This is a pre-publication DRAFT of a paper I crafted for an upcoming volume arising from one of the many "Building Bridges" Muslim-Christian seminars sponsored by The Archbishop of Canterbury. A slightly modified version of this paper will soon be published, in the company of other worthy papers on the subject of prayer, by Georgetown University Press later this year, in sha' allah.
Growth
in Prayer:
Reflections
and Lessons of a Struggler
Timothy
J. Gianotti
I
often reflect that the prayer-related growth we most need within the Muslim
community is an excavation of the spiritual depths and riches underlying this
religious obligation. I say “obligation”
here because prayer is often presented and taught as a duty, as something we
owe God, rather than as a way God – in the infinite mercy and love we believe
God extends to us – has opened for us to approach and come close to the One who
is the ultimate goal of all our longing and unrest. So, in my community teaching and in my own
self-coaching, I try to engender the sense that prayer is a most welcome and
precious opportunity to respond to God’s invitation, sounded in the depths of
our being as well as in the explicit teachings of the Qur’ān and the legacy of
our beloved Prophet, may God’s blessings be ever upon him and his family.
Before
we forge ahead with this discussion, I must frankly acknowledge that the topic
of “Growth in Prayer” presents unusual challenges for the scholar in me; while
tempted to approach this theoretically and professionally and with a sense of
academic competence, I quickly realize that I cannot embark upon this subject
without a full admission that the author writes as one who struggles greatly
with prayer and who desperately seeks to grow in prayer. Of course, this admission betrays the
perspective that prayer is something we do rather than something
God does within us, a perspective that dominates the way we Muslims are
taught to view prayer. As we will see in
this very selective survey of Muslim discussions of prayer, however, filtered
as they are through my own experience and understanding, growing in prayer
seems to mean, among other things, a letting go of this somewhat materialistic
notion that prayer is the product of the worshipper. That said, there is no question in the
sources (as well as within my experience) that personal growth in prayer seems
to begin with personal struggle – born of a deep, personal desire for a closer
walk with God. This desire is, of
course, itself a gift and so we again are faced at the outset with the ambiguity
of prayer being both an act of Creator and an act of creature.
Another
ambiguity immediately asserts itself at the outset and stems from our tendency
to speak of prayer as an act of worship as opposed to a process. In the first case, when prayer is understood
strictly in terms of duty and obligatory act of worship, growing in prayer
might, for a Muslim, mean mastering the forms of prayer, memorizing various
Arabic supplications and litanies, getting into a better habit of praying with
regularity, and becoming more adept at focusing the mind and truly attending to
the act of worship when we are in it. In
this sense, growing in prayer is fairly straightforward and can, to some
extent, be quantitatively measured and monitored. Growth in all of these areas is, of course, highly
beneficial and meritorious, but I do not think such growth can be separated
from the larger religious project of growing as a God-centered, moral being,
remembering God with greater frequency and intensity and, in doing so,
transforming everything in our lives into the acts of love and obedience that
we associate with acts of worship. In
the prophetic vocabulary, this means making an explicit and permanent
connection between our “islām” – our
embodied act of surrendering – and our “iḥsān”
– the psycho-spiritual and moral beautification of our dispositions and our
actions in God: in other words, the act of worship, which dwells in the realm
of the embodied dimension of the faith (“al-islām”),
must enter into a state of constant communion with the transforming, spiritual
awareness of standing within the theatre of God’s ever-presence (“al-iḥsān”). When this link is made, prayer remains an
“act” but an act that reflects a much larger process by which that closer walk
with God becomes increasingly real, increasingly intimate, and increasingly
transfiguring for the practitioner of prayer.
Of course, when taken in this expanded and all-inclusive sense, the idea
of growing in prayer becomes much more demanding and more difficult to measure.
In what follows,
I will reflect upon seven lessons that, from my perspective as a scholar, a
religious teacher, and “a kneeler in training,”[1]
are essential for any Muslim who seeks to grow his or her prayer life. Because I am presenting these lessons first
and foremost to myself, I often frame these lessons in the language of the
first person.
