The following is an article originally published in Pastoral Psychology, Spring 1977. At that time the word “holistic” was new in use and its spelling was not standardized. I chose to spell it “wholistic” in order to convey both its meaning and its pronunciation. I have replaced that spelling throughout the article with the current spelling.
Warner White, D.Min.
Church of St. Paul and the Redeemer, Chicago
ABSTRACT: The author has experimented with an approach to prayer in which he draws on insights and methods from contemporary psychotherapy. He calls his approach “holistic prayer” and defines it as “the movement, the lifting up, of the person—body, heart, mind, and will—towards God.” He characterizes holistic prayer, discusses problems associated with its practice, describes its stages, and illustrates the use of dreams. He provides clinical data from participants in classes on prayer and from his own experience.
Recently I have begun to experiment with methods of prayer that draw heavily upon insights and methods from contemporary psychotherapy. I call the approach “holistic prayer.” Let me give an example. The following prayer is an introspective one beginning with the person’s awareness of her body. The person praying, Pat, was a member of one of the classes in prayer I have been teaching. Participants were asked to become aware of their bodies (as in bioenergetics), to engage in a dialogue with their body (as in Gestalt therapy), and to conclude with a dialogue with God in which they take both parts, God’s as well as their own.
Pat: My arm aches. My left leg aches, too. I ache a lot of the time, lots of places. My body’s a nuisance and to be ignored as much as possible. I don’t like it much.
God: Oh? You see and hear and smell and taste and touch with it.
Pat: Well, that’s all pretty good, but I don’t exactly mean the senses; they’re all sort of connected with my mind. I mean way inside.
Body: Why don’t you pay more attention to me, respect me more? I keep clamoring.
Pat: You sure do. Shut up.
God: I don’t think you’re on very good terms with your body. Where did you get the idea you can stand aside from it and put it down? Why not try staying in better touch? Maybe you will learn some things.
Pat: Sure. I get anxious. I get a pain in my stomach.
God: What do you do then?
Pat: Hope it will go away soon.
God: Is that all? Not very helpful, is it? Don’t you have any better ideas?
Pat: They take time I don’t have.
God: I don’t believe you. Isn’t your stomach important?
Pat: Not very. Hardly worth noticing.
God: No wonder it complains. After all, it’s the only one you’ll ever have.
Pat: O.K. So I get up at 7:30 and exercise and meditate on the Bible or something and eat breakfast sitting down, tasting it.
God: Sure. Try it. You might like it.
Pat: I’m into the old game of making up rules for me to follow. I get out the old lash and flog myself a few times into doing “what I should do” while at the same time I try to be less anxious. Maybe if I can stay more consciously in touch with God, I will be encouraged to take hold rather than feel burdened by demands.
Since some may question whether this is prayer at all, I should comment briefly on my emerging understanding of prayer. Prayer, as I define it, is the movement of the person toward God, the whole person, body and spirit. St. John Damascene’s classic definition is that prayer is the lifting up of the heart and mind and will toward God. I have adapted this definition by making two changes in it: (1) I am including body and (2) I am substituting “movement” for “lifting up.”
I include body as well as feelings and mind and will because my approach is holistic: I am viewing the human person as a whole, not as a duality of body and mind. I speak of “movement” rather than “lifting up” for two reasons. First, I wish to emphasize with St. Augustine that there is within each human being a natural movement toward God. (“Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee.”)1 Second, I wish to escape any implication that human beings are the initiators of prayer. “Lifting up” has very active connotations and can easily be misunderstood. I do indeed conceive conscious, explicit prayer to be work, and it can accurately be called “lifting up,” but it is responsive work. Within us there is a longing for some unknown thing, some completion of our being. Prayer is the work of the human being in response to that sense of incompleteness, that powerful but inchoate longing for I-know-not what.
Thus it is possible to pray without knowing it. Any time I respond to my interior movement toward God, toward completeness of being, toward my ground and source, I am praying. If I do so consciously and explicitly, I am engaged in explicit prayer. Unconscious or unidentified movement toward God is implicit prayer. For convenience’s sake I shall usually mean explicit prayer whenever I speak of prayer in this paper. Explicit prayer is the conscious movement, the lifting up, of the person—body, heart and mind and will—toward God.
