet and washing the caked sweat from God's eyes and then watching God swell with life and vitality and energy and following God wherever God goes.

Prayer is not a request made to an almighty ruler who can do anything at any time. It is an act of liberation -- within and without -- of the universe's origin, goal, and process from the distortions, poisonings, ravagings, misdirectedness, and sheer hatred of being that frustrates the divine purpose.

When we pray, we are not sending a letter to a celestial White House where it is sorted among piles of others. We are engaging in an act of co-creation, in which one little sector of the universe rises up and becomes translucent, incandescent -- a vibratory center of power that radiates the power of the universe.

That may sound good, but it is all arrogant bravado unless we recognize that it is God who initiates prayer, not us, and God's power, not ours, that answers to the world's needs. The second part of this article will look at this more in-depth.

History belongs to the intercessors, who believe the future into being. If this is so, then intercession, far from being an escape from action, is a means of focusing for action and for creating action. By means of our intercessions, we veritably cast fire upon the earth and trumpet the future into being. It is no accident that the seven angels of the apocalypse make ready to signal in the scenes that follow as a direct result of prayer.

Walter Wink was a 1989-90 peace fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, DC, and the author of Violence and Nonviolence in South Africa when this article appeared. This article is part one of a two-part series, which is excerpted from volume three of his series on the powers, Engaging the Powers: The Spirituality of Social Struggle (Fortress Press).