LESSON
ONE: Growing in prayer involves tests
and difficulties. I have to want it and
be willing to work for it.
Insofar
as prayer forms the core of the religious life, the Qur’ān sates quite
powerfully that it necessarily involves difficulty and testing. We
are to be tested in prayer and we are meant to struggle in prayer as in
the entirety of our religious life. This
difficulty seems to be part of a Divinely-ordained test that is designed to
awaken struggle within the truly devoted, a struggle or striving that promises
to open the door of God’s blessing. The
first word of advice then given to the aspiring practitioner of prayer (and given
first and foremost to myself), is to embrace the hardship; struggle and strive
for God, and God will help you. As we
read the following selected āyāt (verses) in the sūrah (chapter) of the spider / al-‘ankabūt
(29), struggling is a promise that contains a promise: Difficulty and struggle
will definitely come to those who seek God, and Divine help will come if and
when we embrace the test, the difficulty, the struggle.
Do the people reckon that they shall be left alone [after saying]
“We believe” and that they will not be tested? (29:2)
We certainly tested those [who came] before them, and [thus] God
most certainly knows those who are true and those who are false. (29:3)
Whosoever hopes to meet God [let him/her know that] God’s appointed
time is surely coming; He is the [all] Hearing, the [all] Knowing. (29:4)
And whosoever strives [to meet God], truly
he strives for [the betterment of] his own soul. Verily God has no need of [anything within]
the worlds [of creation]. (29:6)
Then, as if by design, the ray of hope –
the promise of Divine help – comes at the very end of the chapter:
[As
for] those who strive for Us, We shall surely guide them [along] Our
paths. God is indeed with the doers of
beautiful deeds. (29:69)
This
theme of necessary personal struggle is corroborated and expanded upon by many
later Muslim sources. For example, one anonymous,
thirteenth-century Persian author wrote,
No one can reach
Him through performing good works, but no one has ever reached Him without
them.
What has not been allotted
cannot be gained through effort,
but unless you show your effort,
you will never reach your lot.[2]
The ambiguity of this personal effort does
not escape the anonymous author, who states just prior to this, “whoever
supposes he can reach God through other than God has been deceived.” So who is striving to do the work of
prayer? Is it the supplicant or God
working through the supplicant? Is there
a meaningful difference?
A
few centuries earlier, the extremely influential Sunni theologian-jurist-mystic
Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī taught that the prayerful goal of remembering God
incessantly in the heart begins with “a laborious effort to turn our thought,
mind and concern toward God and the Hereafter.
It thus aims to reverse the tide of our whole character and to turn our
central concern from this world, with which we have been familiar, to the Hereafter,
with which we so far have no experience.”[3] It is important to note here that “Hereafter”
need not be understood as a time and place other than the now and here; indeed,
in al-Ghazālī’s “psycho-cosmology,” this world and the next world are
contemporaneous, and the human being exists in both simultaneously, even though
most are unaware of their otherworldly existence until after death.[4] In al-Ghazālī’s words, “your this world and
your Hereafter” – i.e., your Heaven and your Hell – “are really just your own
stations and states.”[5] In the words of our anonymous mystic (cited
above) from the century following al-Ghazālī,
Your paradise and
Hell are within you,
Look inside and find
Blazing fires in your
liver,
Blooming gardens in
your heart![6]
Coming
back to the relevance of these points for our discussion of the difficulty of
prayer, it is safe to say that the process of prayer involves a re-orienting of
our perspective, indeed our consciousness, from an unspeakably cluttered,
world-centered or ego-centered view to an unfragmented, Hereafter-centered – or
theocentric – perspective. In the words
of one Prophetic tradition, this process entails “shunning the abode of
delusion and turning toward the abode of everlasting life.”[7] It also seems well established that this
reorientation does not come without difficulty and great effort. Growing in prayerful living thus means
engaging in that effort and embracing that difficulty as something God-given,
just as the desire to pray must be seen as a gift from God, who longs for us
just as we long for God.
LESSON
TWO: I must make my prayer personal.
