Prayer and Planetarity Prayerful Inclusions of the Web of Life
John B. Cobb, Jr. and Jay McDaniel
If prayer is defined as touching God, then all things pray in their own way. Stars pray, trees pray, mountains pray, cats pray. Sensitive eyes can see the world this way. They have naturally planetary minds.
But our concern here is with a more humanly specific way of praying. We want to talk about how we humans might pray in an age where so many other creatures on our planet are threatened by human greed and arrogance. We need to pray for their own well-being and also for our own. We propose that praying for the planet can be one important way that we are transformed into the friends of the Earth, and the friends of one another, that we are called to be.
Let us note at the outset that in the tradition we know best, Christianity, there are two kinds of prayer. There are Prayers of Address in which God is addressed as a Thou; and there is Contemplative Prayer in which God is a field of compassion in which the heart quietly rests, without needing or seeking communication.
We believe that these and other kinds of prayer are valuable. Contemplative prayer has a way of cultivating a spirit of patient listening, which can then enable them to listen to the many voices of the world -- human and more-than-human -- in a nonjudgmental and generous way. Planetarity can be enriched by practices conducive to this kind of prayer, and we encourage Christians and others who are unfamiliar with contemplative prayer to become more familiar with it. Within Christianity, the centering prayer movement is a good place to start:http://www.centeringprayer.com/.
But in this essay we want to focus on Prayers of Address, because they are common throughout the world but so often ignored by environmentalists, human rights advocates, and others interested in sustainability. We hope readers will indulge us if we begin, not with generalizations about the life of prayer, but with a bit of personal experience.
As it happens, in our own households, we pray before meals. Before eating we say: "Dear God, please bless this food to our use and us to thy service. In your name we pray, Amen." Sometimes we hold hands around the table and sometimes we fold our hands like the boy in the picture. The hands are part of the prayer, too. Praying before meals is a holistic act in which a person prays with body and mind. To bless the food is to acknowledge that food itself is a gift and that many people in our world are hungry.
We know that our prayers must be complemented by actions. If we pray for someone who needs comfort, we need to provide the comfort. If we pray for peace we must work for peace. If we pray for people who are hungry, we need to work on their behalf in practical ways. Prayer and action work together like yin and yang, complementing and nourishing one another.
But praying is a kind of action, too. In praying before meals we are expressing our gratitude for being alive and also our desire to be vessels of goodness in the world. This is what we mean by: "And us to your service."
Who are we praying to? Is anyone listening? Or are we simply releasing our ideas into the universe?
These are important questions. However, for us, there is not a sharp difference between releasing intentions into the universe and sharing our intentions with God. We think God is the living unity of the universe: the Life in whom all life unfolds.
In speaking of God this way, we are influenced by the Bible and the idea found in the Book of Acts that we live and move and have our being in God. (Acts 17:27-28). We are also influenced by the philosophy of Whitehead, who helps us understand and appreciate the idea of being in God.
We think the unity of the universe is not simply an aggregate of stars and planets. The unity is a loving Consciousness -- a Life -- who can be addressed in prayer, who feels the feelings of all living beings, and who responds continuously through indwelling lures toward wholeness. This means that, when we pray, we think Someone is listening and receiving the prayer. And we think this Someone is also feeling the feelings of all living beings all the time.
People can rightly ask "Where is this Someone?" For us the Someone is not located in a particular region of space, but is instead everywhere at once, equally present to all things. The Someone is here with us on the planet earth, and also there with the stars and planets, fully present to any forms of life that might dwell on those planets. God is not simply everwhere but also every-here.
But here on Earth is what we know best. The Someone is here in China and here in Iran. There is a hymn we sing in church which goes: "In Christ there is no East or West." People in other lands are as close to the Someone as are we in the United States. The animals and other living beings are close to the Someone, too.
The closeness does not require that they believe in the Someone. The closeness is a gift from the Someone. It is a kind of love. A kind of grace. The grace consists of God's empathy for all living beings everywhere and also God's provision of fresh possibilities to them, moment by moment, relative to the circumstances in which they find themselves. As Christians we believe that this love, this grace, was revealed uniquely but not exclusively in Jesus. In expressing our intention to walk in service to God we are saying that we want to walk in love as Christ walked in love. Sometimes, at the end of our prayers we say "In Christ's name, Amen." But we also know that the grace is given to all and gratefully received by people who do not believe in Jesus. Belief in Jesus is a way to receive the grace. But it is not the only way.
