Sounds like the ultimate exercise in futility, doesn’t it! But it’s not; in fact I think it’s the way to go.
This is for those of you who, like me, find it very hard to believe in God. We want to believe, we hope very much that God exists, but we can never quite bring ourselves to do it.
So how can prayer be meaningful when you’re not sure the God you’re praying to even exists?
Instead of “doesn’t exist”, I could have said “imaginary”, or “fictional”, or even “virtual”. I know I’m sounding heretical, in fact atheist, but I think I am actually completely mainstream, orthodox. Here are two very orthodox reasons to think the God of Christianity doesn’t exist.
Firstly, the actual nature and existence of God is beyond our wildest imaginings. He or she is essentially ineffable, unknown and unknowable, the mystery of mysteries. In Judaism God’s name cannot be spoken, He cannot be approached. We get glimpses of what God is like in the Bible, but you can rest assured that anything you’re ever likely to think or say about God will be either partially or wholly wrong. That’s why whenever someone tells me God is like this or that, I know immediately they don’t know what they’re talking about.
Then, secondly, there is the little matter of the Cross. Correct me if I’m wrong, but God sacrificed His own life – His own existence – on the Cross, in order to incarnate perfect love and true freedom into the world. There was no other way to do it, presumably, no Plan B. He made the ultimate sacrifice, paid the ultimate price, then resurrected Himself for a short period of time, before leaving for parts unknown.
We now live in a world where there is perfect love/freedom (or at least the potential for it), but no God. The fact that early Christians, and even some Christians still today, hankered after a Second Coming, is neither here nor there. Nor is a whole lot of elaborate Christian theology since, which attempts to explain how and in what form God continues to exist after the Cross. If you think the point of the Cross was the Resurrection, doesn’t that make the Cross a bit point-less?
Nick Cave says “I don’t believe in an interventionist God”; Nietzsche, earlier, went further and said that God is dead, murdered by the established church. I say He just no longer exists.
I take it the message of the Gospel is that, post-Calvary, perfect love and true freedom are now attainable. This is precisely where it can be very, very meaningful to pray to a God who doesn’t exist but can be imagined. It’s like when you’re interacting with a great novel, or a beautiful film: rather than being a matter of belief, it’s a matter of suspending your disbelief!
What we can do when we pray is enter into a dialogue with an imagined God who is a perfection of love, freedom, truth, hope, goodness, kindness, wisdom, you name it. You’re really imagining the best possible version of yourself – the self you really want to be, hope to be, aspire to be – and projecting it outside yourself, as if it was real. It is an imaginary, virtual God.
Prayer – our encounter with God – is always an act of imagination, in fact. Journaling is another form of prayer, of imaginary dialogue with God. Tolstoy’s hero Nekhlyudov in Resurrection writes:
For two years I have not written anything in my diary, and I thought I would never return to such childish nonsense. But it wasn’t childish nonsense, it was a chance to talk to myself, the divine inner self that lives within all people. All this time that self has been asleep, and I have had no-one to talk to. It has been awakened by an unusual event ….. [Part I, Chapter 36, italics in original]
This imaginary, virtual God is absolutely real, by the way. If you don’t want to believe in a virtual God, then you’ll believe in nothing, because God, whatever He is, is clearly not material! Tell me when was the last time you saw God directly, with your own eyes, in the material world.
The alternative – we’ve all tried it – is to pray to God as if He does exist, materially, here in the world. Now this type of praying really is futile. You pray for God to intervene – to solve world poverty or heal your friend’s big toe he stubbed – and either world poverty is solved or your friend’s big toe miraculously heals, and you falsely ascribe that to God’s intervention; or world poverty isn’t solved and your friend’s big toe gets worse instead of better, and your belief in the God who does exist takes another nail in the coffin.
Praying to the God who doesn’t exist, by contrast, is wonderfully meaningful, because quintessentially practical. It’s best done out loud, or on paper, but in your head is OK. It is pray-decide-act. You tell Him your troubles, ask for advice, present some possible plans of action, sleep on it, gird your loins, decide, then act. When you inevitably blow it, once again, the next day, you go through it all again – pray-decide-act. Hope springs eternal: I’ll get it right one day!
If you persevere, you learn and you get better at it. You become more like the God you imagine who doesn’t exist each day – you, so to speak, gradually incarnate that better version of yourself into existence. What matters is an open heart, and a desire, nay an obsession, with self-improvement. Like me you are an old dog desperate to learn new tricks.
The “will of God” is always what we are searching for in prayer: what dost Thou want me to do, right now, here, in this life-situation that has arisen? Not infrequently it is desperation stakes. In the moments when we cry out to God in despair – “my God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” – these are precisely the times when God seems most distant from us, when He most absolutely doesn’t exist. Just deafening silence, nothing but the loud ringing in my ears. Then someone trots out the infuriating Footprints cliché – “My precious, precious child ……… during your times of trial and suffering ………. it was then that I carried you!” Apparently we have to take the God-who-does-exist’s word for it, but as usual the hindsight provides no solace, is no excuse. No, don’t make me feel any worse than I already feel: Thou really wasn’t there when I needed Thou.
In the dark night of soul abandonment the space opens up for one to find oneself, to truly be oneself. It’s a blank canvas, a projector screen, on which we see our soul itself gradually emerge, as a faint but definite image, so to speak, as our eyes adjust to the dark. The voice we hear talking back to us is most definitely, can only be, our own. The despair, the utter loneliness, slowly transforms into a sense of real freedom. There is no longer any God there, whose tyrannical iron will we are futilely trying to guess at; just the thrill of finally being free to aspire to be the best possible version of ourselves we can be.
It is in this darkness of prayer that, as Bonhoeffer might say, our “free venture” can approach “divine necessity”. The false God who does exist makes way for the true God who doesn’t, incarnated by, and in, our imagination. God sets us free (by not existing) to be ourselves, which paves the way for the God who doesn’t exist to come into our lives. Yay!
Praying is a sort of conjuring trick, very much akin to the work of a magician, who conjures into existence a hidden and unexpected reality. Or, indeed, akin to the work of an artist, who projects the deepest secrets of his or her own soul into the objet d’art. It is thus that we conjure up a lovely God for ourselves; or is it, really, that lovely God who first conjures us up? You decide.
I guess you freaked out when you saw the title of this article. Hopefully by now you’ve recovered yourself and are starting to think there might be some merit in this approach. Sorry to freak you out. I really do believe God exists; please don’t excommunicate me! Welcome to the real God, the one of whom we cannot speak and cannot know, but who is with us, instantly available, helping and guiding us, every moment of everyday. Amen? Amen!
October 2020