Because the
formal Islamic act of prayer involves memorized Arabic supplications and the
recitation of memorized Arabic verses or “signs” (āyāt) from the Qur’ān, it is vitally important for the worshipper
in training to work toward a point of understanding and even “feeling” the
individual words and verses involved, even if the worshipper knows no other
Arabic. This need not mean a memorization of a particular translation; but it
does mean allowing oneself to feel and experience the meanings in a way that
becomes intensely personal. This is also
true for the various postures involved in prayer; the worshipper should listen
to her body in the act of prayer and strive to “hear” the whispered mysteries
of each movement and posture. This
intimate personalization of the words and movements helps us to experience
prayer as an intensely personal, intimate moment of communion, or at least
communication, with our Lord, who has promised – right in the prayer – that
“God hears the one who praises Him.”
LESSON
THREE: The quality of my prayer has to be given priority over the quantity of
prayer cycles or length of recitation.
Sometimes, less is more.
We
can sometimes be swept away by the somewhat disturbingly widespread, popular emphasis
upon the quantity of prayers and the rewards that many believe come from quantitative
performance. The antidote for this
spiritual positivism or materialism is the teaching of our spiritual sages
regarding the necessity of mental presence (ḥudūr
al-qalb) or mindfulness in prayer and humility or lowliness (khushū‘) in prayer. In his Book
of Knowledge, al-Ghazālī describes this mindfulness as a state in which
The heart is empty of
everything other than that which the person has undertaken and concerning which
he is speaking. Awareness must be joined
with word and deed, and thoughts must not wander in other than these two. When the person’s thought leaves aside everything
but what he is busy with, when his heart remembers [dhikr] what he is concerned with, and when he is heedless of
everything else, then he has actualized the presence of the heart.[8]
Regarding the sense of humility or
lowliness in prayer, the thirteenth century mystic-poet, Jalaluddin Rumi, gives
bold expression to this when he imaginatively captures a moment when God is
reprimanding Moses, who has been theologically critical of a shepherd’s simple
prayer:
It’s not me that’s
glorified in acts of worship.
It’s the worshippers!
I don’t hear the words
they say. I look
inside at the humility.
That broken-open
lowliness is the reality,
Not the
language! Forget phraseology.
I want burning,
burning.[9]
One of the ways in which we grow in prayer,
then, is by getting in touch with our longing, our burning, and understanding
that this burning is nothing other than God calling us to prayer. Only then, in the words of Rumi, can we “be
friends” with our burning and approach God with an acute and consuming awareness
of our need for God. This awareness,
driven by our longing and harnessed by our rapt attention and mindfulness to
the prayer as-we-utter-and-enact-it, can make a single cycle of prayer more
efficacious than a thousand cycles performed with partial awareness or no
awareness at all.
LESSON
FOUR: growing in prayer means making my entire life a theatre of remembrance.
Addressing
the very common and constant challenge of keeping one’s mind and heart fixed
upon God in the act of ritual prayer, al-Ghazālī and others advise an
interconnected hierarchy of remembrances: remembering in the first instance that
one is conversing with God in prayer; (if that by itself does not work) remembering
with gratitude everything bestowed upon one by God (including the knowledge of
how to pray and the promise that “God hears those who praise Him”); remembering
one’s own poverty and great need of God; remembering one’s imminent death[10]
and one’s great vulnerability and peril before God. All these “lesser” remembrances are taught with
the hope of training the servant to be mindful of God and fixed upon God in the
act of ritual worship. We thus find that
the practical pedagogy of prayer often employs a hierarchy of remembrances, all
employed as helpful supports for the higher goal of being absolutely mindful of
the Hereafter and God. While al-Ghazālī
makes reference to an ultimate level of prayer where all such supports fall
away, the supports are treated as essential, potentially life saving practices
for seekers in the earlier stages of formation and possibly even for selected
moments in the prayer lives of more cultivated and advanced practitioners.