Some people think that God is an object in whom one may or may not believe, but not a reality who can be experienced in other ways. We disagree. We think God's spirit can be experienced among people who do not believe in God.
Prayer is an especially beautiful way of experiencing God. In prayer we are experiencing God as a subject with whom we are in a relationship and not simply an object of belief. This activity is akin to being in the presence of someone you love. You might have beliefs about that person, but when you are in the presence of that person, the experience is different. There is an immediate, subject-to-subject relation.
We have friends who are not sure they believe in God but who nevertheless pray to God. We understand. A person can have a subject-to-subject relationship with God without being able to make sense of God as an object of belief. There is an ancient prayer which says: ""Dear God, I have never believed in you, but I have always loved you." This makes sense. Formal belief is not a necessary gateway to experiencing God.
Indeed prayer is simply one way of experiencing God. There are many ways. Influenced by process theology, we believe that people experience God when they feel small but included in the larger whole of the universe. They experience God when they are curious about the world and seek truth. They experience God when they are open to new possibilities and creatively transformed into fresh ways of living. They experience God in loving and mutually respectful relationships within one another. When they care about each other, they are experiencing God.
Admittedly they may not interpret what they experience as "God." They may say that they are experiencing something very good or very beautiful or very meaningful. But we believe God is experienced in occasions of goodness and beauty and meaning. The knowing that occurs in these experiences is not a propositional knowing. It is not a knowing about or even a knowing how, but a knowing with. It is knowing God by being with God's spirit -- with God's breathing -- as found in goodness and beauty and meaning.
Still another way to experience God is as a calling, an inner beckoning, to add goodness and beauty to the world. The metaphor is auditory rather than visual. It is the idea that you can hear God even if you cannot see God.
Hearing God is a little like hearing music. Just as the rhythms and melodies of music can beckon us and stretch us, enliven us and empower us, console us and challenge us, so the callings of God can do this, too. The callings of God are not simply ideas we entertain intellectually. They are the felt presence of possibilities for responding to the existing circumstances, combined with a sense of their desirability and the intuitive reception of a certain kind of energy -- call it spiritual energy -- for responding to them.
In feeling these possibilities we feel the presence of God's calling as deep-seated aims for how we can respond to what is happening in our lives and the world. And in feeling these aims we are sharing in God's own hopes for us. Dimly but importantly, we feel God's feelings. Dimly but importantly, we hear the callings.
We are not forced to respond to these callings. We can hear the melodies and say "No." This is where intentions become important. It can be important to want to respond to the callings even if we have fallen into habits of non-response; and the very act of wanting to respond can become a habit of the heart which gradually turns into action. Prayer is one way of cultivating this habit, of saying "I want to follow the leadings of the spirit, or at least I want to want to follow them." Indeed, an honest prayer can be: "Dear God, I do not want to follow you, but I want to want to follow you."
The callings of God are social as well as personal. One of the leading biblical scholars of our time, Walter Brueggeman, shows how, from biblical perspectives, many of the callings we receive from God are invitations to imagine the world as it should be, in contrast to how it is, and then to act in ways that help bring about the world as it should be. In his book The Prophetic Imagination he shows how Moses, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Jesus seem to have experienced the callings of God this way. The callings they heard were not just for individual well-being, they were for what Jesus called the basilia theou: that is, the community of love in which people treat one another with dignity and respect, sharing in one another's destinies.
The callings had political as well as economic and cultural implications. They were callings to resist empires. For our part, we think the divine callings are often experienced in just this way, and not by Jews or Christians or Muslims alone. Gandhi experienced the callings and help lead India toward independence. And he felt that these callings were indeed divine and truthful. He proposed that love and truth are two sides of a holistic experience, an experience of God.
We agree with Gandhi. We believe that the truth of God is the most important truth there is, but it is not a conventional truth. It is not the truth of power over things, but the truth of love. And along with Gandhi, we believe that this non-violent love rightly extends, not only to other human beings, but also to other living beings. He was a vegetarian. He believed that animals, too, deserve respect and care. We do, too.
Back, then, to praying before meals. As we have said, we pray before meals in our households. We quiet down for a moment and articulate our desire to desire what God desires. "And us to thy service."
Sometimes we add a special word of prayer for people we know who are in need: friends and relatives, people nearby and faraway. We ask that they have strength and courage and that they flourish in whatever ways are possible for them.
