Phenomonology of Prayer Pt. 2

Seeing that prayer is one of the most common of human activities, it makes sense that people have attempted to understand it at its deepest. However, as we attempt to submit that it’s most common form, that of petition, to philosophical analysis, difficulties arise. Prayer is caught in “mimetic violence” where we begin to compete with others. This is because as we focus on objects in petitionary prayer it traps us within what may be called an “earthly economy.” This has been observed for years and years. Plato saw this and called it a “mutual exchange of benefits.” The difficulty we run into in this is that the gods neither need nor depend on our sacrifices. So… how can we ask for things and not be trapped in an “earthly economy”? Bruce Ellis Benson and Norman Wirzba believe that we can resolve this if we see prayer as the attempt to provide a space where the sacred can appear. There are two notions that this may happen. The first is that the otherness of the god, of it’s not fitting into the context in and through which things are normally given. The second notion is the sense of the sacred as coming into the world by incarnating itself. My particular favorite notion is the second in the context of the Christian God incarnating himself in the person and work of Jesus the Christ. This incarnation involves the notion of kenosis, that is, of God in Christ emptying himself and taking the form of a slave (as seen in Philippians 2:7). This kenosis is an emptying out or a making void. In one translation it means “made himself nothing.” To take this literally is to see the Incarnation as the progressive emptying out of God, one that culminates in the Cross. This is because such self-emptying is the only way that God can manifest his non-worldly being. In addition, to see the divine splendor and live is to grasp this splendor in its absence from the worldly context. However, this does not mean this splendor does not, in a certain sense, appear. It must, if we are to see the Crucifixion as the culmination of the Incarnation and see the Incarnation as manifesting God’s love as stated in 1 John 4:9.