Australian signer, Nick Cave, famously begins his song ‘Into my Arms’ with the words “I don’t believe in an interventionist God” and then goes on to express the plea that God would somehow deliver the woman he loves into his arms. In this delightfully poetic way, he introduces something of the dilemma of prayers; when we pray, what are we thinking about God and what do we expect of God?
My initial reaction to the song some years ago was to think Cave’s dilemma would be resolved were he to believe that God is an interventionist God. Now, I am not so sure. Now, I think the notion of an interventionist God creates more dilemmas than it solves. Certainly it leaves us to deal with those moments God did not intervene when it was so clear to us that God should have intervened, perhaps to prevent some horrifying disaster. Or perhaps, even worse, how it could be that God seems to have intervened to rescue one person but not another from the same disaster.
My musings about such matters have led me to the point where I believe it is better to understand God as constantly and consistently engaged in the world, in, through and under the whole of creation, than to see God as popping into the world from time to time, for some reason known only to God, to answer some person’s prayerful bidding. In fact, I would go so far as to say that were it not for God’s constant and consistent presence in the midst of the life of the world, the life of the world could and would not be sustainable. Without God’s presence in every moment, we would not last beyond any moment.
In this scheme of things, prayer is not asking God to intervene in the life of the world but is engaging in the world on God’s terms, in company with an ever-present God. To pray,, then, is to entrust our lives to God and our ways to God’s way in the midst of life as we find it in any given moment or situation, rather than to expect God to leap to our aid from somewhere outside the world in response to our prayerful calls for assistance.
When understanding prayer as engagement with an ever-present God, we can certainly still recognise that turning to God in the midst of life does make a tangible difference and that startling things do happen only because God is involved. We can still meaningfully talk about what we call ‘miracles’, not because God has intervened but because the God who is ever-present has acted.
A conclusion to which all this musing drives me is that prayer is therefore a constant demand in our lives. St Paul’s call to “pray without ceasing” makes great sense. It is a call always to seek the heart and mind of God in the midst of life. It is a call constantly to be turning to the God is is ever beside us and, in faith, to be committing our lives and the lives of others into God’s ways, knowing that in going in God’s way lies our and their only hope. For we know, again to quote St Paul, that “nothing, not even death, can separate us from the love of God.”
Prayer then becomes my responsibility to be faithful to God, not God’s responsibility to fit my demands. Prayer is the day to day expression, in every moment and every situation, of “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”, a prayer made possible only because God is constantly and consistently engaged on earth.
Bishop John McIntyre