One evening at the McDaniel household, one member of the family -- Matthew, aged eight -- asked if the relatives for whom the family prayed could include animals. His mother, Kathy, thought he had in mind our doge Ashes. She said: "Yes, of course. Ashes is part of our family."
Kathy's point was that, if we desire what God desires, and God desires the well-being of all life, then we desire the well-being of Ashes, too. But the point went deeper. It was that Ashes is indeed part of our family, and that our very sense of family can and should be extended to include other living beings, including our closes biological and spiritual kin, the animals.
We think Kathy was right. God loves and cares for all living beings, not just human beings. Animals have value in their own right, as subjects of their own lives, quite apart from their usefulness to human beings. And they have their callings, too. Moment by moment they are lured by God into the distinctive forms of satisfaction that are marvelous in their own right. They add to the glory of God in their very existence, their very subjectivity, their own feelings.
Moreover, humans and other animals can be bonded in ways that are immensely rich. If God can be known through rich relations, then the richness of human-animal bonds are relations in which God is known. A beloved companion animal is the answer to many a prayer: the prayer of an elderly person for companionship, of a young child for someone to love, the prayer of a family for the blessing of something more-than-human, the prayer of a handicapped person for an empowering friend. When we treat animals kindly and respectfully, we are responding to divine callings.
Back again to the dinner table. That night over dinner Kathy soon realized that Matthew meant much more than the departed Ashes. He meant all animals and plants. He meant the planet and its inhabitants. Here's the context:
Matthew had been reading about Native American traditions in school and he was impressed by the fact that the Dakota Indians speak of all living beings, and spirits as well, as relatives. "Can we pray for the planet?," he asked. "Can we pray for all our relatives?" Kathy again said: "Yes, of course." And again, of course, she was right.
The idea that we are all family is not new. It can be found in East Asian and South Asian traditions, in African and Australian traditions. In the traditions of India, for example, the Upanishads point to a spiritual energy which is present in all plants and animals and people, uniting them.
The idea can also be found in the Abrahamic traditions as Jews, Muslims, and Christians say that we humans are part of not apart from a single web of created life; that we are endowed with a divinely given breath of life; that we are all creatures of the flesh.
Thus the question emerges: Can we, should we, pray for the planet that God so loves? Can we, should we, pray for the entire tree of life? We turn our attention to intercessory and petitionary prayer.
One question about petitionary and intercessory prayer whether it makes a difference or is just a waste of time. For those of us who understand our world as one in which everything is intimately related, including thought and physical reality, there is no doubt that prayer makes a difference both to those who pray and to those for whom they pray – and to God as well. A second question then arises, how should we pray, and, especially, for what should we pray. That is a moral question.
Unfortunately, too many people think of morality as defined by a set of rules. We should do some things and avoid others. Of course, there are many useful generalizations of this sort that we should teach our children. But Jesus made it very clear that we should act according to these generalizations only as long as they are beneficial to people. Turning them into absolute “moral laws” can sometimes have harmful consequences. We should treat these generalizations about what works best as generalizations and nothing more. They may tell us what over many centuries human experience has shown us is best under most circumstance. But they do not determine what is moral.
For Jesus morality is a matter of loving God and other people and acting accordingly. Whitehead’s understanding of morality is informed by Jesus. For him morality has to do with the widening of concern for the future.
We are all concerned for some future, at least the immediate personal one. When we are hungry, we want food; when we are tired, we want rest. There is nothing wrong with that, but there is nothing particularly moral about it either.
We are being more moral if we extend the time period. That is, if we consider that it might be better in the long run to complete a task we have been assigned before eating or resting, that is more moral than just responding to the immediate hunger or tiredness. We expect infants to be focused only on the immediate future, but as they grow into children, we hope they will consider a longer-term future as well. Prudence is an important virtue.
We become still more moral by broadening the future with which we are concerned to include the well-being of other members of our family. It is more moral to want all members of our families to have the food they need than just to care about ourselves. It is still more moral to care whether our friends and neighbors are well fed.
For Jesus morality is a matter of loving God and other people and acting accordingly. Whitehead’s understanding of morality is informed by Jesus. For him morality has to do with the widening of concern for the future.
We are all concerned for some future, at least the immediate personal one. When we are hungry, we want food; when we are tired, we want rest. There is nothing wrong with that, but there is nothing particularly moral about it either.