This understanding of prayer is the basis for the discussion that follows. It reflects my experiences with classes of laypersons committed to exploring prayer’s meaning for them. I shall proceed by describing several characteristics of holistic prayer and then discuss its process and problems. After noting personal experiences with dreams and holistic prayer, I shall conclude with a few general observations.
Characteristics of Holistic Prayer
Holistic prayer might first be characterized as expressive rather than repressive. It stands in contrast to repressive types of prayer in that it explicitly seeks to start where the person is. If, for example, I am filled with lust, some views of prayer teach that I should purge myself of such “unworthy” feelings. Holistic prayer teaches that I should seek to discover the meaning of my lust and “own” it. The one attitude implies that I have unworthy thoughts and impulses of which I must rid myself. The other attitude implies that at the heart of even the most perverse and distorted behavior or impulse is to be found the movement toward God-^distorted, to be sure, but toward God nevertheless. The task is to discover what is, to take responsibility for it (to “own” it), and to bring it into relationship with God. Repression of “unworthy” feelings simply represses the task.
The change theory involved in this characteristic of holistic prayer is perhaps closest to the paradoxical theory of change found in Gestalt therapy. According to that theory you change not by resisting what you are, not by willing to be different, but by fully owning what you are. For example, I find myself anxious and do not like it. Instead of seeking to suppress my anxiety, Gestalt therapy invites me to enter fully into my anxiety, to feel it fully, to explore it, to discover as many of its aspects as I can, and then to accept my responsibility for it. At that point, change occurs.
So in holistic prayer the conscious movement towards God is the lifting up of the person as that person is—not the lifting up of part of the person or of a purged or purified person but of the whole person, uncensored. Whatever we are, God will take care of it.
Holistic prayer is also actively imaginal and dialogical. Here it borrows from Gestalt therapy, from guided fantasy, and from the Christian tradition of biblical meditation.2 Holistic prayer assumes that God is active and the movement toward God is active in our inner imagery.
The testing of images (iconocrisis) becomes very important in holistic prayer precisely because we seek to trust our own images and our own imaginations. This trust ought not to be blind. It should be critical trust, trust hammered out by the hard work of exploring and testing images, trying various ones out, digesting their meaning, and seeking reliable outside sources by which to measure them. Thus biblical meditation becomes important in order to inform the spirit with imagery that has been tested and found revelatory of God. The help of other persons, outside points of view and support, also is important.
Finally, holistic prayer assumes an epistemology, a way of knowing, which Paul Pruyser says “undergirds the whole Judeo-Christian tradition.”3 Knowledge of God and knowledge of self have always been intimately linked in classical Christian thought. Holistic prayer affirms this tradition in its assumption that knowledge of self leads to knowledge of God and that knowledge of God is the only sure path to the true knowledge of self.
Stages
Holistic prayer makes active use of the imagination, starting with something important to the person. It is important now to clarify how this is true—in other words, how one begins to pray in this manner— and to describe the three stages through which such prayer progresses.
Most simply, holistic prayer begins where you are. In the example given earlier, Pat started with a bodily state. It is possible, however, to begin with an incident that has occurred or with an impending event. You may begin with a biblical passage, with a dream or a daydream, or with thoughts of another person. The important thing is not to begin with an abstraction but rather with matters that are vital or experiential to you.
Once begun, holistic prayer moves through three stages. Stage one is awareness. This is the stage in which active imagination—visualization, dialogue—is used to explore the starting point, to become aware of its meaning.
Stage two is owning. In this stage one takes responsibility for his/ her part in what he/she has become aware of. For example: “O God, I see now that my anger with John means I am feeling hurt, that he has rejected my affection. O God, I feel warm toward John, I want to be closer to him, I feel hurt and angry that he doesn’t respond to me.”
