“Science, Philosophy, & Religion” with Sarah Coakley

Show Notes:

Suffering and pain are part of life. We all struggle with finding meaning in our suffering and the suffering of others. We all need help finding hope and encouragement in dark times, and one place we can find that hope is in prayer. It’s through prayer that we stand alongside our suffering friends and neighbors to offer them our attention and empathy. Prayer connects each of us in ways that can transform the world.

Dr. Sarah Coakley is an Anglican priest, systematic theologian, and philosopher of religion. She is a retired professor with degrees from Cambridge and Harvard Universities. Dr. Coakley has held positions at various institutions, including Cambridge, St. Andrews University, Australian Catholic University, Oriel College, Harvard Divinity School, and Princeton. She is also an author and essayist and the editor of Spiritual Healing Science, Meaning, and Discernment.

Resources:

Learn more about Dr. Coakley on her website, sarahcoakley.com

Find her books and essays here

Follow her on Facebook and YouTube

Transcript:

Eddie Rester 00:00

I'm Eddie Rester.

Chris McAlilly 00:01

I'm Chris McAlilly. Welcome to The Weight. Today we're talking to Dr. Sarah Coakley, Anglican

priest, systematic theologian. She's a philosopher of religion with a wide range of

interdisciplinary interest, and today we're talking to her about a book she edited,

"Spiritual Healing: Science, Meaning, and Discernment."

Eddie Rester 00:23

This was an incredible conversation. I didn't know her before this conversation, but she is

incredibly smart, but a woman of incredibly deep faith. And our conversation really turned to

prayer for the last half of the conversation, and I was just scribbling notes. It was so incredibly

meaningful, the conversation we got to have about healing and prayer today. Chris, what did

you take away?

Chris McAlilly 00:51

You can't get out of life without experiencing suffering or pain, agonies, and ultimately, death.

And I think all of us at particular moments in life have a deep longing for a hope, for the

possibility of healing, either for ourselves or for someone that we love dearly. And it's also one

of these areas of life that's a profound mystery. Why do some people experience healing and

others don't? How do we make meaning of our suffering? And we need to think quite deeply

and critically about how we navigate this space, the intersection between science and religion,

but we also need to know how to actually be with one another in those spaces, how to pray

through this particular dimension in the area of life.

Chris McAlilly 01:57

And I've just found Dr Coakley to be just such a helpful conversation partner, in the way that

she has explored the depths of some of the issues and problems and also the possibilities of

how we think about these things. What did you take away from the kind of conversation today?

Eddie Rester 02:16

So many, so many different things. Near the end, she's talking about our hope in Christ's

resurrection, and she said, "Keep on not disbelieving that". And I just love that turn of phrase,

instead of just, instead of saying, "keep believing," "keep not disbelieving it." And so it's that

sense of continuing to hold on to something that is elusive for us. Sometimes, sometimes we

put all of our hopes in medicine, we put all of our hopes in one basket, and yet still, the hope of

the resurrection is there for us.

Chris McAlilly 02:53

Yeah, we do explore what it means to pray, not just asking God for things, but how to be taken

more deeply into the life of God. One of the things that that she says towards the end of the

conversation is that prayer is God being God in us, and that changes the whole story. And I

really do think that how we become people of prayer developing the patience and the

gentleness and the attentiveness to be with ourselves and one another through times of

suffering and pain, that that's one of the most profound dimensions of the conversation, is how

to think well about those things, but then you have to go on and live it. And so I'm so grateful

for the conversation and and the opportunities to cultivate communities.

Eddie Rester 03:44

I think you're going to love it wherever you are in life right now. I think you're going to enjoy

her perspective and her, again, just deep faith and confidence in in what God is up to in the

world. So make sure you share it with somebody. Make sure you like it on whatever platform

you're watching. Help us get the word out about The Weight.

Chris McAlilly 04:07

[INTRO] Leadership today demands more than technical expertise. It requires deep wisdom to

navigate the complexity of a turbulent world, courage to reimagine broken systems, and

unwarranted hope to inspire durable change.

