Prayer as Divine Propulsion: An Interview with

Sarah Coakley, Part II

theotherjournal.com/2012/12/27/prayer-as-divine-propulsion-an-interview-with-sarah-coakley-part-ii/

12/27/2012

Sarah Coakley is a theologian and philosopher of religion who is widely known for her
writings on prayer, gender, and systematic theology. Her work argues that the rational
exercise of theology must not be severed from the embodied practice of theology. In Part I
of this interview, published last week, Coakley shares how prayer intersects with her work
as a scholar and a priest and makes a case asceticism in the everyday prayer life of
Christians. And here in Part II, she discusses the erotic nature of prayer, her Giord
Lectures, and how silent prayer is most meaningful in community.

The Other Journal (TOJ): Most Christians dont normally think of prayer in the realm of
the erotic, but how and why could prayer reorder the economy of sexual desire so that its
orientation is nally ordered to God? And how might this t in with ideas of chastity or
celibacy?
Sarah Coakley (SC): Before I answer your question, there is one hump that we have to
get over. You say that we dont normally think of our prayers as having to do with the
erotic. I think that prayer has everything to do with the erotic, particularly in its widest
sense.
This is one of the big surprises when we pray silentlyand when I say pray silently, I just
mean being willing to be there without lling the space with all our good and pious
thoughts. Im really talking about a gentle longing for God in prayer, with the will as the
central focus of the prayer. It goes something like, My God, I want you, and nothing more
above you, except that one doesnt really say that, but thats the sensibility of it. And
because distractions are always there, its sometimes useful to use a word or phrase
(such as Jesus or a short psalm verse) just to keep the mind from going in a dierent
direction. Its a very simple thing. You nd it discussed in early monasticism, such as in
John Cassians discussion with Abba Isaac on prayer, or in later medieval manuals, such
as the Cloud of Unknowing.
Now, you cant do that sort of simple prayer daily for very long without sexual stu just
ooding in, either in the time of prayer itself or outside of it. Why? If you want to talk about
that secularly, youll say, Well, of course. This is a state of disassociation, and the
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unconscious is welling up. But if you want to put it more theologically, you say, Yes,
thats happening, and theres a reason for it: God wants us whole. God wants us. God
doesnt want a polite version of us but all our desires laid out for inspection and
transformation.
But what if you discover through such a prayer of vulnerability, perhaps for the rst time,
that your sexual desires are not straight? I happen to believeand I know this belief is not
held by all Christiansthat for whatever reason some of us are born not heterosexual.
Ive listened to too many students, too many people whom I respect spiritually, who have
spoken very openly to me about this to disbelieve it or to believe that homosexuality can
be cured. They tell me that theyve known from age ve, six, or earlier that their primary
attraction are to the same sex and that they cannot be wrenched from themselves into
something that theyre not. And other people live in a really gray area of attraction to both
sexes. I cannot believe that God wants us to be anything other than who we areor,
rather, I believe that God wants us to be more truly who we are than we can even ask or
imagine.
Still, realizing that ones sexual desires are not straight can get a person very worried. You
may want to sort it out, putting everything back into its genie box; or conversely, you can
say, What if the primary thing that God wants of us is honesty and a complete willingness
to believe that whatever God has created is good? Saying those things allows for the
possibility that the one thing we all have in common is longing for God and the possibility
that our particular being, which is being continually created, is somehow in Gods
providence and that it is going to be ultimately and intensely ordered toward Gods love
and plans for us. Once you get that to the front of your list, boxing people up into
categories seems a very strange, modern obsession. Indeed, we only invented the
category of homosexuality in the modern period.
A critic might say here, Are you just being liberalin a negative sense of that word
and telling people to let it all hang out, letting them do what they like? My answer is
absolutely not. The whole point about this kind of ascetical exercise of prayer and
transformation is that it absolutely refuses the modern disjunction between repression and
libertinism. It says, I dont want either of those. God wont let me repress in this prayer;
and libertinism is also out because God is drawing me to Gods self in such a way that
that would be a very serious and harmful distraction from the unity and integrity of soul
and body to which Im being drawn.
Those individuals who make a vow of celibacymonks, Catholic priests, or anyone called
to this vocationare making a public, institutional kind of commitment to this process of
ascetic transformation. They are saying, I am going to give this my complete
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commitment. For the rest of us who are not called to celibacy, God intends us to live in
fruitful and transforming, though often dicult, faithful relationships with one another. And
I believe that lifelong vows of stability and faithfulness, whether to a monastic community
or to a partner, are ultimately the sort of royal road to which Christ calls us, whether we
are straight or gay.
TOJ: In your Giord Lectures from earlier this year, you argue for forms of rational,
sacricial altruism that are evident in supernormal saints, a grace that speaks to a
dispossession to the Spirit and in the imitation of Christ yet has its roots in evolutionary
biology. You seem to be pushing against the false dichotomy between science and
theology.1 Is prayer a form of nature, grace, or a bridge between the two?