Stage three is resolution. It means “lifting up” or submitting (handing over) the owned awareness to God, some resolution of the issue in relation with God. This may involve confession, a commitment, giving thanks, or letting go. Sometimes prayer mistakenly seeks to jump to this stage—the stage of the solution of problems—without first seeking awareness and owning.
Examples of this process may prove helpful. Two persons reported their experience with introspective prayer starting with the body:
My dialogue centered around just feeling tired. And I made sort of a small discovery in that I was thinking about why I was tired and what could be left out. And I realized that sometimes I do so much because I’m afraid if I slow down I’ll stop completely and I’ll lose my momentum. I won’t be able to start again. I’m afraid of the inertia. I realize that’s sort of a lack of trust and faith. If I did stop for a meditation I’d probably find myself refreshed. But I have this fear I gotta keep going.
Maybe this would be a good way for a person to stop drinking or smoking, because when I started thinking about my body I had a rotten headache. So I talked to my headache. And my headache said, “Well, you don’t have any oxygen in your brain. You’ve got a rotten headache, and you can’t breathe and you can’t see because you keep smoking.” I just can’t stop smoking. So I just thought maybe I can submit this to God and maybe I can quit. It sounds like a kind of trivial thing, but I don’t know if it will work…. I know it’s really killing me. So maybe III continue with this kind of prayer.
In another type of prayer, a self-observation prayer or self-empathic prayer in which the person is asked to imagine himself/herself and then to pray for himself/herself, Chris reported the following experience:
I fly up in the air and look down on Chris walking across the snow. I am God looking down from the sky on Chris. Chris is praying about Dale. “Gosh, I’m worried about Dale. I’d like to pray, do something about the situation Dale’s in, but I have all these hang-ups about prayer and religion and God and so I just say, as I walk along, ‘God, you know all these thoughts I’m having about Dale.’“
And from the sky I say, “You poor creature. What a small and piddling kind of prayer!” I swoop down and hold Chris in my arms. “So you think you want to fly,” I say. “Come on, fly with me. Ill show you things you probably won’t want to see.”
“Oh no,” Chris says, “don’t show me the future. Don’t show me what’s going to happen to Dale. I’m afraid to know.”
“I’ll show you the harshness and the hunger and the grief of millions. Well fly through the world and it’ll rend your heart.”
Chris reflects: Right now I feel like I want to pray more often and more authentically.
Holistic prayer is, however, as varied as life. It does not always lead to desired outcomes. In the following prayer, which reflects on a past event, the outcome is a pounding headache!
Reflections on being left out of an important event in parish life. As I reflected, some of the original emotions returned: First, sorrow and sadness because I was forgotten. Next, anger when I learned the reason. Later, sympathy for Mr. X who didn’t seem to get any help from the committee. He was stuck with the messy business. I wondered what had happened with them. Since I was asked questions about it two weeks later, I knew others knew what had happened to me. Thoughts wandered. Wondered why I get disturbed when hurt or neglected by the church. Wondered why I am so touchy about the sort of thing this committee was doing. I remember how upset I was when one of the members made a caustic remark to me once. I gave up after an hour—had a pounding headache. Remembered a hymn I used to turn to when upset in the past.
Come, ye disconsolate, where’er ye languish
Come to the mercy-seat, fervently kneel:
Here bring your wounded hearts, here tell your anguish;
Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal.
Another person reported a similar trap: “I have a way of obsessively mulling things over. It’s very interior and introspective and doesn’t move anything anywhere and gets totally unrealistic and then I stop living my life while I mull over.”
Problems
The last two examples lead us to some of the difficulties we encounter in holistic prayer. It seems accurate to observe that whatever difficulties one has in one’s inner life are reflected in one’s approach to prayer as well. Consider, for example, the problem of faith and doubt. In a meditation concerning Nathanael and Jesus (John 1: 43-49) one person reported the following experience:
I had two complete scenarios. One: I was just like Nathanael, gave myself completely. And in the other: extremely defensive—I said, “Oh, ah, you must have seen somebody else under the fig tree—what did you say your name was again?” I have double reactions to what’s going on here. One part of me would like to say “Alleluia!” and the other would like to say, “Define your terms!”