The
wider, more generic religious consciousness of which prayer is a part can also
be supported and cultivated by such supports, including a comprehensive
remapping of one’s daily experience of the world. This remapping is similar to the practice of
allegorical exegesis (al-ta’wīl), whereby literal meanings are “turned”
toward allegorical referents, which are believed to be the true foci of the words
and images of a particular passage.
Korjiro Nakamura reflects upon this aspect of al-Ghazālī’s teachings: “to
those whose sole concern is the Hereafter, everything in this world can be a
reminder of, and a lesson in preparation for, the eschatological events.”[11] Therefore, if one wants to be such a person,
one must train the mind to see things as such people do. Reminders of Hell and Paradise
are everywhere, and so the mind is continually turning its perceptions and
experiences of this world to the anticipated visions and experiences of the
Hereafter. For example, extreme heat and
hunger and thirst all conjure images of separation from God (Hell), whereas
moments of ease and shade and satiation conjure images and foretastes of the
Gardens of the blessed. In both cases,
God is remembered, and the ultimate concern of one’s existence is placed before
our eyes. One’s sojourn through this
world effectively becomes inseparable from one’s eschatological journey into
the next world.
Frequent
supplication, Qur’ānic study and recitation, oral recitation (also dhikr)
of mantra-like Qur’ānic verses or Divine names, and nashīd hymns and qasīdah
poems, celebrating God or memorializing the virtues of the Prophet, all support
this mental reorientation and help make it more stable and permanent. The daily exercises of a supplicant seeking
to grow in prayer, then, involve a combination of all of these, in additions to
the five-times daily prayer, and so they all can be considered “prayer” in a
sense. Of course, the saturation of the
senses with tokens of remembrance also aids in this reorientation, and this is
why we see, even at the very popular level, calligraphic representations of
Qur’ānic verses and phrases in homes, shops, taxis, buses, on jewelry,
etc. We can also hear verbal
“remembrance” in our linguistic conditioning, which turns everyday, mundane
exchanges into moments of remembrance: such as when we are asked about our
condition and automatically say, “al-hamdulillah” (praise be to God) or when
declare an intention to do something followed by the pious caveat, “in shā’
allāh” (“if God wills”).
As
I write and mention these everyday aids to Divine remembrance and their
possible impact, memories of weathered taxi drivers firing up even more
weathered vehicles assert themselves; I sit next to them again as they turn
their key and breathe out, “I bear witness that there is no god but God and
that Muhammad is the messenger of God.” In
such moments, I have observed that remembrance is no less natural than
breathing, and I wonder if this is the point.
I wonder: if “prayer” is the proper word for the act of reorienting of
our consciousness from a world-centered or ego-centered state to a theocentric
or Hereafter-centered state, is it possible to separate such aids to prayer
from prayer itself?
Another
way to speak of the process of prayer within our traditions is to speak of cultivating
an ongoing “friendship” or intimate companionship with God. In a modest but evocative chapter on “Friendship
with God in al-Ghazali and Aquinas,” David Burrell writes that al-Ghazālī
presupposes that
God’s love can bring creatures to a greater and greater proximity to the
Creator. The point of encounter is the
human heart, and the Divine action is invariably described as “removing the
veil from one’s heart, in order that one can see with one’s heart, to be
elevated to God’s own self along with those who are already near to God. The
progressive stations are then described as successive unveilings of the heart,
and the dynamic is summarized as follows: ‘in this way the love of God for His
servants brings them closer to Himself, removing their negligences and sins
from them by purifying their inner self (bāṭin) from the filth of this
world. God removes the veil from their
hearts, in such a way as they contemplate what they see in their hearts.’ He proceeds to distinguish this transforming
love of God from the servants’ response, which consists in “the desire which
animates them to seize hold of the perfection which they lack.” There lies the lack of symmetry in the two
loves: while God’s love is transforming, ours seeks transformation; yet the
dynamic of “the way” is to bring us to the point where our response is a
perfect reflection of God’s initiating love: “the one who has entered into
intimacy with God is one who acts with the very action of God.”[12]
In this ever-deepening friendship, we
become increasingly aware that our desire for God – for happiness, completion,
fulfillment, perfection – is a response to God’s love, and then we turn to the
practice of prayer (and the prayerful life) as a way God has opened for us to
progress toward that goal. In intimate
friendship, God’s love and our response become the inseparable partners of an
eternal dance; this is, perhaps, Rumi’s intention when he writes, “lovers pray
constantly.”[13] Our anonymous, 13th century mystic adds, “until now, the lover travelled
by means of the Beloved, but from now on, the Beloved will travel in the
lover.”[14]
LESSON
FIVE: My prayer is never complete until and unless it indiscriminately reaches out
in mercy to the needy in my midst. To
grow in prayer thus means to grow in mercy and in active response to the needs
around me.