Eddie Rester 04:24

As Christ-centered leaders in churches, nonprofits, the academy, and the marketplace, we all

carry the weight of cultivating communities that reflect God's kingdom in a fragmented world.

Chris McAlilly 04:34

But this weight wasn't meant to be carried alone. The Christian tradition offers us centuries of

wisdom if we have the humility to listen and learn from diverse voices.

Eddie Rester 04:45

That's why The Weight exists: to create space for the conversations that challenge our

assumptions, deepen our thinking, and renew our spiritual imagination.

Speaker 1 04:54

Faithful leadership in our time requires both conviction and curiosity, rootedness in tradition,

and responsiveness to a changing world.

Eddie Rester 05:03

So whether you're leading a congregation, raising a family, teaching students, running a

nonprofit, or bringing faith into your business, join us as we explore the depth and richness of

Christ-centered leadership today. Welcome to The Weight. [END INTRO]

Speaker 1 05:19

We're here today with Dr. Coakley. Thank you so much for joining us.

Sarah Coakley 05:22

Thank you. It's a delight.

Eddie Rester 05:26

Dr. Coakley, tell us a little bit about your journey as a theologian and as a priest in the Anglican

Church. Just help, for those who don't know you, sketch a little bit of your life for us.

Sarah Coakley 05:38

Well, let me keep this very short. I was a theologian long before I became ordained, and

unbelievably, I desired to be a theologian very early in my life, when I was being prepared for

confirmation. I was very dissatisfied with the confirmation classes that I thought, wouldn't it be

great if you could think about these transcendental topics for the rest of your life, and wouldn't

it be even better if somebody paid you to do so? So that's where it all started, and very much

to my own surprise, I did end up becoming an academic theologian from a very young age.

Sarah Coakley 06:17

My first job, believe it or not, was when I was about 24 and it was only in middle life that I

became drawn to the life of a minister or priest. I think it came about because I was at the time

teaching at Harvard University, which was a very secularized Divinity School, and yet within

that Divinity School was an enormous number of really interesting intellectual seekers who who

had come to Harvard to find themselves and to find God and what they were being offered on

the whole, was not terribly theologically rich and so without in any way imposing my own

ecclesiastical agendas, I felt I was responding to this longing in taking up the role of a priest.

And so in the latter part of my time at Harvard, I was able to listen to people's spiritual agonies

in a more priestly way, and indeed, to celebrate the Eucharist and preach in that context.

Sarah Coakley 06:17

There's a wide range of scholarship that you've engaged through time, and we could talk, we

could take the conversation a number of directions. A couple years ago, I came across a

volume, "Spiritual Healing: Science, Meaning, and Discernment," that you edited, and I just

found it to be so, so helpful in navigating this territory as a person working in a local context of

ministry, where there are a number of students and other people in a university town seeking

something that they might name a kind of healing. Some of them would speak of it in terms of

spiritual healing. But I think there's a lot of confusion. And there are whole range of questions

that people have in the area.

Chris McAlilly 07:06

And so I wanted to just, we wanted to have you on and maybe kind of dive into some of the

dimensions of the book. One of the things you say in the in the introduction is that at the heart

of the book is this challenge that we all have to interpret our suffering, to interpret our pain,

and find meaning. I wonder if you you might just tell us a little bit about the project and and

how you sought to kind of set up the conversation in the edited volume?

Sarah Coakley 08:44

Certainly yes, this was a strongly interdisciplinary project in which we brought together

anthropologists, medical practitioners, metaphysicians, and theologians, amongst others, to

ask about what spiritual healing means in the first place. And we realize that this is a hugely

conflicted arena, even semantically. And so we had to make a rather clear distinction in our

first meeting between two meanings of spiritual healing. One meaning is the meaning in which

the, as it were, the locus of healing is the spirit. So the human spirit is in search of some kind of

holistic, integrative, meaningful healing over a lifetime. And the locus of that is the human

psyche.

Sarah Coakley 09:40

And the other meaning is where you're looking for some kind of divine intervention in the realm

of medical catastrophe of some sort or upcoming death or whatever, and you're asking God for

some divine transformation of a much more overt and obvious nature.