On another occasion someone said, “I’m just cynical. I mean that very seriously. I always see why I have that particular line (in the inner prayer-dialogue) being said.” Someone else reported: “I have a suspicion that it isn’t really dialogue, that it’s just me. But it does seem to me that God is inside, not just external, addressing me in here.” This same person on another occasion said: “When I get to God’s part of the dialogue, a part of me says, ‘Oh, that’s just you talking!’“
Such doubts are taken seriously in holistic prayer and treated expressively, just as are any feelings. They become the starting point for awareness, owning, and resolution. Such a prayer is iconocrisis or the testing of images. It may be done as follows:
First, sit quietly, get comfortable, back straight, feet flat on the floor. Take several deep breaths. Quiet down. Keep silence. . . . [Ellipsis points indicate a time of silence for quieting down, imagining, reflecting, or writing.]
In this exercise you are asked to carry on an imaginary dialogue involving three speakers. The first speaker is your image of God, whatever that
may be. It may be an old bearded man. It may be a harsh judge. It may be a buzz of confusion. This kind of exercise starts where you are. The second speaker is your personal center. And the third is the critic or skeptic with in you.
First, personify the image of God within you, be that picture or symbol. Now, as this symbol, describe yourself to your personal center. Sometimes it is helpful to set up chairs representing the speakers and to switch chairs as you take the parts of the speakers. Tell your personal center what you, the image of God, are like. “I am your image of God. I am X. I am Y. I am Z. I do thus-and-so, feel thus-and-so.” Perhaps your personal center will want to respond.
When that dialogue has reached a peak, when it feels right to you, or perhaps when you feel stuck, bring in the critic or skeptic. (If you are using chairs, this means a third chair.) Challenge your personal center. Tell him/her your criticisms. “You are being sentimental.” “You are just intellectualizing.” Tell your personal center what is wrong with your image of God. . . . Your personal center and your critic or skeptic should hold a dialogue. Especially seek out what you really do trust. In what do you really have confidence, or tentative confidence? And your fears? Perhaps your image of God will change.
Now from your personal center own your belief and doubt. “I really believe, trust….” I really do not believe, trust….” In imagination put your life into those trustworthy points (persons, God).
Chances are that this exercise done once is only a beginning. You may want to repeat it in several versions, perhaps many times. (Images of Jesus,
Some of the reactions to this exercise are as follows:
I started out with a gentleman with a long white beard. I was mad at you, Warner, and at him because I don’t think you can make an image of God. God is too big for me to deal with. And God spoken of as a male is a barrier. It’s my father sitting up there. And then when you said to start criticizing the image, I said “What is eternal?” Motion! Change! Sea, wind, universe moving. That’s the closest I could come to it.
My critic said, “This is a projection of your ego.” But I got to criticizing the critic. My difficulty in belief is the voices of the world that say, “This is all part of yourself.” So I came to trusting this and to the idea of not listening to all those other people. When I shut out those voices I do believe.
I was struck by the idea that this might change your image of God. I’ve generally been troubled by the idea of changing my image of God, as if that were wrong. I was shutting myself out. And I was suddenly struck by the fact that there is nothing wrong with changing your image. In fact, there’s something wrong if it doesn’t change and grow!
A problem related to that of faith and doubt is that of openness. Some persons wish to become more aware of their inner lives; others see such a tendency as potentially dangerous. Since these differences need to be respected, it may be that holistic prayer is more helpful to the former. Typical reactions to this dilemma of openness are evident in these statements from participants.
I find that in the area where I can be relatively honest with myself prayer can really help me, but when the feelings are overwhelming to me and I don’t know where they’re coming from, which happened to me this week, I found that prayer was not helpful at all. In fact, my vulnerability was such that I couldn’t bring myself to put down anything. I got to the stage of “My, this is really embarrassing.” That was about as much as I could stand.
Is it always helpful to reflect about something that’s troubling you? It seems to me that lots of situations don’t benefit by reflection about them.
