Active Prayer

No big post tonight--too much stuff going on.

Here's a quote Alan shared from an essay by Tom F. Driver about ritual:

What we can say in general, I think, is that there is something healthy about ritual's assumption that human reality is essentially dramatic, that at bottom life is not something to be treated, as scientifically based medicine treats a disease, but something to be enacted, as in the enactment of one's own being in the world or the enactment of a cure. Although this insight can perhaps be defended metaphysically, it is beyond my present purpose to do so. The clearer case is moral: when we understand ourselves as agents active in a world made up of other purposive beings, our sense of self and responsibility is heightened. The person who performs a rain dance or goes to church to pray for rain is at least doing something, and probably with more self-awareness than the person who watches the TV weather report and waits with passive impotence for the sky to change. Of course, there is nothing to prevent one's doing the ritual and also watching the TV weather, but in that case the passivity is gone.

Tom F. Driver. "Transformations: The Magic of Ritual." Readings in Ritual Studies, edited by Ronald L. Grimes, Prentice Hall, 1996, pp. 170-187.

This reminds me of my father's Sunday School lesson, where he talked about what prayer does. It isn't a passive thing you do instead of action (ideally); it is instead the transformation of one's orientation to a situation, person, or issue that prepares one for action.

More tomorrow,

JF