Upon seeing my post from yesterday morning, Nate (Nate Paxton, not my son Nate) pointed me to something he had written a couple of days before. I was pleased to see it, and noted in response my genuine sympathy with his position (though without the same panentheist underpinnings).
One point in particular impressed me: Nate’s resistance — expressed in his willingness sometimes to blog his prayers — to the cultural tendency to enforce a strong separation between private and public manifestations of religion. That private-public abyss that’s been jammed into religious thought and behavior (partly to facilitate the American compromise relative to religion and state authority) effectively disables important dimensions of religious behavior, and tends perniciously to naturalize Christian observance and exoticize other religious expressions. Indeed, it tends to naturalize hegemonic Protestant Christian observances, so that less socially-prominent observances (praying the Rosary, for instance, or auricular confession, or pacifism, or dressing only in plain clothing) seems a peculiar transgression against cultural norms of religious behavior. (But why should it be less normal to pray the Rosary, for instance, than to worship in a white-paint-and-clear-glass colonial church? In Italy, I’d guess, the former would seem much more normal than the latter.) Making one’s prayers public defies convention Over Here, but it’s not that odd in a global context.
So praying in public may feel weird, and it’s certainly risky, but even for non-panentheist reasons, I sympathize with Nate: it's worth doing.
Posted by AKMA at October 10, 2003 09:12 PM | TrackBack