Another problem, especially initially, is that of shame and fear. In connection with my first class in prayer many class members indicated initial fears and worries about participation. One member, for example, spoke to me two weeks before the first session to say that she found it “scary” thinking about the class. Another member with whom I talked about the class in advance told me that although he had very strong impulses toward prayer, their very strength frightened him since he didn’t know where they might be leading. I had been aware of similar fears myself in the months in which I first thought of offering the class. It was only when I thought of ways to structure the class “safely” (as I conceive safety) that I relaxed. Another man said to me ahead of time, “I’m worried about the class, about looking so close. I’m afraid I’ll lose my faith.” Another said, “I’m worried about all my doubts.” This person came to see me twice to be sure that it was all right for a “doubter” to be in the class.
A frequent problem we encountered was the impasse. The person praying gets stuck, blocked, caught in his/her own alienated inner life. No breath of the spirit stirs. Instead the person plays old tapes over and over.
Sometimes a “third chair” is helpful. When I am stuck in my own internal dialogue I sometimes turn to Jesus as one observing from outside and he grants me a new perspective. From his point of view I see things a new way. Sometimes this does not work, however. Sometimes my image of Jesus is faulty and instead of a new perspective I get the old criticisms of my faulty superego. In such cases I usually quit. Outside help may be necessary, or deliberate iconocrisis. Sometimes a night’s sleep, during which my unconscious may work something through, provides an opening to the spirit.
There is also a problem of guilt when prayer is seen as a burden. It is something we are “supposed to do,” something that “good people” do. Several class members reported feeling guilty about “not doing as much practicing as I ought.” Two or three made jokes about whether I was going to give them grades, whether I would flunk any of them. : One person had this reaction in an extreme form: “I felt sick to my stomach all the way over to the group tonight thinking I haven’t done what I was supposed to do this week.” Another person found, however, that making prayer into a burden was a means of avoiding God:
Prayer as burden—a lot of us seem to have that reaction. It seemed to me that making prayer an assignment, a task, was for me a way of hiding or avoiding God. The suggestion was that by working through the six steps as though they were six mathematical problems, that if I could get to step six, I’d get an A!
Dreams and Holistic Prayer
My most powerful experience in holistic prayer has been in praying dreams. Because I have little or no case material from others, I will share some of my personal experience. I am somewhat self-conscious about its highly personal nature, but I do not know any other way to convey its power.
One dream and prayer occurred mid-way in my teaching the first six-week prayer class. It marked a turning point for me, not only with respect to the class but with respect to my life.
I am with someone. We are soldiers. An enemy keeps lobbing large white plastic grenades at us, and we (I?) keep throwing them aside to explode. I get tired of this. “Why don’t I throw some of ours at them?” I get a grenade. It is old and rusty. I pull the pin—I am going to count to three before throwing it—but the pin doesn’t come out all the way. I am afraid. Another grenade. This time I remember about the safety handle. The grenade is , not armed until I let go of the handle. I pull the pin, release the handle, count to three, throw it, lob it. I keep doing this over and over. Then I am thinking of lobbing it up. They are up. I worry about whether I will lob it just right. If I don’t it will roll back down and explode next to me.
My immediate association to this dream, even as I recorded it, was the prayer class! If I do not handle it just right it will explode on me. At that week’s class session we had done introspective prayer starting with the person’s bodily state. I had worried in advance that participants would think this too gimmicky or artificial or too psychotherapeutic. Instead they reported very positive experiences, in the course of which I announced that we would no longer be doing introspective prayer but would be moving on to prayer for others. “Why did I do that?” I asked myself later. “Why, just as things really clicked, why did I back off?” That was a Wednesday night. Thursday and Friday I avoided dealing with the issue, but finally late Friday I decided to pray about it on Saturday. The above dream came that night.
I prayed the dream Saturday morning by using two chairs—one to represent myself as fear and another to represent Warner. I sat in each chair in turn, speaking in dialogue between my two states of self.
Fear: I am your fear, Warner. I am going to frighten you. I am going to blow you up. Try all you like but you can’t throw me away. I keep coming back. I keep coming back.