Sarah Coakley 10:04

The latter context, of course, summons all kinds of metaphysical difficulties for those who don't

agree about whether there is a God in the first place, and if so, if there is a God, whether God

can intervene and break physical and medical laws. But the book is about both. It's

predominantly about the former, because as a priest myself, who has sat with people

struggling with mental and physical pain, with eminent interventionist medical crises, and

ultimately with death that none of us can avoid, what I've noticed over the years, and this isn't

very novel, is that their struggle is often about how to place whatever is happening to them in

this crisis in the context of the meaning of their own life.

Sarah Coakley 10:57

And sometimes we don't spend enough time, I think, in our theological reflections in church

about how to think about our own lives in relation to the life and death and resurrection of

Christ. How do we place ourselves into that narrative? It can often seem quite extrinsic and

distant. And what I noticed when I was doing my own training in Clinical Pastoral Education,

which, of course, everybody has to go through. It's a great rite of passage. And in my case, I did

it for a whole year, and I did it in a Catholic General Hospital and in the mental hospital. And I

would say that that changed my life irrevocably. It was the best possible training I could have

had.

Sarah Coakley 11:42

As a theologian, I had always discussed these intellectual metaphysical problems at a kind of

high level, intellectual level, but now I was actually sitting with people who were struggling to

make meaning. And the most important thing a priest can do in that circumstance is to listen,

not to fix but to attend. Often, as a chaplain, we don't even know all the full medical details. We

don't know what the outcome is going to be, but what we see is a human being suddenly up

against the big crises of life. And nothing could be more wonderful than to be a minister in

these circumstances. This is what we're for, and we so often get it wrong.

Sarah Coakley 12:30

We can't, until we hear more, we can't tell where that person is exactly, and it's going to take

some time for that person to make this meaning. And one of the most wonderful thing that

happens is that when you're sitting with someone who's dying and you see them make the

meaning triumphantly, I think that's one of the things that most makes me believe in the

resurrection, actually.

Eddie Rester 12:54

Talk a little bit more about that. When they make the meaning, kind of pull that, tease that out

a little bit more for us. What do you sense is happening in that moment when they make the

meaning?

Sarah Coakley 13:09

I think it can be quite varied, but if we want to look for a pattern that moves between different

people, it is the moment in which they cease to see God as a rather distant, very large

phenomenon with whom they've been, you know, trying to do business all their lives. And

suddenly they are rent into the middle of the very life of the Passion of Christ. And they've

always subscribed to that. And I mean, some of them have subscribed to it magnificently for

many years. But then when it comes to the actual moment, it's this true internalization of what

this actually means for them, and the bits of their lives that they regret, the bits of their lives

that they are joyous about, the bits that they wish had never happened. Often, ancient wounds

will come up at this point. So many people who have been abused in their early life and it's

never really been dealt with. We all know as ministers that we sit with this, and then we listen.

And sometimes people die without resolution, but sometimes people die with an extraordinary

insight into how being wrought into the life of Christ and his death transforms the whole matter.

Chris McAlilly 14:40

One of the things that I appreciate about the approach in the book is certainly it's

interdisciplinary quality, but also the way in which the resources of the Christian faith are put in

conversation with just a range of religious experiences. And you note that the importance

maybe... Perhaps a prior step of asking the questions of what philosophical or theological

meaning or metaphysical meaning might be made of an experience of suffering, that a prior

step is to actually engage with a thick description of the lived experience of suffering among

persons. I found that to be quite helpful and true, but not really... I was struggling to kind of

name or think about why that is so important. And I wonder if you might just spend some time

just unpacking the importance of a thick narrative description of a story of someone's

experience of suffering is a really important prior step in then making a bridge towards

theological meaning or metaphysical meaning of pain.

