CONTRA FATUM

Yet one of those blog-posts that are "to be updated" as  I find more quotes on the subject matter. There is a tendency to think of prayer as a mechanism of obtaining things. You ask, you receive. God is imagined to be some sort of cosmic mechanical dispenser. You put in prayer, you get something, whatever, out. Of course it has to be honest prayer from a pure heart, and so on. We also tend to think of prayer as an initiative we take in order to get God's attention. But what we forget is that the only prayer acceptable to God is the one animated by the Spirit.

“According to the Gospel, God is not confined to the sanctuaries of the Church. He is not enshrined in any altar. The reason Christians gather now and then in their sanctuaries is not because God is there but rather to celebrate and proclaim God’s presence and action outside the sanctuaries in the common life of the world. Worship which has integrity in the Gospel is always an intercession by God’s people for the cares and needs of the world, and always a thanksgiving - a eucharist - for God’s love for the world. Worship at the altar is thus authenticated by the constant involvment of the people of the Church in the world’s life and by the public witness of the Church in the world.” (William Stringfellow) It might seem strange to want to base an ecumenical argument upon the views of ‘sectarians’. But by formulating an ecumenical view on the eucharist with reference to anabaptists such as Menno Simons, this is, to some degree, what the following proposes. There can be no dou...