Henri Nouwen wrote this meditation on prayer in response to "The Work of Prayer" (Sojourners, March 1979), which called Christians during the Cold War to respond to the idolatry of nuclear weapons with a daily prayer vigil during Holy Week, and a national gathering on Memorial Day in Washington, DC -- Ed.
The Sojourners have called us to prayer. What does this mean? Ever since I first read the call to prayer in the March issue of this magazine, I have wondered about its significance and its implications. Are they seeking flight in a prayer-rally because they have come to realize the futility of their actions against the arms race? Are they turning to God because turning to people did not get them very far? Are they capitulating to the pietism of those they tried previously to call to action? Are they making a dramatic gesture after getting themselves caught in the fears they were trying to overcome?
I do not think so. On the contrary, I believe that the Sojourners are discovering a dimension of prayer they did not see before, a dimension that is becoming visible to them precisely in their confrontation with the powers and principalities. I see their call not as an invitation to retreat into a familiar piety, but as a challenge to make a radical move toward prayer as “the only necessary thing” (Luke 10:42).
What I see happening is the discovery of prayer as the act: the most radical and most revolutionary act, the act by which everything is turned around and made new, the act by which the barriers of fear are broken down, the act by which we can enter into a world which is not of this world, the act, therefore, that is the basis for all other actions. I think that the Sojourners are sensing this intuitively without yet knowing fully on what they are embarking.
And who does know? It is a very courageous direction, but also a direction which is more demanding than any earlier call. It is a call to martyrdom, a call to die with Christ so as to live with him. Are we ready for that? I doubt it.
In a book about his experiences in the German concentration camps, Floris B. Bakels witnesses to the power of prayer as an act. Bakels, a highly sophisticated and richly educated Dutch lawyer, simply states that prayer saved him not only physically, but also mentally and spiritually. Why? Because prayer meant for him a process of death and rebirth that enabled him to live as a hopeful man while hundreds of people around him died daily from hunger, torture, and execution.
In the midst of the most horrifying circumstances, Bakels, who never considered himself a very religious man, unexpectedly found himself responding to his dying friends by speaking to them about “God, Jesus, and the Gospel” and discovered a new peace in himself and others that was not of this world. It was hard for Bakels to grasp fully what was happening to him. But now, 34 years later, he writes:
I had an idea ... hard to articulate ... Being born again presupposes also for me a dying, a dying however of the old man, the birth of a new man ... But this departure of the old man ... was an ultimate sorrow, a “sorrow towards God,” a world-sorrow, a sorrow for what is passing, for the vanishing world, for the letting go of all things ... I started to realize my strong attachment to this world, but to the degree that this process of detachment developed itself, my adoration of the ... beauty of this world increased. It was heartrending, it was one great birth pang. What to do? ... What about love, the love for a woman, my wife, my family, the butterflies, the waters and the forests? ... All the attractiveness of that great rich life on earth ... was I too attached to it? Under the shimmering of eternity I started a new process, a laying down of the old man, a saying farewell, a departing, even an attempt to be no longer so attached to life itself ... and then ... a wanting to take up the new man, to be a quiet flame, a reaching upwards, forgetting my own miserable body, a wanting to come home to the Power out of which I was created ... I couldn’t articulate it well ... I only knew one thing to do: to surrender everything to Him. (Nacht und Nebel: Mijn verhaal uit Duitse gevangenissen and concentratiekampen)
This process of dying and being born again, experienced by Floris Bakels during World War II, belongs to the core of prayer as an act. Today, as our world is slowly becoming an enormous concentration camp threatened by a new and even greater holocaust, I wonder if this act of prayer is not the most important response. It is the response in which fear is overcome by breaking through the barrier between life and death. I want therefore to better understand Floris Bakels’ profound prayer experience and to seek that experience in our own days of nuclear threat.
In a situation in which the world is threatened by annihilation, prayer does not mean much when we undertake it only as an attempt to influence God, or as a search for a spiritual fallout shelter, or as an offering of comfort in stress-filled times. Prayer in the face of a nuclear holocaust only makes sense when it is an act of stripping ourselves of everything, yes, even of life itself. Prayer is the act by which we divest ourselves of all false belongings and become free to belong to God and God alone.