If we do not personalize and engage ourselves
deeply in the process of prayer, we run into the danger of falsifying,
betraying, or belying our religion.
Thus, prayer is only transformative if we go beyond treating it as a
duty, if we begin to listen to what God is saying to us when we say our
prayer. Again, turning to the Qur’ān,
this time to the sūrah of “basic assistance” / al-mā‘ūn (107), we
read,
Have you seen the
one who falsifies religion?
|
That is the one who
treats the orphan harshly
|
and
does not urge [others] to feed the destitute.
|
So woe to the
worshippers
|
who are heedless
of their prayers,
|
those who are
seen [to be performing acts of piety],
|
while withholding
basic assistance [to those in need].
|
LESSON
SIX: There is no meaningful difference between growing in prayer and simply
growing as a moral and religious person.
Prayer is what and
who I am as well as what I do. There is
thus no difference, within the religious context, between the perfection of
oneself and the perfection of prayer.
Turning again to al-Ghazālī, some of the inner virtues associated with
the gradual perfection of prayer include longing, humility, gratitude, thinking
well of God, unconditional praise, hope, pleasure with whatever God decrees, a
sense of servitude to God, and total trust in God’s generosity, in which
supplication eventually disappears. This
culminates in the highest stage of remembrance (dhikr) and affirmation
of Divine unity (a-tawḥīd), a state in which one sees only God.[15] While not a substantive union between
Creator and creature for al-Ghazālī, this stage is nevertheless a momentary
experience of perceived union (waḥdat al-shuhūd) and is, according to
him, the very pinnacle of prayer in Islam.
Reflecting upon
this, our aforementioned, anonymous, 13th century Persian mystic
writes,
You won’t become
Him,
but if you
strive,
you will find a
place
where your
you-ness will leave.[16]
Prayer
is thus as much about who and what we are as it is about what we do, or –
better said in the company of the mystics and sages of prayer in Islam – what
God works in us and through us. The more
effaced we become before God and the more God’s attributes become manifest
within us, the more perfect our prayer becomes.
Here, our spiritual poverty or personal emptiness in prayer becomes the sine qua non of experiencing or
manifesting the fullness of God’s presence.
LESSON
SEVEN (optional): The end of prayer
For
al-Ghazālī, the ultimate end or goal of prayer is contemplative: reaching a
state wherein the worshipper is completely absorbed in God. This “unitive state” is not believed by
al-Ghazālī to be substantive or ontological; rather it is a “unity of
perception” (waḥdat al-shuhūd) by which the servant sees only God
without any remembrance of self. This
“forgetting” of self is, for him and others within the mystical traditions of
Islam, the pinnacle of remembrance (dhikr), but it is not easy to attain. In order to enter into such a contemplative
state, he explains that a worshipper must become completely detached from
everyone and everything connected to the world and be able to behold everything
with equanimity, wherein existence and nonexistence are the same. It must be granted here that the cultivation
of such a state may not be possible or even advisable for worshippers fully
engaged in the world, but it nevertheless stands as the ultimate end of the
process we have here described as prayer.
In al-Ghazālī’s words,
Then, let him
seclude himself a zāwiya, devoting himself to the religious duties, both
obligatory and superogatory, and then sit with the heart empty and the
attention concentrated, without scattering his thought by reciting the Qur’ān,
nor by considering its meaning, nor by reading the books on Tradition, nor by
anything else. Rather, let him see to it
that nothing but God enters his mind.
