Prayer as Physical Hospitality

Today, I met my accompanyer. L'arche provides for assistants "accompaniment" with another person, either inside or, in some cases, outside of the community. As a L'arche assistant, my accompanyer is someone with whom I can speak it utter security. I can vent and ask for advice (if need be) and generally use this person as a resource for discernment and decision making. It still shocks me to see the amount of time and energy the L'arche spends on its assistants, as well as the organization's core members. I dare say it more favors the assistants in some instances. L'arche tends to make a point of the idea that no one ought to be alone, neither in pain nor celebration. As it turns out, my accompanyer is Father Roderick Milne. "Father Rod" founded L'arche in New Zealand and actually spent time with Henri Nouwen at the community of Daybreak. He has also, of course, personally met with Jean Vanier, which is also rather cool. With Nouwen now passed, Father Rod is about as close as I'll ever get to one of those people who have directly inspired my current pilgrimage into L'arche. Pretty freakin sweet.

It was never really Nouwen's theology that called me to L'arche, thought that is very good stuff. Instead, I felt more attracted by his personal story. Nouwen delved into his own sense of vulnerability more than once and it definitely shaped the way that he thought, wrote, and lived. When I mentioned that I had a copy of Gracias!, Father Rod suggested that I look up the entry for "Friday, December 11." I've been doing more theological thinking lately. I'd like to wrap up my thoughts and feelings on the topic of hospitality with this passage:

Every morning at 6:45 I got to the small convent of the Carmelite Sisters for an hour of prayer and meditation. I say "every morning," but there are exceptions. Fatigue, busyness, and preoccupations often serve as arguments for not going. Yet without this one-hour-a-day for God, my life loses its coherency and I start experiencing my days as a series of random incidents and accidents. My hour in the Carmelite chapel is more important than I can fully know myself. It is not an hour of deep prayer, nor a time in which I experience a special closeness to God; it is not a period of serious attentiveness to the divine mysteries. I wish it were! On the contrary, it is full of distractions, inner restlessness, sleepiness, confusion, and boredom. It seldom, if ever, pleases by senses. But the simple fact of being for one hour in the presence of the Lord and of showing him all that I feel, think, sense, and experience, without trying to hide anything, must please him. Somehow, somewhere, I know that he loves me, even though I do not feel that love as I can feel a human embrace, even though I do not hear a voice as I hear human words of consolation, even though I do not see a smile as I can see a human face. Still the Lord speaks to me [...]. I notice, maybe only retrospectively, that my days and weeks are different days and weeks when they are held together by these regular "useless" times. God is greater than my senses, greater than my thoughts, greater than my heart.

I take lots of pride in the fact that, for the most part, I'm a committed physicalist. There is some background to this: If Martin Heidegger and, particularly, A. N. Whitehead are correct, then we dwell in the realm of the actual, which is distinctively different from than of the real, in which God dwells. Although the two interact, we must seek the expression of God in the actual world as it happens around us and have little business making grand, metaphysical inferences about the "nature" of the Divine reality.

As a physicalist then, as one who needs to find God here in actuality, I have a hard time reconciling my inclinations toward religion and theology. I know that the one road which I do not want to travel is that of the epistemological realist: Noah's Ark was an actual boat, the whole world actually flooded, and the world as we know it is actually only 6,000 years old. This position is ridiculous, even at face value, because the truth of our religious practices are quite obviously non-factual. Yet if this is so, then why religion at all? If religious practice implies that we must transcend the physical, then why would those of us who must live in the realm of actuality practice our religion?

As it stands now, I have come to L'arche in an attempt at encountering the absolute Other. I believe that, in terms of physical value, this is purpose of prayer and, indeed, of most all religious practice. It is a physical expression of our deepest non-self interest. It may be all well and good to speak of God in large theological terms and the same deep need is present within the various works of theology, but, honestly, nothing beats a genuflection. The word "genuflect" comes to us from Latin and it means "bent knee." The knee, breaking at it's primary point of weakness, has in its physical nature, the capacity to change a person. The one who physically walks becomes the one who physically worships. So it is with worship and prayer.

To follow the Ethics of Emmanual Levinas for a moment, we must recognize that there is an Other who's presence wounds our sense of Being. This much is true, but please don't make it a "mystical" experience. What good does pure mysticism do? It reminds me of Paul's preaching to the charismatics of his day who "spoke in tongues." In Acts, the apostles where given the gift of tongues, but they weren't keeping these gifts to themselves because the tongues given to them where actual languages spoken by actual people. They were not tongues of mysticism. Pardon me for being so harsh toward mystics, even those mystics whom I love, such as Martin Buber. This is simply what I see in people whom I think can truly be called faithful, such as Henri Nouwen. In the passage above, Nouwen doesn't cover up the bare, physical realities of his prayer life; it is an impoverished experience. But it is, somehow, this physical poverty which makes it so important: the act of prayer is "useless" to Being, it is an act of hospitality toward Other, toward God.

I believe that this will be, for me, a serious point of argument with other theologians. As the economy suffers, the message that we received from Jean Vanier in his latest letter to L'arche basically ran like this: "Get hard and give more." The reasons to support this conclusion were, of course, vague and highly "mystical" in their nature and usage. Mysticism is not the answer to our problems because its obscurity cannot wound us. Even Nouwen himself wrote that his experience among the poor of South America was "God receiving God" and the like. Don't get all mystical on me like that. We need an actual answer to our distress. We need an actual Other to wound us. We need an actual Gift.

So it is also with my experience of prayer at L'arche. Tonight we had a visitor: Tamzin. Tamzin is considering joining L'arche as a core member and is spending a couple of nights with us to try it out. Last night, her first night here, she did not really participate at prayer time and she gave us the impression that she wasn't used to prayer. I understand the feeling. Tonight, however, it was my night to run prayer and Tamzin was asked to aid me. I chose a reading and she decided that it would be good if we did prayers with stones. As we sat in our circle, Tamzin, feeling the need to physically participate, went round and made everyone pick a stone from a basket, so that each of us would have to physically walk up to the prayer table in order to place it. The experience worked well and I think that it encouraged more free thinking about prayer time, which is a very deeply entrenched ritual, particularly with Kim. It was then that I understood my physicalism: a deep and physical need for participation, for encounter, brought forth some "useless" accident of physical action, which, in turn, created a better sense of consciousness about goodness and mercy and love.

In its physical practice, prayer is a kind of hospitality, we are looking for the Transcendence of God to break our Being. We genuflect in order to seek the change. We kiss the icon, light the candle, sing the hymns, and take the bread. Where the hell is God in all this silly ritual? Who can say, since it actually is useless. It actually is stupid and uncomfortable and boring. Yet is is precisely this actuality of uselessness which opens the space for God to inhabit. It is an invitation for the reality of God to inhabit the actuality of our world. Who wouldn't make space for that? A wedding is the same way: say some words, give a ring, smash a glass, whatever. As dumb or archaic as these rituals are, we believe them important because it is these physical practices of foolishness which invite a lifetime of shared life and love. "And the two shall become one flesh." These are not mystical things. I am a physical creature, I will die a physical death, and I will love a physical love, even toward God.