Worldly Holiness

'What is the place of worship and prayer in an entire absence of religion?' Bonhoeffer

Communion is the assertion of 'the beyond' in the midst of life, the holy in the common. When worship becomes a realm into which to withdraw from the world 'to be with God' it is the essence of a religious perversion. Doing so relegates the realm of the non-religious (ie. most of life) to the profane. It implies that the holy place where the Christ is met, lies not, as in the parable of the Sheep and the Goats, in the ordinary relationships of life; but within the circle of 'the religious'. The purpose of worship is not to retire from the secular into the department of the religious, ie. not an escape from the world, but to open oneself to the meeting of the Christ in the common. The function of worship is to make more sensitive to these depths: to focus, sharpen and deepen our response to the world and to other people beyond the point of proximate concern. The test of worship is how far it makes us more sensitive to the 'beyond in our midst', to the Christ of the hungry, the naked, the homeless and the prisoner. Only if we are more likely to recognize him there after attending an act of worship is that worship Christian rather than a piece of religiosity in Christian dress.

Prayer is conceived in terms of turning aside from the business of 'the world' to 'be with God'. It is assumed that prayer is defined in terms of what one does in the times of disengagement. The sacramental moments of communion with God are to be expected in the periods of withdrawal. We have developed a deep inferiority complex because the experts have told us that this the way we ought to pray, and yet we find that we cannot maintain ourselves for any length of time with the required discipline or consistency - we end up saying we are not the praying type and carry within ourselves an unacknowledged sense of failure and guilt. Many of our habits and traditions come from our medieval inheritance which is not as relevant for a man come of age.

I wonder whether Christian prayer, prayer in the light of the Incarnation, is not to be defined in terms of penetration through the world to God rather than of withdrawal from the world of God. How easily one finds oneself giving pious advice to a person faced with a decision to 'go away and pray about it'. Traditional spirituality has placed a premium upon 'the interior life', regarding this as the spiritual core of man. 'The heart' in the biblical sense is not the inward life, but the whole man in relation to God. Man lives just as much from outwards to inwards as from inwards to outwards. The need for times of withdrawal is accepted naturally, but with no pretension that these times are particularly 'holy'.

I pray for people and agonize for them most when I meet them and give myself to them. It is in this incarnational relationship that deep speaks to deep and the Spirit of God is able to take up our inarticulate groans and turn them into prayer. To open oneself up to another unconditionally in love is to be with him in the presence of God, and that is the heart of intercession. To pray for another is to expose both oneself and him to the common ground of our being; it is to see one's concern for him in terms of ultimate concern, to let God into the relationship. Intercession is to be with another at that depth, whether in silence or compassion or action. It may not be specifically religious, it may not be consciously Christian; but it may be a meeting of Christ in that man, because his humanity is accepted 'without any reservation'. The Christian life, the life of 'the man for others', must, as Bonhoeffer insisted, be a 'worldly life'. Yet it must be a life of 'holy worldliness', of 'sacred secularity'.