I recently read John D. Caputo’s Specters of God: An Anatomy of the Apophatic Imagination, a work of “anxious apophatics” in line with his radical (or, previously, “weak”) theology, specifically in combining deconstruction (and Schelling) and Judeo-Christianity into a postmodern approach to a “world without why.” With my focus on spirituality, I began wondering what a Caputoian spirituality might be: how, for example, would a radical theologian pray? Still more, how might process theology—which has some affinities with radical theology—likewise approach prayer?
Radical Prayer
Helpfully for this line of questioning, Caputo himself begins the discussion with a slightly earlier article, “Do Radical Theologians Pray? A Spirituality of the Event.” He emphatically proclaims,
Do radical theologians pray? To this my response will be simple—they pray like mad and, if anything, in keeping with my thesis about a radical spirituality, even more ‘radically’ than the prayers that are prayed in the confessional or denominational religious bodies.
This claim might seem highly surprising given radical theology’s understanding of God as an event rather than, to use Tripp Fuller’s phrase, “the Big Other.” Caputo readily acknowledges the radicality of prayer rooted in such an understanding:
To whom is (Derrida) praying if he does not believe in God?…to Geoffrey Bennington…his mother, himself, anyone, everyone. The orthodox believers cannot believe this. They protest: seriously, how could Derrida be really praying? Is this not a literary conceit and nothing more than that? My answer is that prayer cannot be shut up within orthodox confessional limits, no more than the unconditional can be shut up within a being, however supreme. Prayer is a prior or deeper structure over which the religious confessions have no proprietary rights…It belongs to the event, to a deeper faith and hope, to the heart, to our cor inquietum.
This “prior or deeper structure” is, to put it as simply as possible (an action which is admittedly not in the “playful” spirit of Caputo’s beloved theopoetics), life itself in all its complexity and wonder. Caputo maintains that “elemental human aspiration” and “basic hope or expectancy” is
a more elemental form of life. There is a parallel or deeper proto-prayer, prior to the claims that religion stakes to such a profoundly important matter, a matter of ultimate concern, as Tillich called it, which reveals something important about the very structure of our being-in-the-world. What is at issue here is a more general form of life.
This elemental, irreducible, radical spirituality of the event, he says, is always hopefully working for a better “what is to-come.” Radical prayer therefore “hits the streets, galvanizes demonstrations, holds up traffic, gets tear-gassed by the police.” I’m sure Caputo would agree—even though he regrettably does not point this out in his article—that such a hopeful and quintessentially active view of prayer, to be truly radical, would also extend beyond public acts of advocacy and resistance to incorporate all aspects of life which contribute in their little ways to a better world and a better tomorrow. Beyond such obviously beneficial activities as volunteering or working in public services like education or healthcare, all actions that benefit our families and communities—and even much-needed acts of self-care—can be offered and experienced as prayerful.
There is great power in this view of prayer. Rather than the saccharine “thoughts and prayers” offered by many people in times of difficulty—usually without any intention to work to make the situation better, and frequently without any intention of even thinking or praying beyond the moment—radical prayer goes beyond ora et labora to experience that work is prayer.
Process Prayer
Process and relational thought also understands prayer as oriented toward the betterment of the world. For example, Marjorie Suchocki, in In God’s Presence: Theological Reflections on Prayer, explains that “God works with the world as it is to bring it toward what it can be. Prayer changes the way the world is and therefore changes what the world can be. Prayer makes a difference to what God can do in and with the world.” At the same time, though, this quotation demonstrates a crucial difference between the radical and process views: while as a result of its apophaticism radical theology takes a generally agnostic approach to deity, process thought tends to see God as intrinsically related to us (there are non-theistic process thinkers, but that is beyond the scope of this article). Process thought, as Suchocki says, focuses upon “the creativity of God, or the omnipresence of God, or the persuasive power of God. But whatever we may say of it, it is the great communion with God, and the basis for prayer.”
Suchocki expands on this prayerful relationship between God and praying individuals:
This framework for a relationship with God exists for all, but at unconscious levels. Prayer is the act of bringing our moment-by-moment connectedness to God into our consciousness. Through prayer we actually address God as if our doing so made some difference to God, which of course it does. Because the impulses God gives us are conditioned by where and when and who and how we are, these impulses are affected when we become one who prays. Prayer opens us to God’s presence and/or guidance, and thus shifts our ability to receive whatever guidance is appropriate for ourselves and the communities of which we are a part. Prayer also opens us to the possibility of change, with the direction of that change oriented by God’s wisdom relative to us.
Jay McDaniel likewise explains:
What are we doing when we pray? At the simplest level, with spontaneous prayer or wordless prayer, we re-center ourselves with God at the core…With God as our magnet, prayer allows us to orient ourselves around optimal love, justice, experience, compassion. We elevate our own sense of what is possible, the significance of our choices and our capacity to make a difference. Since God works with the world as it is, that new/renewed energy and determination is now available for God’s wondrous work.
It should be noted that, as with radical theology, process theology expands the definition of prayer far beyond the mere thinking or utterance of words directed toward deity. As Suchocki explains in another article, “Prayer is not reducible to words alone…The activity of prayer is one’s orientation toward others, toward oneself, and towards God…Hence finally, in process theology, one must say that the prayer is the pray-er. We ourselves are our prayers.” This is a beautiful image: we as praying prayers interact with others as prayers in an ever-growing harmony of prayer.
A Christian Perspective
As I pointed about earlier, there is true power in the radical theological view of “what is to-come”-focused action being prayer; this understanding empowers those who reject any hint of theism to nonetheless see their world-improving actions as inherently sacred. As Caputo announces, “Radical theology not only dares to think; it dares to hope. It not only dares to hope; it dares to pray. Radical theology is a prayer. Its first, last, and constant prayer is to say yes to what is to-come: yes, yes, viens, oui, oui, Amen.”
From a distinctly Christian perspective, however, as much as I respect the radical emphasis upon improving this world, I nonetheless miss the relational interaction between God and the world inherent in both traditional (i.e., confessional) and process Christianity. Caputo’s radical apophaticism, despite his frequent claim that radical theology is all about the “possibility of the impossible,” is really about—as he himself readily acknowledges—“the suspension of supernaturalism.” This means radical theology focuses on the “possibility of the not-yet”—anything to which we might point as involving divine relationality or action remains impossibly off the table. As B. Keith Putt notes,
One would expect him to be a bit less evangelical with his postmodern positivism and leave open the possibility of the impossibility of divine reciprocity. His poetics of the event actually allows for a potential hermeneutic of divine providence as interactive in human lives, as well as supporting a genuine theopassionism in which God is truly affected by human response…He might just recognize that the passion for the impossible and the undecidability inherent in the messianic structures of the sacred anarchy of the event might allow for the incoming of a Wholly Other who genuinely comes in to existential encounters with individuals.
As a Christian I am formed and transformed through my relationship with God. I therefore resonate strongly with Suchocki’s description of process Christian prayer:
Prayer, then, is not an appendage to our Christian living, nor is it some false illusion of a communication with God. Prayer is the lifeblood of our activity, a creation of reality which attunes us to the wider reality surrounding us…Ultimately, the openness of one’s orientation toward good, the self-constitution of the individual in attunement with the reality of God, is prayer, and the dynamics of prayer are simply the dynamics of the relationship of God to the world, and of the world to God.
Image: Woman wearing a white shirt (Source).
