The Unselfing of America

How we can give up our preoccupation with the puny objects of ourselves.

“Each citizen is habitually engaged in the contemplation of a very puny object, namely himself.”

—Alexis de Tocqueville

In the century and a half since de Tocqueville penned those words about the American experience, little has changed. No one, and no thing, interrupts people more than momentarily from their obsessive preoccupation with themselves. Indeed, concerned observers using the diagnostic disciplines of psychology, sociology, economics, and theology lay the blame for the deterioration of our public and personal lives at the door of the self.

It seems America is still in conspicuous need of unselfing.

Of course, a few people carry placards to try to wake up the masses to the danger in which a century of mindless selfishness has put us. Desperately they try to avert the destruction of the Earth by protesting the insanities of militarism, the greedy and reckless practices ravaging our streams, forests, and air, and the bloated consumerism leaving much of the world hungry and poor.

Others hand out tracts in an attempt to startle the shuffling crowds into dealing with their souls, not just their selves. They urgently call attention to the eternal value of the soul, present the authoritative words of Scripture, and ask the big question, “Are you saved?”

Both groups attract occasional flurries of attention, but not for long. And while both groups care, they do not seem to care much for each other. One group wants to save society, the other to save souls. Neither recognizes a common ground.

From time to time other solutions are offered: psychologists propose a therapy, educators install a new curriculum, economists plan legislation, sociologists imagine new models for community. Think tanks hum. Ideas proliferate. Some of them get tried. Nothing seems to work for very long.

In Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s now famous sermon to America, delivered in 1978 at Harvard University, he said, “We have placed too much hope in politics and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. It is trampled by the party mob in the East, by the commercial one in the West.” We are, he thundered, at a “harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse. All the celebrated technological achievements of progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the twentieth century’s moral poverty.” We need a “spiritual blaze.”

What the journalists did not report (not a single pundit so much as mentioned it) is that a significant number of people are actually doing something about Solzhenitsyn’s concern. I work with some of these people, encouraging and sometimes providing guidance. Thousands of pastors, priests, and lay colleagues are similarly engaged. They are doing far more for both society and the soul, tending and fueling the “spiritual blaze,” than anything that is being reported in the newspapers. The work is prayer.

The Unselfing: Its Power Source

Prayer, of course, has to do with God. God is both initiator and recipient of this underreported but extensively pursued activity. But prayer also has to do with much else: war and government, poverty and sentimentality, politics and economics, work and marriage. Everything, in fact. The striking diagnostic consensus of modern experts that we have a self problem is matched by an equally striking consensus among our wise ancestors of a strategy for action: the only way to escape from self-annihilating and society-destroying egotism and into self-enhancing community is through prayer.

Only in prayer can we escape the distortions and constrictions of the self and enter the truth and expansiveness of God. And we find there, to our surprise, both self and society whole and blessed. It is the old business of losing your life to save it; and the life that is saved is not only your own, but everyone else’s as well.

Prayer is political action. Prayer is social energy. Prayer is public good. Far more of our nation’s life is shaped by prayer than is formed by legislation. That we have not collapsed into anarchy is due more to prayer than to the police. Prayer is a sustained and intricate act of patriotism in the largest sense of that word—far more precise, loving, and preserving than any patriotism served up in slogans. That society continues to be livable and that hope continues to be resurgent are attributable to prayer far more than to business prosperity or a flourishing of the arts. The single most important action contributing to whatever health and strength there is in our land is prayer. It is not the only thing, of course, for God uses all things to effect his sovereign will. But prayer is, all the same, the source action.

Now, the single most widespread American misunderstanding regarding prayer is that it is private. Yet strictly and biblically speaking, there is no such thing as private prayer. Private, in its root meaning, refers to theft. It is stealing. When we privatize prayer we embezzle the common currency that belongs to us all. When we engage in prayer without any desire for, or awareness of, the comprehensive, inclusive life of the kingdom that is “at hand,” we impoverish the social reality that God is bringing to completion.

Solitude in prayer is not privacy. And the differences between privacy and solitude are profound. Privacy is our attempt to insulate the self from interference; solitude leaves the company of others for a time in order to listen to them more deeply. Privacy is getting away from others so we don’t have to be bothered with them; solitude is getting away from the crowd so we can be instructed by the still, small voice of God. Private prayers are selfish and thin; prayer in solitude enrolls in a multi-voiced, century-layered community.

We can no more have a private prayer than we can have a private language. Every word spoken carries with it a long history of development in complex communities of experience. All speech is relational, making a community of speakers and listeners. So, too, is prayer. Prayer is language used in the vast contextual awareness that God speaks and listens. We are involved, whether we will it or not, in a community of the Word—spoken and read, understood and obeyed (or misunderstood and disobeyed). We can do this in solitude, but we cannot do it in private. It involves an Other and others.