Sarah Coakley 15:59

Yes, thank you. That's another big question. It would be so easy as a philosopher of religion to,

you know, come to the bedside of someone in this state and say, "Let me tell you about the

higher order goods theory of suffering," right? I mean, I happen to believe in that. That is, let

me to explain to your listeners the problem of evil, I think, is transformed enormously when we

add another plank to its reflection, which is that there may be secondary goods coming out of

suffering that we can't initially see when we confront the raw business of immediate agony. But

we can't jump to suggesting that to the people we're attending to, because the thick

description can't be hurried. That's one of the most important, I think, temporal aspects of a

narrative of suffering.

Sarah Coakley 16:55

If I've just received the very bad news that I've got a brain tumor and I'm going to die in three

months, I'm going to take some weeks to come to terms with what that means for me and my

life and my my family and my relationship to God. So that's that's one point. The other point is

that we're up against the miracle of contemporary, modern medical science, which, thank

goodness we have it. We can't even imagine what it would have been like to live even, you

know, 80 years ago when my grandfather committed suicide and there was no there were no

antidepressant pills. Right? So, or pre antibiotics. But now we have this megalith that we have

in the modern, contemporary, Anglo-American world. We don't have it in parts of Africa and

Asia and other poor places.

Sarah Coakley 17:53

And so there's a whole set of meanings coming from the doctors that we're having to put into

contestation with our own fragile attempts to make existential and spiritual meaning. And the

doctors may be saying, "I can give you this zapping three weeks intervention," provided you've

got the money for the insurance, of course, "which will give you another six months of life." And

then you've got to make that decision, and that's taking up all the space in your head. And the

doctor may be a very devout Christian, but the doctor isn't allowed to impose his or her

Christian meaning system into this decision. That's where we are, and it makes this whole area

of what we pretentiously call hermeneutics, that is the arena of making meaning so terribly

complicated in an arena of of medical emergency in this country, amongst privileged people,

amongst unprivileged people, they don't even have the option of that zapping, right? So

they've got a rather different and arguably simpler but more tragic meaning making decision to

make at this point.

Eddie Rester 19:13

When I was in seminary, we had someone from the Duke Medical School who was also a

professor. It was Warren Kinghorn's mentor at Duke and...

Sarah Coakley 19:25

Was that Harold Koenig?

Eddie Rester 19:27

No, I'm blanking on his name right now, but a marvelous man. But he brought such insight,

because he said often, it's what you're saying right there that a doctor will bring different

questions and different assumptions into the room than a pastor or priest, and what most

people need is both at hand. How do you respond to that? Because you do a lot of

conversations with doctors and other folks within the healing sciences. So how do you deal with

those? Or how can we deal with those intricate and interwoven conversations?

Sarah Coakley 20:04

Well, there's no magic bullet. We do need both of them, but we don't have a established

understanding of exactly how they are to be negotiated in any particular case, and everything

depends... That's why, to get back to Chris's question about thick description, we're not dealing

with a set of generic principles here. We're dealing with particular cases in which particular

clinical and medical outcomes are being quantified by the doctors on the one hand, and then

the minister on the other is attempting to attend to all of those but at the same time, at a very

deep level, to assess, spiritually, where this person is and what is best for them. Because to

state the obvious, but it's not obvious to the general American public, we all have to die, and

dying is not the worst thing that can happen to you.

Chris McAlilly 21:05

That's right.

Sarah Coakley 21:06

The latter I say, as a Christian.

Chris McAlilly 21:10

One hundered percnet. Yeah, I find myself at times, I remember some of the first encounters

that I had as a minister, and at this point, I was a student pastor, in contexts where decisions

were being made, you know, in a hospital with families under the supervision of of a physician,

but all of the assumptions were, we can't allow this person to die, and we have to do whatever

we can to avoid that outcome. And then there's almost...

Sarah Coakley 21:44

And then there's the Hippocratic Oath, I mean, in a way they're obliged to...

Chris McAlilly 21:48

Right. No, it's, yeah, absolutely, certainly not a bad thing. And also, there does come a

moment, and it's a moment of discernment that everyone is is trying to do from every

perspective of, okay, this is not... It's not going to work to fix the problem, whatever the

problem presenting problem might be, and knowing how to navigate that with care a certain a

certain deference of authority in in a hospital setting, but also to assert a certain kind of

spiritual authority to say, "Okay, I see what's happening here. And we need to shift. We need to

shift the intervention perhaps to a different mode."

