[Psalm 119 ]
Last Sunday, I invited you to think about prayer as a wheel… All these spokes radiate into the center, the hub. The hub of the wheel of prayer is what I called intentional awareness. Or an awareness of the Divine Presence. I was intentionally trying to use very simple, almost untheological language, because I wanted to look at prayer’s essence.
We’re going to talk about the spokes today. What leads us into that hub? What leads us into this awareness, into this Presence? What concepts about God and Divinity will resonate most with us? Creator God, brother Jesus, Spirit? Do we think of God as our Ground of Being, as Beloved Friend, as Liberator? Do we tend not to think of God in personal terms at all? Or does it have to be made concrete for us? What forms of prayer will lead us into this hub, into an awareness of Presence? Will it be silent meditation, small group sharing, reading and journaling, acts of service or justice-making?
Fittingly, given our wheel metaphor, there is a way of talking about these different prayer personalities that also uses the metaphor of the wheel. It’s been made popular by a writer named Corinne Ware.[1]
I want to first talk about these horizontal and vertical lines and the four quadrants they make. Each of those four quadrants represents a different spiritual type. I’ll also explain the funny-sounding words like apophatic and kataphatic. I was going to replace these words with more common ones, but I have a great fondness for exotic words. I think we need to use them from time to time to make sure they don’t go extinct.
The vertical axis is labeled speculative and affective. These two poles pose the question of how one goes about knowing. Do we know through via our rational mind? That’s the speculative pole. Or do we know through accessing our feelings? That’s the affective pole. For those of you familiar with the Myers Briggs personality test, these poles would correspond with the thinking/feeling functions. “Head” and “heart” would be another way to describe it. So, a “speculative” or “head” person would tend to gain their information about God, and life in general, through emphasizing logic and accumulated facts. A “heart” or “affective” person would tend to gain their information via instinct and intuitive feeling.
The horizontal line represents how we conceptualize Divinity. On the left, you have apophatic, from a Greek word that means “negative.” It refers to a person or a spiritual discipline that tends to think of God in non-concrete ways. God is more of a mystery, and any attempt to box God in by confining the Mystery to a particular image or concept is resisted. The purpose of apophatic spiritual disciplines is to empty oneself, empty the mind of concepts so that the God beyond all concepts can be experienced. Apophatic folks tend to be drawn to meditation: Zen, forms of Christian meditation. An apophatic-type person might really love the name God gives to Godself in story of burning bush: “I am who I am.” Or “I am Who I am Becoming.” That can be quite meaningful to an apophatic person, whereas it might leave a more kataphatic person quite cold. God as “Ground of Being.”
Apophatic spiritualities do use symbols for the Divine —they have to – but they will tend to be less anthropomorphic, and not as concrete. Perhaps creation-centered. Those metaphors we use for Spirit will probably work better: Wind, Fire, Breath.
At the opposite end of this scale is the Greek word kataphatic, translated as affirmative. It refers to the method of thinking most familiar to Western culture, in which God is revealed and knowable. In this way of thinking, we tend to see God or the Divine in concrete, often anthropomorphic terms – God is friend, the one who walks with us in the Garden in the cool of the evening. (The Bible is quite kataphatic, although it has its apophatic moments.) Or God is incarnate in Jesus, who walks with us, breaks bread with us, whom we can know and talk to. The hymn “What a friend we have in Jesus” is a very typical kataphatic hymn.
I tend toward the apophatic, and when I first came here as pastor, I had a bit of trouble with the joys and concerns prayer. That sort of verbal prayer, addressed to a person-like God, was not completely natural for me. But I didn’t think it would be OK to come up here, have you share your prayer concerns, and then just stand in silence and say my mantra. So I adjusted. And, in fact, my own understandings of how I can pray and my concepts of God were stretched. Though you may identify with one type, it is always good to be stretched.
So, let’s talk about the four quadrants these two continuums create, and the different spiritual types they represent. These descriptions are, of necessity, going to be a bit overdrawn. No one, I’m guessing, is just one spiritual type. We may likely have a dominant type, but we’ll also contain some of the other quadrants, too. My sense is also that at different times in our life, we may gravitate toward a certain spiritual type more than other.
This typology is used not only to talk about individuals but congregations. Congregations will tend toward one or two types. Perhaps even whole denominations. This will of necessity be brief, but we can talk about it more during Education Hour.
Type 1: Speculative/Kataphatic. Head Spirituality. Theologian.
- They want to understand, make sense. If God and prayer are not presented to them in ways that make sense, forget about it. The intellect, in a way, is a kind of gate that their spiritual self must walk through before they can get to anything else.
- This person loves intellectual order. They like things to be logical and consistent. They will examine the texts of our hymns to see if we are singing what we actually believe.
- Highest spiritual moments might have come when you heard something that stirred you to understanding or in reading a passage that seemed to say exactly what felt true to you.
- Jewish ideal of study-as-worship. They like Bible studies that dig deep. What was life like for the Biblical community when a given book or passage was written? What does that word mean in Greek and where and in what context is it used elsewhere in the Bible?