SC: Those are very probing questions and not easy to answer quickly. In the Giord
Lectures, I was initially concerned with discussing the latest developments on cooperation
in evolutionary theory and with critiquing the popular Dawkinsian idea of primary and
pervasive selshness. That was my main kicko point for a wider argument: I take the
notion of rational sacrice from Paul and give it new evolutionary valency. Im not
promoting bloody sacrice, which the late antique world was very worried about, but
laying out the idea that even in the pre-human evolutionary spectrum, we have very clear,
mathematically demonstrable evidence that the ourishing of species occurs only when a
countervailing set of sacricial or cooperative behaviors are made on behalf of the group
by particular members. Indeed, a population that only has self-interested forms of
behavior will eventually die.
In our time, we have lived through bizarre manipulations of evolutionary evidence, with a
heavy ideological overloading of this metaphor of selshness. Of course, the idea of
selshness qua genetic material is either highly misleading, because genes dont
themselves have intentionality, or else tautological, because the genes that are the
strongest are the ones that survive. But this emphasis on selshness becomes very
dierent if it insidiously recommends selshness as a consistent human strategy. For we
now know that the strongest bacteria, genes, amoebas, and viruses only survive because
of cooperationthats how population balance can occur, how the overall group can
ourish.
So how does human cooperation relate to prehuman forms of cooperation? In higher apes
and dolphins and meerkats we see very elaborate forms of cooperation and so-called
sacricial behaviors by individuals on behalf of the group. Theres a kind of praeparatio in
the prehuman. But humans are dierent in that weve developed forms of language so
that these stories of cooperation can be told and reected on, and thus this cooperation is
intensied even beyond what would be regarded as a sort of higher form of selshness.
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But at what point could we say that some manifestation of altruism is not simply a clever
bit of ratiocination about what would work out best for our family, group, or species
sometime later down the road? When does human altruism cease to be a cunning form of
higher selshness and become a sort of ecstasy or excess of response to something
higher?
This is where the argument in my Giord Lectures peaksin examining individuals who
engage in what we might call supernormal forms of altruism, I spell out how divinity
undergirds the whole of evolution, how evolution itself and its processes mirror the
sacrice of the cross and the participation of the Trinity. And this isnt just a supercial
overlayits not that Im imposing my own little vision on the material as a private whim.
Rather, when the evolutionary manifestation of cooperation reaches the human realm, it
can, under special conditions, create manifestations that mathematicians cant gure out;
there are excessive forms of supernormal altruism, and these seemingly only occur
because of human religious convictions. As a theologian, I would say that these are
instances of grace. But they are not the last gasps of the God of the gaps. They are not
the lone areas where God is operatingGod is operating in and undergirding the whole
evolutionary spectrum.
TOJ: Would you say, then, that prayer is a kind of recognition on our part of this excess or
ecstasy?
SC: Thank you for pushing me on that because I dont think I address it in the Giord
Lectures. But yes, I would say prayer is partly that recognition of excess, though it may
not be a conscious recognition. More signicantly, though, it seems that the possibility for
supernormality is born through submission to the Spirit. But notice that the Spirit isnt
pushing away our embodied, genetic inheritance but completing itthere is something in
our genetic inheritance that is opened upward to this more excessive manifestation in
Christ.
TOJ: What suggestions would you give regarding cultivating the practice of silent prayer,
and what sources have particularly shaped your own experience?
SC: There is much to be learned from realizing that prayer is always implicitly communal;
it is always done in and with Christ where two or three are gathered in my name (Matt.
18:20). For fteen years I ran a silent prayer group at Harvard, and now Im running
another one at a theological college, Westcott House, in Cambridge. When I started this
practice myself, I was doing it on my own. It was very lonely and quite frightening, but I
found that there are plenty of good things that one can read if one feels drawn into this
encounter. There are contemporary how-to manuals. There are books from the centering
prayer movement that insightfully draw upon other resources, like the sayings of the early
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monks, though I have mixed feelings about the way these books are marketed. There are
medieval authors who are both profound and practicalThe Cloud of Unknowing is the
supreme text here for beginners. But above all, there is John of the Cross, who in book
one of Dark Night of the Soul explains that being moved into this road, this passive form
of waiting on God, is the lot of virtually all serious Christians. The idea that this is elite
stu for the higher ights of saints is a very naughty imposition on what John said; that
was the church trying to cordon contemplation o, realizing that it had explosive,
transformative power. The democratization of this practice has been one of the great
movements in the twentieth century, and I think its all the more necessary because we
are so bombarded by intellectual and sensual material in our modern lives, in our
privileged places, that we are suering mental overload. We have so shut out the true
God that even when we do pray, we pray to an idol weve created for ourselves.
So how do we set about undoing this? We can only do it by an intentional practice, which
is often very disconcerting and quite frightening. And Ive come to the view that its best if
this practice is sustained with a group of trusting people, because then you can sort of
hold each other in it. Its just like a Quaker meeting, in some ways. But while you are
reading some of the classics on this, every week you are being sustained and encouraged
by others who are active in the same undertaking. That gives an anchor to your individual
everyday practice. And that means that when you have a moment when youre waiting in
the bus queue or a trac jam or you simply have ten minutes when theres nothing else to
do, instead of fantasizing about your next power move [laughs], you can move into this
practice instead. And its cumulativeit is! Every time youre doing it, youre opening up to
a divine propulsion.

1. Coakley, Sacrice Regained: Evolution, Cooperation and God (Giord Lectures

Series 2012, University of Aberdeen, April 2012), http://www.abdn.ac.uk/giord/about/.

About the Authors

Sarah Coakley
Sarah Coakley is the Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University. She was
the Mallinckrodt Professor of Divinity at Harvard University from 1995 to 2007, and she
has also held positions at the Universities of Lancaster, Oxford, and Princeton. Coakley
delivered the 20112012 Giord Lectures in Aberdeen, United Kingdom, and her rst
volume of systematics, God, Sexuality and the Self: An Essay On the Trinity, is
forthcoming in 2013.
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SueJeanne Koh
SueJeanne Koh is a doctoral student in theology and ethics at Duke University Divinity
School and is theology editor of The Other Journal.

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