The self is only itself, healthy and whole, when it is in relationship. And the healthy relationship is always dual, with God and with other human beings. Relationship implies mutuality, give and take, listening and responding. If the self exploits other selves, whether God or neighbor, subordinating them to its compulsions, it becomes pinched and twisted. If the self abdicates creativity and interaction with other selves, whether God or neighbor, it becomes flaccid and bloated. Neither by taking charge or by letting others take charge is the self itself. It is only itself in relationship.

But how do we develop that relational sense? How do we overcome our piratical rapaciousness on the one hand and our parasitic sloth on the other? How do we develop not only as Christians but as citizens? How else but in prayer? Many things—ideas, persons, projects, plans, books, committees—help and assist. But the “one thing needful” is prayer.

The Unselfing: Its Pattern

The best school for prayer continues to be in the Psalms. It also turns out to be an immersion in politics. In the Psalms, the people who teach us to pray were remarkably well integrated in these matters. No people have valued and cultivated the sense of the person so well. At the same time, no people have had a richer understanding of themselves as a “nation under God.” They prayed when they were together and they prayed when they were alone—and it was the same prayer in either setting. Prayer was their characteristic society-shaping and soul-nurturing act. These prayers, these psalms, are terrifically personal and at the same time ardently political.

The word politics, in common usage, means “what politicians do” in matters of government and public affairs. The word often carries undertones of displeasure and disapproval because the field offers wide scope for the misuse of power over others. But the word cannot be abandoned just because it is dirtied.

It derives from the Greek word polis (city). It represents everything that people do as they live with some intention in community, as they work toward some common purpose, as they carry out responsibilities for the way society develops. Biblically, it is the setting in which God’s work with everything and everyone comes to completion (Rev. 21). He began his work with a couple in a garden; he completes it with vast multitudes in a city.

For Christians, “political” acquires extensive biblical associations and dimensions. Rather than look for another word untainted by corruption and evil, it is important to use it as it is in order to train ourselves to see God in those places that seem intransigent to grace. It is both unbiblical and unreal to divide life into the activities of religion and politics, or into the realms of sacred and profane. The question is how to get these activities or realms together without putting one into the unscrupulous hands of the other?

Prayer is the answer. Prayer is the only means adequate for the great end of getting these polarities in dynamic relation—for making politics become religious and religion become political. And the Psalms are our most extensive source documents showing us how this can be done.

The Psalms are an edited Book: 150 prayers collected and arranged to guide and shape our responses to God accurately, deeply, and comprehensively. Everything that is possible to feel and experience in relation to God’s creative and redeeming word in us is voiced in these prayers. (John Calvin called the Psalms “an anatomy of all the parts of the soul.”)

Two psalms are carefully set as an introduction: Psalm 1 is a laser concentration of the person; Psalm 2 is a wide-angle lens on politics. God deals with us personally, but at the same time he has public ways that intersect the lives of nations, rulers, kings, and governments. The two psalms are by design a binocular introduction to the life of prayer, an initiation into the responses that we make to the Word of God personally (“blessed is the man,”1:1) and politically (“blessed are all,”2:11).

Psalm 1 presents the person who delights in meditating on the law of God; Psalm 2 presents the government that God uses to deal with the conspiratorial plots of peoples against his rule. All the psalms that follow range between these introductory poles, evidence that there can be no division in the life of faith between the personal and the public, between self and society.

Contemporary American life, though, shows great gulfs at just these junctures. And at least one reason is that we love Psalm 1 and ignore Psalm 2. It seems to me strategically important to reintroduce this psalmic mix as source prayers for the “unselfing of America.” Praying them, or after their manner, breaks through the barrier of the ego and into the kingdom that Christ is establishing.

We often imagine, wrongly, that the Psalms are private compositions prayed by a shepherd, traveler, or fugitive. Close study shows that all of them are corporate: all were prayed by and in the community. If they were composed in solitude, they were prayed in the congregation; if they originated in the congregation, they were continued in solitude. But there were not two kinds of prayer, public and private. It goes against the whole spirit of the Psalms to take these communal laments, these congregational praises, these corporate intercessions, and use them as cozy formulas for private solace.

God does not save us so we can cultivate private ecstasies. He does not save us so we can be guaranteed a reservation in a heavenly mansion. We are made citizens in a kingdom—that is, a society. He teaches us the language of the kingdom by providing the Psalms, which turn out to be as concerned with rough-and-tumble politics as they are the quiet waters of piety. So why do we easily imagine God tenderly watching over a falling sparrow but boggle at believing that he is present in the hugger mugger of smoke-filled rooms?

