September 12, 2016
Essay One: Prayer as the Posture of the Decentered Self
Merold Westphal begins his essay by discussing the five elements of prayer: praise, thanksgiving, confession, petition, and intercession. Of the five elements, the one that most people find themselves uncomfortable doing is praise. He goes on to explicitly state his thesis: "Prayer is a deep, quite possibly the deepest decentering of the self, deep enough to begin dismantling or, if you like, deconstructing that burning preoccupation with myself". This is why he puts praise as the first element of prayer -- it is to focus our minds on something other than the self, or the "I". Especially with Christianity in America, we are so consumed with the self and certain wants of life that we tend to forget about the Other. Westphal's thesis offers that prayer begins in a very immature state which is self-serving and self-promoting rather than self-decentering and God-desiring. Westphal relates it to a 3-year old praying for gelato while kneeling in a church. Now, our prayers may not be that immature, but they definitely lack a "dying to self" in most cases. They tend to begin with, "Lord, give me. Lord help me", as Westphal states on p. 15. Or, when we intercede, it tends to be focused on an individual that we deeply care about.
Westphal then goes into discussing surrendering one's self by looking at Samuel's prayer in 1 Samuel 3. Samuel prays to God, "Here am I, for you called me", and later on with the help from Eli, says, "Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening." It is here where Samuel is submitting to God and dying to self. He is acknowledging his servitude, which can be translated to slavery, to the Lord. He then touches on four things that we learn about prayer through Samuel. First, that God calls, and then we respond to that calling by being ready to hear God speak again. Secondly, we learn that prayer is a task of a lifetime. Prayer is never going to be something that we as Christians are able to completely grasp. However, we can present ourselves as listeners with hopes that God will guide us further. Third, we learn that silence is an important aspect to prayer. The Word of God can be heard within our prayer when we are silent, says Johannes Tauler. Lastly, we learn that Scripture and prayer are so "integrally intertwined", as Westphal says on p. 20. For it is the God who speaks in Scripture that we listen to in the silence. He goes on to say that, "before prayer is a fivefold speech act on our part, it is listening to the word of God as found in Scripture."
This essay was interesting to me because having a sort of Calvinistic background theologically, Westphal produces a very good conversation as to how to properly listen to God through reading Scripture and prayer, which ultimately leads to the decentering of the self. This is intriguing for me because his discussion is how to properly die to self while seeking to serve God while still remaining firm in Scripture -- leaning on God to keep you in the Word. American Christianity is not solely self-centered, but much of it is tended to the self, which strays from what the Word of God is saying to do. Instead of praying for the will of God to be done in one's life, a person tends to pray for advancement for him or herself, contradicting his or her true beliefs. Much of this is done unknowingly, simply because of culture, but it is something that needs change.
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