This explains why, although we often feel a real desire to pray, we experience at the same time a strong resistance. We want to move closer to God, the source and goal of our existence, but at the same time we realize that the closer we come to God the stronger will be his demand to let go of the many “safe” structures we have built around ourselves. Prayer is such a radical act because it requires us to criticize our whole way of being in the world, to lay down our old selves and accept our new self, which is Christ.
This is what Paul has in mind when he calls us to die with Christ so that we can live with Christ. It is to this experience of death and rebirth that Paul witnesses when he writes: “I live now not with my own life, but with the life of Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20).
What has all this to do with actions to end the arms race? I think that the most powerful protest against destruction is the laying bare of the basis of all destructiveness: the illusion of control. In the final analysis, isn’t the nuclear arms race built upon the conviction that we have to defend -- at all cost -- what we have, what we do, what we think? Isn’t the possibility of destroying the earth, its civilizations, and its peoples a result of the conviction that we have to stay in control -- at all cost -- of our own destiny?
In the act of prayer, we undermine this illusion of control by divesting ourselves of all false belongings and by directing ourselves totally to the God who is the only one to whom we belong. Prayer therefore is the act of dying to all that we consider to be our own and of being born to a new existence which is not of this world.
Prayer is indeed a death to the world so that we can live for God. The great mystery of prayer is that even now it leads us into a new heaven and a new earth and thus is an anticipation of life in the divine kingdom. God is timeless, immortal, eternal, and prayer lifts us up into this divine life.
Here the meaning of the act of prayer in the midst of a world threatened by extinction becomes visible. By the act of prayer we do not first of all protest against those whose growing fears make them construct nuclear warheads and build nuclear missiles and submarines. By the act of prayer we do not primarily attempt to stop nuclear escalation and proliferation. By the act of prayer we do not even try to change people’s minds and attitudes. All this is very important and much needed, but prayer is not primarily a way to get something done.
No, prayer is the act by which we let ourselves know the truth that we do not belong to this world with its warheads, missiles, and submarines; we have already died to it so that not even a nuclear holocaust will be able to destroy us. Prayer is the act in which we willingly live through in our own intimate being the ultimate consequences of nuclear destruction and affirm in the midst of them that God is the God of the living and that no human power will ever be able to “unmake” God. In prayer we anticipate both our individual death and our collective death and proclaim that in God there is no death but only life. In prayer we undo the fear of death and therefore the basis of all human destruction.
Is this an escape? Are we running away from the very concrete issues that confront us? Are we spiritualizing the enormous problems facing us and thus betraying our time, so full of emergencies? It would be so if the act of prayer would become a substitute for all actions. But if prayer is a real act of death and rebirth, then it leads us right into the midst of the world where we must take action.
To the degree that we are dead to the world, we can live creatively in it. To the degree that we have divested ourselves of false belongings, we can live in the midst of turmoil and chaos. And to the degree that we are free of fear, we can move into the heart of the danger.
Thus the act of prayer is the basis and source of all action. We need to affirm this over and over again because when our actions against the arms race are not based on the act of prayer, they easily become fearful, fanatical, bitter, and more an expression of our survival instincts than of our faith in God as the God of the living.
When, however, our act of prayer remains the act from which all actions flow, we can be joyful even when our times are depressing, peaceful even when the threat of war is all around us, hopeful even when we are constantly tempted to despair. Then we can indeed say in the face of the overwhelming nuclear threat: “We are not afraid, because we have already died and the world no longer has power over us.” Then we can fearlessly protest against all forms of human destruction and freely proclaim that the eternal, loving God is not “the God of the dead but of the living” (Matthew 22:32).
Copyright © 2007 Estate of Henri J.M. Nouwen. (www.HenriNouwen.org). Originally published in Sojourners. Henri Nouwen, who wrote this reflection on prayer while spending time at the Abbey of the Genesee in Piffard, New York, was professor of pastoral theology at Yale Divinity School and contributing editor for Sojourners when this article appeared.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!