When Prayer Becomes Protest

How is this even relevant?

As a professor of church history, I get this question a lot. I teach at a seminary, preparing students for a wide range of ministries, and even there my topic can seem tedious and arcane. Students know why they need to study the Bible. And they are usually quite invested in the practical disciplines of pastoral care and preaching. But I am always painfully aware that they approach my class with a raised eyebrow, suspicious that I may be wasting their limited time.

Never have I felt this pressure for relevance more than on Wednesday, the day after our country elected Donald Trump as our next president, a man who, for many in my small but fierce progressive Christian seminary, represents everything we study and train to work against, a man whose misogyny, racism, and xenophobia run counter to what we discern to be Gods vision for the world. And what did I have scheduled to discuss that night? Augustines struggle in a Milan garden. Benedicts attempted murder by his monks.The virginal Theclas rescue from a pack of vicious attack seals. At a glance, nothing could seem more frivolous in light of Trumps election.

And yet, I soon realized, this was exactly the lesson we needed. These were the figures that could embolden us for the world to come, the world of Trump. These ancient texts could teach us a bit about what it looks like when prayer becomes protest.

These are all stories of early Christian asceticism, a word (from the Greek for training) that refers to practices of spiritual discipline and self-denial rooted in individual and communal prayer.

Thecla, a young woman betrothed to be married, is enamored by the preaching of Paul, forsakes her fianc, defies her mother, and seeks out the apostle who has been imprisoned for his evangelism. To gain access to his cell, Thecla bribes the guard with a mirror and bracelets. Later, having been delayed from traveling with Paul, Thecla dresses herself as a man and sets off on the road to find him.

A few centuries later, the young Macrina, who would have known the story of Thecla, also spurns her parents intentions to marry her off. (After all, her original fianc had died, and, since she was a good Christian and believed in the resurrection, marrying anyone else, she argued, would be a form of adultery.) As the sole daughter in an aristocratic family, Macrina convinced her mother to join her in a life of simplicity and prayer. Eventually their entire householdmeaning a large number of servants or slavesadopted the same (and equal) form of life.

In the time between these women, a man in Egypt named Anthony left his town to go into the wilderness to pursue virtue and the perfection commanded by Jesus (Matt 5:48). There he sought solitude to fight the demons of lust, pride, and anger. He sought to pray without ceasing (1 Thes 5:17) while fasting from food, sex, and anything that could distract him from the love of God and neighbor. As his reputation spread, Anthony came to represent the early Christian phenomenon of the desert fathers and mothers, those who abandoned the cultural and economic centers of the city for the isolation of the wilderness, making the desert itself into an alternative city based on different values.

Some stories are real; some are legendary. The characters seem a bit eccentric at best. But they have also given life to communities of Christians for hundreds of years. And I believe they have wisdom for us now, for those Christians called to resist the evils that Trump represents.

Journeying into the desert to pray and fast, Anthony pursued a type of perfection, to embody the human flourishing that God had intended us for but which was lost and withered in Adams fall. By leaving behind his socially expected responsibilities in the city, he was not acting selfishly; he was acting defiantly. In his life of prayer, Anthony stood as a testament to what it meant to be fully alive in the image of God. His prayer was a protest against what he saw as the dehumanizing values of the ancient city.

Creatively avoiding a second betrothal, Macrina subverted the social and familial expectations for a young woman. In her pursuit of prayer and simplicity, she advised and instructed her brothers who became influential theologians and bishops. One brother, Gregory, describes Macrina as transcending the limits not only of her sex but even of human nature by the angelic life she led. Like Anthony, her pursuit of prayer embodied a vision of human flourishing counter to the prevailing culture, a subversion manifest most powerfully in the way she turned her aristocratic, hierarchical household into an egalitarian community.

And as she hands the prison guard her mirror and jewelry, Thecla dedicates herself to a new way of living, one not defined by wealth, possessions, personal vanity, or social beauty standards. She will not be bound by those things but will live only for God, even in the face of persecution, ridicule, and abuse. Theclas story does not include a particular commitment to a life of prayer. But read in conversation with Macrina and Anthony, Thecla fully embodies what it means for prayer to become protest.

Prayer is not about petitioning God for some favorable outcome, be it a new bike, a sick relative, or a presidential election. Prayer can include these things, but if it is only about wish fulfillment, we are missing the point.

At one level, the act of prayer in and of itself is an act of defiance because it seeks a love and a truth beyond the Trumps (and the Clintons) of this world. Prayer directs us toward something beyond ourselves and proclaims, I know that what we are experiencing is not all there is.

Beyond this, though, prayer can be an act of transformation, both for ourselves and for our world. Turning toward God, we do not simply say fix this! (although we might say that, too). We also cry, fix us! Through practices of prayer we seek to discern Gods will for the world. We dont treat God as a crystal ball, but by nurturing familiarity with God, we learn to see ourselves and our world in new ways. Through prayer we knead the dough of grace that God has given us so that we might, ever so slowly, become more patient, more loving, even more angry at the right things. And prayer can hold the laments that threaten to consume and be a source of hope when none seems able to be found in the world. This hope that lives alongside lament, this anger steeped in love, allows us to pursue new ways of being in the world, to march in the street, to lobby our state legislatures, to advocate for our neighbors, to create alternative communities that practice disciplines that might help undo the sinful systems we all sustain.

With a Trump presidency looming, there is real work to be done. And committing to prayer seems like such a cop-out, a non-action, a way for Christians to avoid doing the hard things. And for many of us it is. I am certainly guilty of using prayer that way.

But thats why these early Christians are still so relevant. The remind us of what prayer can and should be: a defiant protest against a sinful world and a training regimen for living into who God created us to be.