Chris McAlilly 22:36

And oftentimes, you know, there is a way that modern medicine does kind of shift towards kind

of hospice care or end of life care, but it isn't fully integrated with a kind of more thick,

Christian understanding of what it might look like to end well or die well. It's certainly there.

People will describe a desire for their loved ones to die peacefully. But there's a kind of deeper

piece, perhaps, that might be on offer. I don't know. It's a certain... It's a problem that, you

know, I think is very basic to pastoral ministry.

Chris McAlilly 23:15

How to do it well, I think is just... It's the art of art. It's not an easy thing to navigate, and it

takes repetition, it takes... But I also think it takes, you know, a deeper level of critical thinking

about the intersection of these things. And that's one of the things I appreciate about the book,

is just the depth of reflection about the limitations of the healing sciences, but also the

limitations of some of the theological claims that we sometimes make that are actually magical

or superstition that have found their way into our theological claims. How do you think about

that, the intersection of science and religious claims and how we negotiate some of the

limitations and some of the opportunities in that conversation?

Sarah Coakley 24:09

Well, I'm strongly pro science-religion negotiations, across many writings that I've done. In

other words, I am not... I wish not to set up a disjunctive binary between scientific instincts and

investigations and illuminations and theological ones. The problem comes when we have, as it

were, smuggled into the scientific side of this a set of ideological, atheistical, reductive

presumptions about what science, modern science means. And one of the great difficulties, just

in cultural terms, is that when people say the word "science," they don't realize that "science"

breaks down into empirical science, including medical science, and then the meaning

ascriptions that come with that in contemporary, largely non theological reflections on what it

means.

Sarah Coakley 25:16

So we need a three-sided story here. We need a story in which we have theological meaning,

inscriptions which are by no means unified. There are many different metaphysical positions

that we can take up from the theological side about how science and theology interrelate, and

they themselves need to be disputed. Then we have messages coming in from medical and

other forms of science, which are often encoded with metaphysical presumptions, which

theologians rightly wish to contest. But they are distinguishable from the empirical, quantifiable

outcomes that science does.

Sarah Coakley 26:03

So we always need philosophers of science and historians of science in our science and

theology discussions. We can't do without them, because they will tell us, amongst other

things, "This didn't look the same 50 years ago." You know, "Let me tell you the story of how

this came about to where we are now." "Let me tell you who are the perhaps covertly

atheistical metaphysicians who are driving the current scientific announcements." And this is

perhaps less obvious in the medical arena than in other arenas like evolutionary biology or

physics, which I've also engaged in discussions with but it's there. And so by the time you're at

the bedside of someone dying, you're not going to be able to orchestrate all of that.

Sarah Coakley 26:55

That's why books such as I've attempted in the arenas of pain and healing are kind of needed

as a backdrop, then we'll become more aware of the complexities of the decisions and the

wafting ideologies that may be at play. You're lucky if you get an oncologist who is alert to

these, if we're talking about cancer again. We haven't talked about depression, but that's

another whole area which is so important in our cultural life and very differently orchestrated.

But there we have another whole set of presumptions about what can be done for depression

pharmacologically, what can't be done by these pills for some people and not for others, and

how much, as it were, psychological and theological support is needed for anything like what

we would call healing.

Sarah Coakley 27:50

So I'm sorry I can't wave a magic wand and say that this is simple, because it isn't. And I think

we need people who are very nuanced about the complexities of the interactions of these

various factors, metaphysical, scientific, and theological in any given thick description case, as

we started out by discussing.

Eddie Rester 28:18

It's a thing, as I'm sitting here thinking about, where you're talking about the interplay and

really that by the time you get to the bedside, you need to be able to be engaged with the

subtleties of things. And I think, you know, I've been in ministry for 27, 28 years now, and one

of the enlightening things for me has been friendships with doctors and nurses.