In a time when our sense of nation and community is distorted, when so many Christians have reduced prayer to a private act, and when so many others bandy it about in political slogans, it is essential that we recover the kingdom dimensions of prayer. For many, recovery begins in attending to the ancient and widespread work of unselfing evident in the Psalms. We move from there to encouragement in the use of the psalm-prayers for the commonweal.

The Unselfing: Its Impact

This unselfing is taking place all across the land. Bands of people meet together regularly to engage in the work. Disbanded, they continue what they began in common. They are persistent, determined, effective. “The truly real,” Karl Jaspers noted, “takes place almost unnoticed, and is, to begin with, lonely and dispersed.… Those among our young people who, thirty years hence, will do the things that matter, are, in all probability, now quietly biding their time; and yet, unseen by others, they are already establishing their existences by means of an unrestricted spiritual discipline.”

Assembled in acts of worship, they pray. Dispersed, they infiltrate homes, shops, factories, offices, athletic fields, town halls, courts, prisons, streets, play grounds, and shopping malls, where they also pray. Much of the population, profoundly ignorant of the forces that hold their lives together, does not even know that these people exist.

These people who pray know what most around them either do not know or choose to ignore: Centering life in the insatiable demands of the ego is the sure path to doom. They know that life confined to the self is a prison—a joy-killing, neurosis-producing, disease-fomenting prison. Out of a sheer sense of survival they are committed to a way of life that is unselfed, both personally and nationally. They are, in the words of their Master, “light” and “leaven.” Light is silent and leaven is invisible. Their presence is unobtrusive, but these lives are God’s way of illuminating and preserving civilization. Their prayers counter the strong disintegrative forces in American life.

We don’t need a new movement to save America. The old movement is holding its own and making its way very well. The idea that extraordinary times justify extraordinary measures is false and destructive counsel. We don’t need a new campaign, a new consciousness raising, a new program, new legislation, new politics, or a new reformation. The people who meet in worship and offer themselves in acts of prayer are doing what needs to be done.

Moreover, their acts of prayer are not restricted to what they do on their knees or at worship. Even as the prayers move into society, they move us into society. There is no accounting for exactly where we end up: some are highly visible in political movements while others work obscurely and unnoticed in unlikely places. We learn to be obedient to what the Spirit is doing in us and not to envy or criticize those whose obedience carries them down different paths. Sometimes what others do looks like disobedience; sometimes they appear to abandon the passion for prayer in the passion for action. But the faithful who continue at prayer enfold the others and sustain them in the petition, “Deliver us from evil.”

These citizens have unmasked the Devil’s deception that prayer is a devotional exercise in which pious people engage when they are cultivating some private felicity with the Almighty or to which profane people are reduced in desperate circumstances. They have recognized the deep, embracing, reforming, revolutionizing character of prayer: It is essential work in shaping society and in forming the soul. It necessarily involves the individual, but it never begins with the individual and it never ends with the individual.

We are born into community, we are sustained in community: our words and actions, our being and becoming either diminish or enhance the community just as the community either diminishes or enhances us. Prayer acts on the principle of the fulcrum, the small point where great leverage is exercised—awareness and intensification, expansion and deepening at the conjunction of heaven and earth, God and neighbor, self and society. Prayer is the action that integrates the inside and outside of life, that correlates the personal and the public, that addresses individual needs and national interest. No one thing we do is simultaneously more beneficial to society and soul as the act of prayer.

The motives of those who pray are both personal and public, ranging from heaven to earth and back again. They pray out of self-preservation, having been told on good authority that only the one who loses his life will save it. They also pray as an act of patriotism, knowing that life is so delicately interdependent that every act of pollution, each miscarriage of justice, any capricious cruelty—even when occurring halfway across the country or halfway around the globe—diminishes the person who is not immediately hurt as much as the person who is.

Prayer is a repair and a healing of the interconnections. It drives to the source of the divisions between the holy and the world—the ungodded self—and pursues healing to its end, settling for nothing less than the promised new heaven and new earth. “Our citizenship is in heaven,” say those who pray, and they are ardent in pursuing its prizes. But this passion for the unseen in no way detracts from their involvement in daily affairs: working well and playing fair, signing petitions and paying taxes, rebuking the wicked and encouraging the righteous, getting wet in the rain and smelling the flowers.

Theirs is a tremendous, kaleidoscopic assemblage of bits and pieces of touched, smelled, seen, and tasted reality that is received and offered in acts of prayer. They obey the dominical command, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.”

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