We are being more moral if we extend the time period. That is, if we consider that it might be better in the long run to complete a task we have been assigned before eating or resting, that is more moral than just responding to the immediate hunger or tiredness. We expect infants to be focused only on the immediate future, but as they grow into children, we hope they will consider a longer-term future as well. Prudence is an important virtue.
We can limit our concerns even more. Probably there are sentient beings in other parts of the universe, but we have no idea what they are like and what are their needs. At this stage in cosmic history, we have no knowledge of our influence upon them and suspect it is very trivial indeed. We do better to concentrate on glaringly important needs here on this planet.
Both physical actions and prayer, then, are particularly moral when they take the well-being of sentient beings on planet Earth into consideration. Actions and prayers of this sort are beneficial to those who act and pray, and they have a good chance of benefiting others as well.
The complexity of morality, however, does not end here. Much as we would commend those who act and pray for the well-being of the planet, we cannot encourage planetary concern at the cost of ignoring the neighbor who is in need. Especially with respect to actions, this is often an important point.
Take an example. Let us suppose that a middle class family has a daughter who is ready to go to college. They favor a very expensive one because they think it would provide their daughter the very best education available. They are, at the same time, aware that the money they plan to spend on her education could be used to meet the much more urgent needs of a large number of people. Are they immoral if they lavish their resources on the daughter?
We are not making a judgment one way or the other. The point is just that morality cannot ignore issues of relationship and special responsibility. Couples have special responsibility to one another that they do not have to others. The same is true of parents to children and children to parents. Overall a society functions better if familial responsibilities are met. But always satisfying the desires of those closest to you before responding to the needs of others is not moral. It seems that we are destined to live always in this moral tension. Far more people err by giving too little attention to the wider needs than by giving them too much weight. But the latter error also occurs. We can give too much attention to the wider needs, and forget what it close to home. The key is finding a balances.
We have dealt with prayer and action together, partly because prayer is a form of action. However, there are differences. Where action is possible, it normally takes priority over prayer. Prayer comes into play, when action is not possible or reaches its limits. We take a sick daughter to the doctor. That takes priority over praying for her. But we may pray even while we do that and certainly while we wait in the doctor’s office. We give the child the medicine and other care the doctor prescribes and show her in every way we can our love. But we can also pray for her. And there are times when there is nothing more that we can do, and prayer becomes central.
With respect to the planet as a whole, our capacity to respond through action is far more limited. Accordingly, prayer takes precedence. First, prayer is one way of shaping our own concerns and attitudes. As we realize that we should care about the well-being of all sentient beings throughout the planet, there is no better way to cultivate this concern than by praying for all. We can pray especially for those parts of the world toward which we find ourselves indifferent. We can pray even more for those whom our government and our media have declared to be our enemies. Prayer can enable indifference and hostility to give way to caring. The changes that prayer makes in our own attitudes and sensibilities sometimes lead to actions as well. Where actions are possible, they take precedence.
On the other hand, if we want our prayer also to work with God in making a difference in what actually happens, focus is probably needed. If we are asking that war be avoided, the likelihood that concentrating on individuals who are making crucial decisions and asking that their hearts and minds be open to God’s guidance probably has a better chance of making a difference than a very general prayer for peace.
Praying for the planet does not mean only praying in the most comprehensive and general terms for the planet as a whole, important as that is to counter our tendencies to narrowness of concern. It also means praying as concretely and specifically as possible for those changes most likely to benefit the planet as a whole. It should be guided by study of what is taking place and how that affects the chance for the survival of sentient beings. Prayers of this kind are also those most likely to lead to effective action. We must be careful in assuming we know precisely what changes are needed. But we cannot and need not avoid sharing with God the specifics of our own hopes, and trusting that divine wisdom can take matters from there.
It is obvious to many of us that effective action is needed today. We propose that it is action aimed at helping people build and enjoy sustainable communities. A serious need in our time is to carefully consider agricultural and economic policies in which those kinds of communities can emerge. One of us (John Cobb) offers an article for this website outlining some of those policies: Ten Ideas for Saving the Planet. But our point in this essay is to suggest that policy alone cannot sustain our world. Nor can study alone. Within us there needs to be a kind of trust or faith that takes us beyond ourselves and our will toward something wider and more inclusive. A trust in Life. For us, and we suspect for others, too, this trust can be cultivated with help from prayer. Prayer cannot solve all problems, but without prayer -- desiring what God desires -- no problems can be solved. Armed with an inclination to pray -- no, gentled by this inclination -- there may be hope.