Warner: Who are you? I can feel you inside me, but I don’t know who you are.
(After a while I was aware that my voice as Warner had changed. I began to speak very calmly, rationally—controlled.)
I am afraid, but I must go ahead.
(The second clause was very slow and measured.) (Then a trusted voice spoke, someone who had been very helpful to me in the past.)
Voice: It is ghosts of your past that are troubling you, Warner. Those are out-of-date fears from your childhood. They are inappropriate now, but they crop up like this.
Warner: I know that! And It’s not very helpful.
As it happened there was a third chair in the room just to the right of the two I was using. I was puzzling over my voice—whose voice was that? Who was that calm, rational voice that made hard decisions in the face of fear and pain? It was my father’s voice! So I turned to the third chair.
Warner: All right, Papa, I know this is somehow all about you. What do you have to say about it?
Father: This is evidence that you don’t love. You’re trying to use gimmicks instead of loving people. You don’t know what you’re doing.
Warner: (immense relief flooding over me) I don’t know? Yes, that’s right. I don’t know. I am just doing a little, because that’s all I know. I’m just trying. You don’t have to know to love and to try! If you love you do try. If you want to know anything, you try a little thing. You can’t know it all. That’s impossible.
Then I felt a surge of gratitude to God. I saw that my constant fear of “sentimentality,” my constant rational approach is an avoidance of commitment, an avoidance of giving anything really powerful a chance to work. Now I visualized Jesus in the chair and, feeling silly, I knelt before him and expressed my sense of gratitude. The kneeling was hard to do, but it felt very important to me as an act of committing myself. I knelt in order to say, “I am going to take this risk.”
Another important dream and prayer occurred after the class was over and I was writing an instructional workbook in holistic prayer, worrying about how I could use it in some way as the basis for the paper to be written for my D.Min. I was also worried about accusations that I was not concerned about the welfare of the persons in the class but only about my learning and my writing the paper.
I am up on a high building with a group of people. We have been doing circus stunts. The Performer gets us out into the air where we float, holding together in two rows, each row holding onto a rubber band. The Performer is by himself, and I am on the end of one row. I wonder what is holding us up. I ask the Performer and, as I do, I wonder what would happen if the rubber band breaks. I start clutching at it and it breaks off in my hand. All the others in my row fall, down, down, down, out of sight. Somehow I get back to the building. The Performer seems undisturbed. “You can’t have an omelet without breaking some eggs.” I ought to feel guilty but I do not. Did I unconsciously murder them?
In my prayer I first redreamed the above. Then I decided to be the Performer. (The following account is condensed.)
Performer: (speaking to Warner) I am your controlling, managing self. I am the one who takes charge of everything, who plans, who reasons, who systematizes. In my scheme of things there is no room for fear or concern or guilt.
Warner: I am frightened. I don’t want to be like you. Yet you are a strength in me. You are what makes it possible to get so much done. Yet you are sterile. In the end you do not feed, you do not even care if persons die. In the end Control and Performance means no faith, no trust in God. You want to clutch everything. So I end up—imitating you and your anxiety, feeling your anxiety—I end up clutching a rubber band! That’s all that holds us up and it’s not enough.
Jesus, I need to trust you. I need to place my Performer and myself in your hands.
Jesus: Why don’t you dream the dream again? Do it differently. If you don’t want Performance and Control, what do you want?
Warner: I want to go with the Spirit, I want to glide on the winds, I want to be held up by your breeze and to be a flyer and a teacher of flying.
Jesus: O.K. Why don’t you dream of gliding, gliding with your class, instead of trying to Perform and holding them up with a rubber band9
I redreamed. I daydreamed of myself and the class holding onto a large glider, being together in a secure harness beneath it. Jesus is the wing holding us up. Together we glide off a dune, soar (just a little!) in the air, and sail down to the edge of Lake Michigan, landing in shallow surf. The next night I had this dream:
I have written a paper for my degree. It comes back from the reader, a priest I respect highly. He gives me a model of how it should be done—it should be embossed on a brown blanket, the words of the paper and some symbols. The symbols are three lamps, standing for Christ, my wife Phyllis, and others. I want to see him to talk about it. Where do I get a machine to do the embossing?
