Attentive Spirituality

From Jurgen Moltmann's In the End—the Beginning: the life of hope . . .

What are we seeking when we pray?

When we pray, what we are seeking is not our own wishes; we are seeking the reality of God, and are breaking out of the Hall of Mirrors of our own illusory wishes, in which we have been imprisoned. That means that we wake up out of the petrifications and numbness of our feelings. We burst apart the armour of the apathy which holds us in an iron grasp. If when we pray we seek the reality of God's world (as with the first petition of the Lord's Prayer), then prayer is the exact opposite of 'the opium of the people'. On the contrary, prayer is more like the beginning of a cure for the numbing addictions of the secular world. . . .

Pray wakefully—that is only possible if we don't pray mystically with closed eyes, but messianically, with eyes wide open for God's future in the world. Christian faith is not a blind trust. It is the wakeful expectation of God which draws in all our senses.

The person who prays, lives more attentively.

The early Christians prayed standing, looking up, with arms outstretched and eyes wide-open, ready to walk or to leap forward. We can see this from the pictures in the catacombs in Rome. Their posture reflects tense expectation, not quiet heart-searching. It says: we are living in God's Advent. We are on the watch, in expectation of the One who is coming, and with tense attentiveness we are going to meet the coming God. . . .

'Watch and be sober' (1 Thess. 5.6, 8). That is the next charge we hear. Sober people are not intoxicated, and don't suffer from hallucinations; they are under no illusions. When sobriety is added to the wakefulness that comes from praying, we shan't fool ourselves, and shan't let ourselves be fooled, either by political propaganda or by the consumerism thrust on us by the advertisers. We shall accept reality for what it is, and shall expose ourselves to it both in its workaday guise and in its surprises. Then we shall discover that reality is far more multi-coloured and fantastic than all our fantasies. But we shall perceive too that the pain which reality imposes on us is still, at all events, better than the self-immunizations with which we try to protect ourselves, but through which we in fact wall ourselves in.