Prayer: Christian and Muslim Perspectives

Response

Response r owan wi ll ia ms A fter the great intellectual and spiritual nourishment of the day, it is a little difficult to boil things down into a few minutes at the end. But I have five words that I have picked up from today’s discussion, on each of which I shall offer some brief reflections. The first word is friendship. The point was made this morning that our common ancestor in faith, Abraham, is called ‘‘God’s friend,’’ and that there is in all our reflection about prayer a crucial and central element of thinking about what it is to be a friend of God. In a text from the Gospel of John (15:12–14) that was referred to today, a friend is one who knows or understands what is going on, as opposed to a slave who does not know what the master is doing or what the master really wants. Friendship, then, is a good place to begin—friendship with God, not to mention friendship with one another. Friendship is very closely connected with my second word, which is knowledge . Prayer is a way of knowing God because, if prayer is rooted in friendship with God, then of course prayer is about knowledge; but this is knowledge as sharing, absorption—not an acquisitive knowledge, a knowledge that seeks to pile up intellectual property. I welcomed very much the question about whether there is an epistemology of the physical in prayer. I think that, as Daniel Madigan said, the answer is that there clearly is. You learn something simply by going through the motions of celebrating Holy Week as a Christian. It was the late, and very great, Russian Orthodox teacher Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh who said that you begin to understand Orthodoxy in your legs. Anyone who has been to Orthodox services will know exactly what that is about. Knowledge as participation, knowledge as sharing—not acquisitive. Perhaps that may allow us to understand a little better one other question that came up this morning in the comments made by Dheen Mohamed 73 74 rowan williams about modernity and puritanism. Modernity and modern religious puritanism (or fundamentalism) are not the same thing. But what they do have in common is an impatience with traditional means of knowledge. They both have a view of knowledge that is essentially about accumulating or acquiring rather than participating or absorbing. Prayerful knowing, I would say, sets itself both against modern consumerist culture and against a false and impatient primitivist religion that seeks quick answers with which to reproach other people. To speak of knowledge in this nonacquisitive way takes us back to another word that was mentioned this morning as a possible area of tension or disagreement between us, and I am not sure that it is. That is the word desire— which is my third word. Reza Shah-Kazemi quoted the wonderful threefold typology of prayer from Imām Alı̄, beginning with desire: the prayer of the merchant.1 There are very similar texts in Christianity that talk about the mercantile attitude to prayer. But this clearly is about a desire that is, precisely , acquisitive. It is a desire that wants to gain a particular goal for the self, whereas one of the fascinating features of Christian reflection on prayer—and I would be very interested to see what corresponds to this in the Islamic world—is a fresh account of desire that sees it as more and more letting go of the acquisitive, the selfish, more and more simply the opening up to what is to be given. That naked desire—not for anything in particular, any goal in particular, any future in particular—but sheer openness to the real, to the true; and, therefore, a desire which always expands and is never fulfilled, never met—a constant, undying thirst for the real, the true, the divine. And it is at that level, I think, that there is a convergence between what we have heard from Islamic sources, and what we find in Christianity, and what we find also in the Buddhist critique of craving. To grow spiritually, for the Buddhist, is to grow beyond desire in the sense of craving. And yet it is still a radical nakedness or openness to what is true or what is real. My fourth word is protest. Desire, in the sense that I have mentioned, means openness. Openness means trust, an absolute confidence that, when you have opened your...