Sarah Coakley 28:43

Yeah, this is very important, especially nurses. Oddly, the nurses are the ones. The nurses are

the ones who stay. That's their job. They stay.

Eddie Rester 28:52

Exactly.

Exactly.

Sarah Coakley 28:53

The doctors waft in and out in their white coats, and you actually have to... They know what's

really going on.

Eddie Rester 29:00

Right. And can tip you off when you walk into the room, if you're consistent visiting a hospital

and see the nurses. But I think it's been some of those conversations with doctors and nurses

over time, where they're willing to admit the limits of their own healing arts. And I'm one who

believes that God works healing through doctors and through nurses and through psychiatrists

and psychologists and counselors, that God's healing work is continuing and continuing in those

ways.

Eddie Rester 29:34

And I think what's happened for me in some of those conversations is that it's allowed me to

speak a little bit more about, "This is how I see your work. This is how my work plays out." And I

think when you make those friendships, rather, it just begins to open up conversations. Chris

and I have one friend who's a neurosurgeon, who got his MDiv before he went to med school.

So he's remarkable. But he sees things theologically, natively. And I think--you may have a

different take on this. I'd love to hear--but I feel like a lot of times, doctors and nurses want to

see around the corner theologically as well, if we give them an open door. What do you..

Sarah Coakley 30:24

I absolutely agree. When I was doing CPE, I've already alluded to this in the Roman Catholic

hospital in Boston, I would go up onto the wards in the morning, and I would look up on the

board and see to whom a particular nurse had been allocated. This particular nurse was a boat

person from Vietnam, and she was a Buddhist, and she was very, very profoundly spiritually

present. And I knew that the supervisor would put her on the case of the person who was going

to die today. I figured that out after it. And so I would then go round to that particular person

and just tentatively ask whether this dying person wished to see a chaplain or not. And

sometimes they didn't, and sometimes they did.

Sarah Coakley 31:13

But that's a very good instance of the medical system sometimes working out what the

particular gifts and skills of particular nurses and doctors are in this transitional phase, and

that's how we need to work together. We need to have these kind of, what I call, spiritual

sensation capacities to understand what's going on in any particular case where one size does

not fit all.

Chris McAlilly 31:45

Yes, indeed, I think that we're getting into this idea of a person in a context of healing, whether

it be in a institutionalized medical setting or outside of that setting, whether a person is a

practitioner or not. One commonality is a profoundly spiritual, spiritually present person. And

one of the things that I've long admired about your writing in a range of areas is the ways in

which you draw upon the resources of contemplation, esthetic disciplines, and prayer that

might shape our ability to be spiritually present in the face of difficulty or profound agony or

suffering. I wonder if you might touch on how one might become that kind of person by

engaging the practices of their faith, whether it be the practices of Buddhist contemplation or

Christian practices of contemplation? What drew you in that direction, in your own work and

how might it help us as we navigate this space of spiritual healing?

Sarah Coakley 33:05

Well, that's such a far reaching question, but I think we all know that as Christians, we are

drawn to a life of prayer. Jesus asks us to do this. Paul insists that we can't do it unless the

Spirit does it in us. That's already a bit of a paradox. We have to figure that one out. But

ultimately, the life of the Christian is not a life of optional prayer. It isn't a life in which we can

fix things extrinsically by prayer. We have to learn to rely on the prior action of God in us, and

that's very, very hard for humans of our nature.

Eddie Rester 33:56

Right.

Sarah Coakley 33:56

People who are not... It's much easier, as Luke's Gospel understands very well, for people who

are poor already. They know they can't even put bread on the table. So if they can't pray for

that, then stuck. For those of us who do put bread on the table, we have to learn how to drop

our defenses. We have to learn, over time, to ask for help. It's extraordinarily difficult. Nothing

in our education would suggest that that would be a good idea. Our education says that we

have to become autonomous, courageous, independent, competitive people. So that's the

great paradox at the heart of prayer.

