Reflections on a Practice

Thoughts on keeping the Proseuxomai... the messianic prayer

To finish this series of posts in which we have been learning the Proseuxomai (once called the Lord’s Prayer) in the Koine Greek of the New Testament, I thought it would be worth reflecting a bit on one last thing: the formation of a practice. This last post is available to all readers, since the subject may be of general interest and in resonance with all kinds of practices. The thoughts here will not run in a straight line. Nor do they hold any water besides being honest reflections on my own dubious way in the world.

I will sketch the substance of my own practice, so that you may know what it is I am reflecting upon. Each morning, excluding those derailed by the unexpected, I take my coffee to a certain chair, read a chapter of sacred text, rise to speak the Proseuxomai aloud (except when confounded by weariness, in which case the seated posture becomes a prayer of its own) and then name my particular others: relatives, friends, strangers and enemies.

I dislike the phrase “spiritual practice”. The qualifier “spiritual” could mean all kinds of things, and I don’t object to them all, but for many it will describe a practice that strictly concerns immaterial things, personal and private things, a-political things, fanciful things… all the curtailing borders that Modernity felt obliged to impose upon the dangerous and irrational world of religion. For myself, the Proseuxomai is not a spiritual practice; it’s just a practice.

The Proseuxomai is both prayer and political manifesto: wholly both. On one hand, I speak from the political space of my own body this pressing wish: to hold none in debt, to be indebted to none, food for all, release from trial and liberation from subjection. On the other hand, at the source and telos of this political manifesto there is no office, no constitution or governing body and no state apparatus that might be imposed upon land or inhabitant. The source and telos of this prayer is sheer otherness, and a name that is never named: Hagiasthētō to onoma sou. This is not a constitution. It remains, in Agamben’s words, a destituent form. It can be lived only in prayerful and dialogical improvisation from below. By the fact that it is not only a manifesto, but also a prayer to some utter (outer) Otherness, it remains resistant to the designs of ossifying power. It cannot be imposed from the top down, it can only be practiced voluntarily in the space of one’s own body, and outward in the relational offers that emanate from this most potent of political spaces.

There is something, for me, about speaking or singing the prayer aloud. The body becomes an instrument, an environment, a space. The religious imagination of Protestant Modernity tended to frown on such things, preferring the pure meaning of the words (which, I fear, were often missed anyway). They were nervous of the possibility that one might mindlessly go through the motions. For them the body was almost a distracting irrelevence; it was a cerebral kind of belief or assent that counted. This played into Modernity’s eradication of the body as a political space. Needless to say, I have found that division of the human creature oppressive and unrealistic. To practice in the body is to practice in the mind, or the soul or the psyche or wherever else one might care to name.

There is also something, for me, about speaking or singing the manifesto in another tongue. I don’t speak modern day Greek, let alone Koine Greek. To learn these words as sounds de-centres me from my usual command of the stuff of language. I become like a child doing something elementary. I become a stranger to the text, which is suddenly defamiliarised. The tradition goes back into realms where I am a visitor. I am obliged to receive something as gift from another. I am welcomed as the stranger. There is something fertile in this meeting place, this otherness, in these open hands reaching across a table, both ways. The text is liberated from its domestication into my national historical coding.

Many people, by the way, asked me about the original original language of the Proseuxomai. That messiah figure would presumably not have spoken these words in Koine Greek, but in his own common tongue, Aramaic. Why did we not learn the Aramaic? The first reason is that I have no knowledge of Aramaic. I would not be the person for that task. The second reason is that we don’t know what the prayer would have been in Aramaic. The earliest Aramaic texts we have come from hundreds of years later and were probably translations of the Greek New Testament anyway (not the other way around). Reconstructions exist, but they are reconstructions. No way of getting back to the original magic. Wherever we are situated we must relinquish the desire for the greatness of absolute proximity… claims of being best because nearest: the kinds of claims by which people form constitutions and authority to wield sovereign power over. God has spoken through the weak things, the second and third-hand things, the weak ties. We must all accept the place of welcomed strangers, where the deepest welcome of the messianic imagination has always lain.

I don’t at all like the idea of proscribing some uniform practice for others. I don’t want to start a “thing”. My task has always been to give away the treasures. I am aware that some have engaged with my attempt to open up the Proseuxomai in order to learn it, which is wonderful. Others have been purely interested in my interpretations of what these ancient words might actually mean; some of those have no religious interest at all. I am not advocating for a particular practice — not in the sense explored here at least. I appreciate that ancient hermetic value on each living by a rule of their own choosing and conviction. Having said this, I do hold myself in a little suspicion. I’ve envisaged and recorded this call and response version of the Proseuxomai, in which it becomes dialogical and communal by nature.

There is some mystery close to my heart in those words ἅπαντες ἐσμεν ἐνθάδε — “We are all here!” And there is afterall some tension between the we and the I in the Proseuxomai itself. It speaks in the first person plural: Give us our bread… release us from debt… liberate us from subjection… On the other hand, it also came with instructions against the stuff of performance and populist noise. A solitary practice was to be preferred. You will sense a little complexity here. My good friend Andrew said to me the other day, “I’m honestly not trying to start a new religion; but if I didn’t, I just wouldn’t have one.” We do what we must. Whatever may be passed along, I hope it remains an unregulated forest lore. My experiences lead me deeper into a folk ethic: there is no contradiction between inheriting and remaking. Such things are destroyed by dictation, management and ownership. Such things live in the cradle of free relations.

As I reflect on my keeping of this practice, I am aware that I received it from distant others who somehow passed it on against all odds to such late and strange recipients. I am also aware of my refusal of various forms and traditions much closer to hand. I have felt myself an awkward and contrary customer, declining much participation in the language and aesthetic forms carried to me by various churches and institutions and such; with no ill will, I just feel myself a visitor in those spaces. Both enemies and friends have asked whether I am not just reflexively defensive against tradition, jaded by adverse experience. I see how easily I might be mistaken for part of the deconstruction cohort. I don’t believe that about myself. I love every word. I believe in faithful treason. I consider it a calling.

There is some gentle irony in Giorgio Agamben’s fascination with the practice of monastic Rules. He is an anarchist to the core, but he seems to see monastic Rules as something entirely separate from the keeping of laws and the policing of space. He sees monastic Rules as a practice by which people have performed their lives as art. The body becomes the space of an event, or a happening. Life form becomes an aesthetic. It is formed by what it performs.

The Proseuxomai is both a manifesto and a prayer, but it is something else too. It is a creative practice; it’s folk art; it’s cultural subsistence, made new by each day that hums it. Though I received what was passed on, my keeping of it is never transparent. It is my own situational song, made new again and again. It appears a little different every time I rise to join it. More still, it is numinous, a space of dialogue feeding both directions. That is to say that my own life itself becomes the thing that is made new, re-spoken by the form as I speak it. My own life becomes the subject of the practice… the art that is formed in the Proseuxomai, the pressing wish.

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Thanks to everyone who engaged with this course. Your thoughts and reflections are always welcome. For those who would like to access it, the full Proseuxomai course remains up and available to all paid subscribers.