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CONFRONTING THE POWERS THAT BE

Those who pray do so not because they believe certain intellectual propositions about prayer's value, but because the struggle to be human in the face of suprahuman Powers requires it. The act of praying is itself one of the indispensable means by which we engage the Powers. (TPTB 181)

Discipline of the Spirit is required, Wink says, for change, and perhapsthe most important discipline is prayer.

Prayer is not a private act, but a battlefield.

..Prayer is never a private act. It may be the interior battlefield where the decisive victory is first won, before engagement in the outer world is even attempted. If we have not undergone that inner liberation, whereby the individual strands of the nets in which we are caught are severed, one by one, our activism may merely reflect one or another counter-ideology of some counter-Power. (ETP 297)

In the integral worldview, however, prayer becomes once more absolutely central. The spiritual is at the core of everything, and is therefore infinitely permeable to prayer. In this view, the whole universe is a spirit-matter event, and the self is coextensive with the universe....We are related to every other self in the universe. In such a world, we no longer know the limits of the possible. Therefore we pray for whatever we feel is right, and leave the outcome to God. We live in expectation of miracles in a world reenchanted with wonder. Intercessory prayer is a perfectly rational response to such a universe. (TPTB 184)

Wink startles us here by pointing out certain prayers to involve "ordering" God to bring the Kingdom near, as Jesus did. We are commanded to command God.

Praying is rattling God's cage and waking God up and setting God free and giving this famished God water and this starving God food and cutting the ropes off God's hands and the manacles off God's feet and washing the caked sweat from God's eyes and then watching God swell with life and vitality and energy and following God wherever God goes. (TPTB 186)

This kind of prayer is an act of co-creation, and it is not just a transaction between the individual and God; it involves also the principalities and powers.Wink uses the example of Daniel's prayers being blocked by the "Angel of Persia." He speaks then of our prayers for peace and arms reduction havingbeen blocked by the "angels" of the United States and the Soviet Union.

We have long accepted that God is limited by our freedom. The new insight in Daniel is that god is limited by the freedom of institutions and systems as well....What God is able to do in the world is hindered, to a considerable extent, by the rebelliousness, resistance, and self-interest of the Powers exercising their freedom under God. (TPTB 192)

Many innocent people may die, while the Powers appear to gain in invincibility with every death, but that is only an illusion. Their very brutality and desperation is evidence that their legitimacy is fast eroding. Their appeal to force is itself an admission that they can no longer command voluntary consent. Whenever sufficient numbers of people withdraw their consent, the Powers inevitably fall. (TPTB 196)

2. Discuss the prayer of the Dutch Jewish woman in a Nazi death camp:

Alas, there doesn't seem to be much You Yourself can do about our circumstances, about our lives. Neither do I hold You responsible. You cannot help us but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last. (TPTB 194)

...in such a time, God may appear to be impotent. Perhaps God is. Yet Hitler's thousand year Reich was brought down in only twelve years. God may be unable to intervene directly, but nevertheless showers the world with potential coincidences that require only a human response to become miracles. When the miracle happens, we feel that God has intervened in a special way. But God does not intervene only occasionally. God is the constant possibility of transformation pressing on every occasion, even those that are lost for lack of a human response. (ETP 312)

Copyright © 1998 by Vern Rossman