Praying with Your Imagination
Proper 7 (June 23, 2024)
“Praying with Your Imagination”
“Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it.”
Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature
The Ignatian tradition, especially in the Spiritual Exercises, uses Gospel stories as a discernment tool. The practice carries the name “contemplative prayer,” which is a bit confusing, because it requires an active engagement with the text, different from other forms of contemplation, which involve stilling the mind. In Ignatian contemplation, we place ourselves in the story, either as an observer or a participant, and we use all our senses to live the story, so that we can learn from whatever thoughts or emotions arise. Kevin O’Brien, in his book The Ignatian Adventure, explains.
Let the events of Jesus’ life be present to you right now. Visualize the event as if you were making a movie. Pay attention to the details: sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and feelings of the event. Lose yourself in the story; don’t worry if your imagination is running too wild. At some point, place yourself in the scene.
Contemplating a Gospel scene is not simply remembering it or going back in time. Through the act of contemplation, the Holy Spirit makes present a mystery of Jesus’ life in a way that is meaningful for you now. Use your imagination to dig deeper into the story so that God may communicate with you in a personal, evocative way.
This week’s Gospel story, in which Jesus stills the waters, is a favorite for Ignatian contemplation. It’s easy to see why. The dramatic scene, with the turbulent waters (some translations call the storm “ferocious”) threatening to capsize the boat, the apostles panicking in fear for their lives, Jesus sleeping peacefully, then, a bit annoyed with the apostles for waking him up, stilling the waters with a word, has everything we might need to fully engage our minds. We can feel the cold sea water hitting us in the face, we can smell the salt in the air, we can scarcely hear each other or Jesus because of the roar of the wind and waves, and then, suddenly, perfect calm – the peace that passes all understanding. Whether we imagine ourselves in the boat with Jesus, or in one of the other boats that the text says sailed with them, or on the shore waiting anxiously, we experience the whole range of emotions from fear to despair to exhilaration, all in the space of a few minutes
Outside of the specific purposes of the Spiritual Exercises, there’s no reason why Old Testament stories such as this week’s first lesson can’t be the basis for imaginative prayer. David’s slaying of Goliath is one of the great set pieces of the Bible, written with high literary skill. (I’m struck by how much Goliath resembles Achilles, from The Iliad, which was written about 100 years before.) It’s wildly entertaining; you don’t have to be a middle schooler to enjoy the NBA-worthy trash talking between Goliath and David. We can’t help loving David, the shepherd boy who saves his nation when the adults can’t, killing the giant with a sling, reminiscent of a toy we all had in our closets and then, to add insult to injury, cutting his head off with his own sword.
Goliath, as much a force of nature as the storm that Jesus tames, proves himself everything a good Israelite is not. (The Babylonian Talmud claims that Goliath was descended from Orpah, Naomi’s unfaithful daughter-in-law in the Book of Ruth.) He taunts the Israelite army morning and evening, to disrupt their prayers. He does this for forty days, bringing to mind the forty-day flood that almost wiped out humanity. When David appears, Goliath the pagan curses David “by his gods.” David responds, not by telling Goliath what David will do, but what YHWH will do to Goliath.
‘You come to me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. This very day the Lord will deliver you into my hand, and I will strike you down and cut off your head, and I will give the dead bodies of the Philistine army this very day to the birds of the air and to the wild animals of the earth, so that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel and that all this assembly may know that the Lord does not save by sword and spear, for the battle is the Lord’s, and he will give you into our hand.’
We can imagine ourselves in David’s shoes. All of us have been harassed. All of us have seen our elders and superiors fail in a moment of weakness. (If the rabbis are correct, the battle between Goliath and David, who was Ruth’s great-grandson, was a battle between cousins, which adds a whole extra dimension to the story.) All of us have been confronted by things that seem just too much for us, by forces that seem irresistible, outcomes that seem inevitable. And, occasionally, we feel the breath of inspiration, a sense that this is not right, and I can do something about it, or that however bad things look we will be ok. David, perhaps still feeling the oil of anointment on his head, takes the battle to Goliath, who probably never knows what hits him.
As compelling as this story is, it only blooms fully in view of what comes after. David turns out to be as flawed as anyone. As soon as he gets to be king, he accumulates multiple wives and concubines. When the Israelites go to war with the Ammonites, he stays behind lounging on his couch rather than leading his soldiers into battle. There, he sees Bathsheba bathing on her roof, and finds himself possessed by a lust so powerful that he murders her husband so that he can have her.
We’re told that Michal, Saul’s daughter, fell in love with David after he killed Goliath. Was she at the scene, thinking “I want to marry this guy”? If so, how could she know what was in store for her? Did Saul realize, with a slight sinking feeling, that he witnessed the beginning of the end of his reign. Perhaps Uriah was in the Israelite army that day. Did a chill run down his spine, witnessing his future murderer? The ruddy handsome lad, seemingly too small to fight, will soon be the son-in-law of the king. Then he goes on the run, chased by the king, only to assume the throne himself. A long reign, with victories in battle over the Philistines, the Moabites, the Ammonites, the Edomites, the Arameans, and others. In his spare time, he writes a great book of devotional poetry still used today. But there were tragic moments also: his first son with Bathsheba dies, and he fights off an armed insurrection led by other sons (losing his beloved Absalom in the process). All that energy, packed into a rock. No wonder it split Goliath’s skull.
Similarly, when we contemplate the taming of the storm story, we do so with the rest of the Gospel in mind. This Jesus, who with a wave of his hand saves his apostles from drowning, declines to save himself from the cross. These apostles have just heard him teach the parable of the sower, and yet, in Jesus’s time of trial, they wither in the heat of official intimidation, just like the seeds that fell on rocky soil. Evidently Peter had forgotten Jesus’s powers over the waves just a few weeks later, when Jesus invited him to walk across the water to him. (Matt. 14: 28-33) Did Judas, remembering how Jesus saved his life on the water, shiver a bit when he took the thirty pieces of silver? The good news of the Gospel, of course, is that Jesus does come back, and the apostles, like David, do get the chance to redeem themselves.
Perhaps our perspective is most like the people in one of the other boats on the water that night. At the moment, all they knew was that the storm had ended. Only in time, perhaps even after Easter, would they have fully appreciated what happened. Isn’t that our experience of God’s grace, appreciated only in retrospect? Nabokov was right. It’s not enough to read these stories; we must reread them, again and again, slowly and prayerfully, not as lectionary snippets but as important parts of the entire narrative of God’s people. When we do, Ignatius tells us, God will shed light on our place in that narrative.