- While types 2 or 3 “experience the Holy,” this type tries to make sense of that experience and name it. They codify and so preserve the faith story from generation to generation. They are our theologians, our scholars. Denominations: many mainline Protestant denominations, especially Presbyterians, who do things “decently and in good order.”
Prayer/Spiritual Juice: They will seek spiritual guidance mainly from words – sermons, books, scripture, study groups. Prayer in this quadrant is almost always language or word-based prayer, whether aloud or silent. “Reading can be the avenue of God’s speech.” They may want to learn Hebrew or Greek so they can read Bible in original language.
Danger: The danger is that faith can become a “head trip,” overly focused on the rational or the intellectual; avoiding feeling, or an interior connection with God. They might come across as dogmatic or dry.
Type 2: Affective/Kataphatic. Heart Spirituality.
- God is still view in kataphatic terms – concrete terms – but now we’ve dropped into affective, or feeling, half of circle. It is heart combined with the concrete, real-life stuff.
- Lot of feeling here. Lots of devotion. Experiences highs and lows in religious feeling. They are looking for things that will give them an emotionally moving experience. Think charismatic churches, and evangelical churches, both African-American and white.
- Their theology emphasizes the anthropomorphic representation of God. A type 2 person may talk about their “daily walk with Jesus.” Rumi, whom I like to quote, is, I believe,also a type 2 spiritual person. He talks about the Divine as his Friend, his Beloved, as the lap on whom he lays his head. Very relational, very intimate.
Prayer/Spiritual Juice: Worship may include a lot of music, and a feeling of warmth, energy and freedom of expression. Prayer is still mainly with words in this quadrant, but less formal than in type 1. Prayers in church or alone often extemporaneous, as opposed to the theologically correct prayers from the prayer book of type 1. Drawn to singing, use of memory and imagination.
Danger: Pietism. While a kataphatic of the mind may say, “My doctrine is purer than yours,” a kataphatic of the heart may say: “My walk with Jesus is closer than yours.”
Smugness about how real their relationship with Jesus/God is, and they may believe that anyone who doesn’t have their emotional energy is second rate. You have to relate to my God my way. If you’ve not had the “born again” experience then you’re not really saved.
Type 3: Affective/Apophatic. Mystic Spirituality.
- Still within the feeling experience, but move into apophatic knowing. Instead of God that possesses characteristic to humans, God is ineffable, unnamable, vast. God’s statement to Moses: “I am who I am” makes perfect sense to this person. Or they may tend to see God as the Creative Force.
- The aim is union with the Holy, even when one knows that this is not completely achievable. Ware: These people seem to be perpetually on a journey. In fact journey is one of their favorite words.
- Contemplative, introspective, intuitive. Great gift is they can penetrate past the temporal, to engage in a “deeper sort of knowing.”
- They are pretty comfortable with things not making sense, whereas type1 isn’t satisfied until they can understand. Prefer prayer group to study group.
Prayer: Like simplicity and silence in worship. Empty mind, simply be in presence of the Holy. Whereas type 2 might like the stimulation of praise band, this type might recoil. It’s too much. They can’t hear internally when it’s too loud out there. Prayer is less about what I’m expressing or saying, than it is about being receptive. Here “hearing from God” rather than “speaking to God” is prominent.
Danger: Quietism, an exaggerated retreat from reality and interaction with world. Go into my cave and be alone there. They have to guard against being too self-absorbed and self-protective. Not want to share gifts with world because that’s messy and distracting.
Type 4: Speculative/Apophatic. Kingdom spirituality.
- Smallest group. The mystical, apophatic experience coupled with an intellectual mode of gathering data produces an active visionary who is single-minded – has a deeply focused, almost crusading type of spirituality.
- They like intellectual stimulation – people with original ideas, especially on anything connected with issues they care about and social change.
- They care less about affiliation with organized religion than either types 1 or 2 – many faith communities simply aren’t engaged enough in changing society for them.
- Their aim is to simply obey God and to witness to God’s coming reign. Concerned with justice on earth, the transformation of society. “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
- They are the praying activists. Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King. Some Mennonites! Perhaps there’s a reason we’re so small…
Prayer: Action. “My work and my prayer are one.” “I pray with my hands and feet.” Need prayer more than they may think because action and hunger for results can overtake them. In prayer, they need to continue to give up control to God or they could become quite bitter and angry at how “uncaring” other Christians are, who are not as single-minded and focused on transforming society as they are. Which leads to the…
Danger: Encratism, a moralistic and unrelenting tunnel-vision. If you are not supporting the cause with the same selflessness and energy as they are, you are not a part of their world. They may make us feel guilty, even as we admire them. They offer judgment and cause others to be more responsible. But they can sometimes be overly critical, wounding, and lose support of others.
A wheel is stronger the more spokes it has. And the Christian community is stronger with all of these types. They each offer gifts. We need theologians, the exuberant witnesses to God’s love, the mystics, the crusaders. We need those people to be as fully themselves, and as fully connected to the Divine as possible. May we each come to know God deeply through our thinking, our loving, our being, our doing. Amen.
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[1] Discover Your Spiritual Type: A Guide to Individual and Congregational Growth, by Corinne Ware (Alban Institute, 1995).