Findings

This morning on my walk I decided to start a list of productive prayers vs. unproductive prayers. That decision got me thinking about two writers who’ve already done something similar: William Blake and, a century later, Wendell Berry. Not only do both have the same initials (which I never noticed before this moment), but both use the spirit of contrariness as a mode for arriving at truth.

Blake wrote scathingly against the apparatus of religion and law that he believed restrained creative genius in a cage of rationality. He turned the traditional vision upside down in a private mythology, making Hell into Heaven, and Heaven into Hell. Here’s his “Voice of the Devil” in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93):

All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following errors:

1. That Man has two real existing principles: Viz: a Body & a Soul.
2. That Energy, call’d Evil, is alone from the Body; & that Reason, call’d Good, is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.

But the following Contraries to these are True:

1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief Inlets of the Soul in this age.
2. Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight.

From this reversal Blake constructs a whole series of “Proverbs of Hell.” Just a few examples: 

1.   The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
2.   If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.
3.   Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by incapacity.

And so on! Blake scores high on shock value, but usually rewards a closer look with an unexpected glimpse of truth from a different angle.

Berry does something similar in his Mad Farmer poems, first introduced in Farming: A Handbook (1970). There are too many poems to encompass here about this character who seems like a modernized, agricultural version of Blake’s speaker. He emerges in “The Mad Farmer Revolution,” and speaks for himself for the first time in “The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer”: “I am done with apologies. If contrariness is my inheritance and destiny, so be it. If it is my mission in life to go in at exits and come out at entrances, so be it…”

But it’s in “Prayers and Sayings of the Mad Farmer” that he offers a set of proverbs reminiscent of Blake’s. A few examples:

1.   It is presumptious and irresponsible to pray for other people. A good man would pray only for himself…
2.   At night make me one with the darkness. In the morning make me one with the light.
3.   If a man finds it necessary to eat garbage, he should resist the temptation to call it a delicacy.

And so on! Again, here’s a narrator who’s longing to get down to the heart of things and finds the traditional tracks lead nowhere.

I have that feeling sometimes in prayer. Following the various formulas — A(doration)C(onfession)T(hanksgiving)S(upplication), for instance — I find distracting. The beautifully articulate prayers of various books, in the style of The Book of Common Prayer, have helped in the past to get things rolling, but not so much these days. God, or I, or both, seem to be insisting that I find my own words, and in the process my own soul, in prayer.

I was going to start formulating some such findings here, but after revisiting these two master writers I feel either too inferior, or too tired, to do so. (Which means that once again I’ve followed previous tracks rather than making my own, and ended up speechless.) But I really do want to. So here’s a resolve to create my own manifesto at a later date, for which this post will become a foundation.

How do people in the Bible pray? When we read of people fasting and praying for days on end: what do they say? How do they do it? I find prayer, at least over the last year or so, to be incredibly hard. Basically my prayers are an acknowledgment to God that I need his perspective and welcome him in every area, and I want him to protect and intervene with people I love. I won’t say it makes no difference, because there is an effect. But it’s not emotional, and I can’t imagine doing nothing but praying for days on end–even hours on end. What am I missing?

Another matter: dreamers in the Bible. There are lots of them. Joseph the father of Jesus had some important dreams that were clearly God’s messages to him. Joseph in Genesis and Daniel are both dreamers and interpreters on a larger scale. In some ways they resemble artists, who see visions and interpret symbolic realities. I feel a kinship with them, but am not sure I’m learning all that I should from them. I have dreams too–certain settings I return to again and again in my dreams, but where I’ve never been in reality. Sometimes I have dreams that are without a doubt symbolic, perhaps prophetic. What do I do with this side of myself? What do these biblical dreamers have to say that applies to my small world?

I see a relationship between my frustrations about prayer and my sense of being bloated with dreams. One of these days it will make sense.