Then, as he sits in solitude, let him keep on saying continuously with
his tongue, “Allāh (God), God” and keep his heart attentive until he
comes to a state in which his effort to move his tongue drops off and it looks
as if the word flows on his tongue [all by itself]. Then, let him persevere in this until any
trace of motion is removed from his tongue and he finds his heart persevering
in the dhikr. Then, let him still
persevere in this until the image of the word, its letters and its shape are
effaced from his heart and there remains the idea of the word alone in the
heart, clinging to it, as if it is glued to the heart, without separating from
it...[17]
If one remains and perseveres in this
state, he says, one will experience the “light of Truth” shining in the heart,
an experience that is both, according to him, noetic and transient, even though
it may endure for some time and even though its impact upon the seeker may be
indelible for eternity. The end of
prayerful remembrance is thus the inner annihilation of the vessel of
remembrance and transfiguration of that vessel and all it contains. Perhaps for this reason, we find references
in the Islamic traditions to great mystics, such as al-Ḥallāj, who reportedly experienced
difficulty coming out of this unitive state in order to perform the obligatory
prayers, which require a conscious recognition of the separateness of the
worshipper and the worshipped. That said,
after experiencing such a unitive experience, the prayer mat becomes a
radically different place, where the worshipper joins God when “God bears
witness that there is no god but He.” (3:18)
[1] I take this beautiful
phrase from the diaries of Etty Hilesum, a relatively unsung Jewish spiritual
luminary whose life ended tragically and brutally in 1943, in the Nazi
concentration camp at Auschwitz. See An Interrupted Life; the diaries 1941-1943 (NY: Owl Books, Henry Holt & Co, 1996),
p. 74.
[2] From the treatise, “The Rising Places of Faith,” in Faith and
Practice of Islam: Three Thirteenth Century Sufi Texts, William Chittick,
trans. (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992), p. 57.
[3] Paraphrased by Kojiro Nakamura, in his Ghazali and Prayer
(Kuala Lumpur: Islamic Book Trust, 2001), p. 63.
[4] See the fifth chapter of my Al-Ghazālī’s
Unspeakable Doctrine of the Soul, where I explore the simultaneous “worlds”
of the here (al-dunyā) and the Hereafter
(al-ākhira) in some detail. For a more basic introduction to his view on
this simultaneous or parallel habitation, see his chapters on the “Knowledge of
Self” and the “Knowledge of the Next World” in the Alchemy of Happiness, Claude Field, trans. (London, UK & Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1991), pp. 3-14, 33-43.
[5] NOTE TO BE INSERTED
[6] See the treatise,
“Clarifications for Beginners and Reminders for the Advanced” in Faith and Practice of Islam, p. 100 and
following.
[7] Ibid., p. 82.
[8] As cited by Chittick
in the Faith and Practice of Islam,
pp. 239-240.
[9] From the poem, “Moses
and the Shepherd” in The Essential Rumi,
Coleman Barks, trans. (Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 1997), p. 166.
[10] Al-Ghazālī closes his famous, forty-volume compendium, Reviving Religious Knowledge, with an
entire book on the importance of the practice of remembering death and the next
world; see Timothy Winter’s translation of this book under the title, The Remembrance of Death and the Afterlife
(Cambridge: The Islamic Texts Society, 1989).
[11] Ghazali and Prayer, 64.
[12] David B. Burrell, Friendship
and Ways to Truth (University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), p. 79.
[13] Essential Rumi, p. 80.
[14] “Clarifications for Beginners” in Faith and Practice of Islam, p. 84.
[15] See Ghazali and Prayer, pp. 63-78; For a primary-text
reference, see his Kitāb al-tawḥīd wa al-tawakkul in Iḥya’ ‘ulūm al-dīn (Beirut: dār al-khayr, 1993), vol. 5, p. 118
and following.
[16] “Clarifications for Beginners” in Faith and Practice of Islam, p. 85.
[17] Ghazali and Prayer, 71.