The work I am doing is no longer a perilous mid-air killing thing but a brown blanket, with symbols of comforters and enlighteners on it! It is backed by a respected authority. The only disturbing element is that I am looking for a machine, something impersonal, with which to do the embossing.
I could give other examples of how dreams, prayer, and my life and ministry have interacted, each affecting the other. Praying dreams is a means of constant “feedback” between the inner life, the outer life, and God. But the best means of determining the validity or invalidity of this approach for you is to try it yourself.
Concluding Observations
I wish to add some remarks for the sake of completeness. So far I have spoken only of prayer involving oneself. I do not wish to leave the impression that holistic prayer is turned entirely inward upon itself. As I view prayer for others, it depends upon the possibility of empathy, understanding another, and of co-inherence, our spiritual indwelling, one in another. In my pastoral counseling, for example, I have tried to pray for counselees by imagining what it is like to be that person and then offering that person—wishes, evasions, strengths, and weaknesses—to God.
It should be clear by now that holistic prayer is conceived as work. Prayer is viewed as a skill that can be learned. Prayer is a here and now practical activity. Its theories and methods are to be judged by their results. Religious notions (stories, symbols, history, creeds, and practices) are to be judged by their results. God is not a hypothesized entity that we may or may not encounter in the hereafter. Instead, we have inklings of God, images of God right now, which we affirm or deny, trust or distrust. What do those images mean? What do our other images mean?
Thus these ideas and methods are subject to the same kind of testing as those, for example, of psychotherapy. We are not in some special area of “faith” that is beyond empirical test. Whether God exists or not appears to be beyond such testing, but whether methods of trusting and testing images of God recommended here are helpful or not is subject to testing. So far my experience shows that for some people they are helpful and for some they are not.
I have shared enough of my personal experience to make it clear that I find such prayer extremely helpful. Two members of my first class reported:
I have a sense that I have just touched the tip of an iceberg, that I have an enormous amount of one-tenth digested material that I need to rework. I have a lot of only a tenth digested stuff too. I’m being very secretive of myself with God, very cautious. I try to get my conceptualizations clear . : before I share with him. Maybe I can keep the dialogue with God going more of the time and not store up a great big shelf full of stuff first.
Still another class member reported enthusiastically:
The prayer technique became only the beginning of a whole new perspective on religion . .. / had to put out, to work, to pray. It wasn’t just reading or hearing about prayer but doing it—and then discussing it. In this it was like therapy.. ..
I’ve thought a good deal about the God-as-projection-of-ourselves dilemma we kept stumbling on in class. In general I think the dilemma is productive. … It really replaces a God-as-projection-of-external-authority dilemma. . . .
My experience in the class was heavily tied in to my growing awareness and acceptance of myself.
Another person was not so enthusiastic:
It was clear to me at the first session that I was in the wrong place. … I do not like public discussion of private matters and I thought more than once in the series potentially damaging discussions began. … I find this technique emphatically non-Anglican. . . . The Anglican Church’s formality and public discipline are what appeal to me. . . , The setting made real prayer impossible for me. …
I recognize that the class has met a real need for some persons, but I question the wisdom of continued similar activity.
Overall, of my first class of 23 persons (not including myself) who tried these methods, twelve reported a positive experience, three a mixed experience, three a negative experience, and five did not provide enough information to draw a conclusion. Only time and further testing will tell the story.
Reference Notes
1. St. Augustine, Confessions.
2. See St. Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises or Francis De Sales’ Introduction to a Devout Life, for example,
3. Paul W. Pruyser, Between Belief and Unbelief (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), p. 121.
Dr. White is Rector of the Church of St. Paul and the Redeemer (Episcopal), 4945 South Dorchester Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60615. He teaches classes in prayer both in the parish and in the Logos Institute of Chicago Theological Seminary.