Prayer: Christian and Muslim Perspectives

Afterword

Afterword r owan wi ll ia ms T wo themes seem to pervade a great deal of the rich material gathered here. The first is the inescapable recognition in both Christian and Muslim reflection on prayer that it is not enough to think of praying as something we do. A lot of the time we may speak of prayer as if it were a matter of human action directed toward a distant God, seeking his attention. Yet as soon as we remember what kind of God we are talking about, such a model breaks down completely; for this is a God who, for the Muslim, can be described as closer to us than our jugular vein (Qurān 50:16), a God whose creative energy is not exercised once and then abandoned but who—to use a Christian wording this time, with strong Jewish undertones— ‘‘carries the universe along by his powerful utterance’’ (Heb. 1:3). God is eternally active in sustaining the world; he is always ‘‘speaking’’ it. And this means that when we pray we are not initiating some new development but aligning ourselves with that ‘‘utterance.’’ It may help us to make sense of the pervasive belief common to the Abrahamic faiths that perhaps the most effective vehicle for prayer is the recitation of the divine Name or Names. We speak God’s Name and so make our utterance an utterance of God’s revealed identity; we pray by declaring who God is, who God has shown himself to be. We desire to say nothing but the echo of what God has said and done. To do this requires the disciplines by which we abandon our individual preoccupations, our images of God and ourselves, our expectations of God, conditioned as all these are by both the limits of our finite imagination and the constraints created by our failures and disobediences. Prayer at its most liberated and God-directed may or may not be literally wordless, but there is agreement that on the way to this liberation a great deal in us needs to be silenced so that something may emerge that is—in the words of T. S. Eliot—‘‘more / Than an order of words, the conscious occupation / Of the 175 176 rowan williams praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying’’ (‘‘Little Gidding,’’ ll. 46– 48). For Christian and Muslim alike, the ‘‘point’’ of prayer (an odd phrase in many ways) is that God’s life in us should be made manifest, and that whatever obstacles we set up to the sovereign freedom of God to act in and around us should be dissolved by the intensity of his presence. For the Muslim, this is a particularly focused realization of our complete and unconditional dependence on the Creator, a realization of how we are suspended over nothing by the divine utterance; again and again the Qurān characterizes God as the one who makes what is from what is not, whose mere word can bring life. The human aspiration to self-sufficiency is at the root of disobedience, and prayer is our recall to the acknowledgement of our insufficiency. For the Christian, though, the principle of seeing prayer as God’s act in us has a further dimension grounded in the doctrine of the Trinity: incorporated into Christ, the believer prays to God the Father in the name and Spirit of Jesus. The eternal prayer of the Son to the Father is now happening in us by the indwelling of the Spirit. It is a particularly intense version of the conviction that our prayer echoes God’s utterance: Christians would say that this utterance is an everlasting act before creation by which God pours out his life and glory in such a way that there is an eternal answering outpouring of love, to which we give the names of ‘‘Word’’ and ‘‘Son.’’ Hence, the importance to the Christian of the ‘‘Lord’s Prayer’’ given by Jesus to his disciples, beginning ‘‘Our Father’’—and hence, too, the importance of the Eucharistic sacrament as embodying the communication to us by Christ of his life in such a way that we can share his relation with the Father. Various contributions to this book explore the tensions between Christians and Muslims on this particular subject, and there is much valuable clarification as to what the real questions are and the points at which mutual misunderstandings arise. But it is striking that the conviction that prayer is in...