Sarah Coakley 34:37

And we all know that every congregation there's ever been, there are some real praying

people. They're usually not the ones who are making a lot of noise. They're usually not the ones

who are being very contentious on the vestry. They get on with it. And so much of my work as a

theologian has been in trying to delineate how it is that the simple act of attention to God at

the heart of prayer changes everything. It changes our lifestyle. It changes our perception of all

our relations. It changes our attitude to politics. It changes... I don't mean it changes... I don't

mean it tells us whether which side of the left and the right to pray on. It just it changes how

we think of how we're related to the church body and the political body. So it changes

everything. And there could be nothing more important in any Christian life than learning to

pray deeply. It's so wonderful that you see people aged 80 suddenly getting it. You know,

there's a very fast forward version the people over 80, sometimes...

Eddie Rester 35:45

Maybe that says something, too. By the time you get to that stage of life, you realize there's an

end. Your mortality is real. And so you begin to open up.

Sarah Coakley 35:54

And of course, the other wonderful thing is, it shows you how to die. I mean, you learn how to

die by giving over, and once you're no longer afraid of dying, you're no longer afraid of living.

Which I think is what Paul is really on about in Romans eight when he says, you know, we don't

even know what to pray for, but the Spirit intervenes and we give way, and that's how we get

into the heart of the death and the life of Jesus, and then we're praying alongside him to the

Abba Father. And that transforms our whole perception of what it is to be on the journey of

Christian faith.

Eddie Rester 36:36

One of the things I find Christians struggle with a lot, and if... I don't even know how,

unbelievably, don't know even how to define it, sometimes, is intercessory prayer. Can you say

a word about what that is, and what are we accomplishing when we intercede directly with God

for someone or some circumstance or situation?

Sarah Coakley 37:00

I can do my best. I think when I first started praying silently because I wanted to go deeper, it

seemed like that kind of prayer was the opposite of intercession. So I was switching off my

independent requests for individual things. I was asking God in the Spirit to just take me more

deeply into the death and life of Jesus. And then over the years, I began to see something that

Thomas Aquinas expresses wonderfully in his Summa Theologiae, which is, well, what is the

meaning of intercessory prayer? If, as Jesus himself says in the Sermon on the Mount, God

knows already what we need before we ask, why are we doing this? Why don't we just leave it

to him?

Sarah Coakley 37:45

And Thomas says, well, this is a deeply incarnational matter. What God wants us to do is to

pray for each other so that we go more deeply into the mystical body of our relationship with

others on account of God's desire that we cooperate with him in the processes of healing and

transformation of this world. So that kind of changes the story. We're no longer asking for kind

of extrinsic miracles, which then don't happen, and then wondering whether we should stop

that altogether, which I think is where many in my church, the Episcopalian Anglican church,

you know, we say all these prayers publicly. We ask for things. We do the prayers of the

people. And then at the end of it we think, "Well, did that do anything? Probably not."

Sarah Coakley 38:32

But if we think of it in a completely different framework in which going deeper into the life of

God through the action of the Holy Spirit, we're being asked to stand alongside those suffering

with attention and empathy, the whole world begins to look different. It doesn't necessarily

mean that I get what I want, but the sensibility has changed, whether it be the person next

door who's dying of cancer or the person in Ukraine who's being bombed, I'm actually being

drawn more deeply into that very mysterious life that we call the body of Christ, and I'm trying

to respond to whatever God is wanting me to respond to in that. And once we realize how much

more deeply connected up with each other we are than we normally think, then it's not so

ridiculous to think that that act of attention is making some difference.

Chris McAlilly 39:31

And so that, yeah... I think there's this profound... as we're describing, the nurse that would

attend those who are dying, that the attending or presiding nurse might point you to on the

floor when you come in at the at the beginning of the day. I do think that there are these

people that have this profoundly spiritually present capacity, and some of them work in the

medical profession. And some of them work in the ministry, and some of them have just, you

know, been through the fires of pain and suffering and agony to themselves. And they kind of

know how to be in that space with God and with other people in a way that, you know, when I

started in ministry I truly struggled to do, to just stay with pain, to stay with a person who was

suffering, with patience, with gentleness, with attentiveness, as one who is there with God and

with them, holding out hope that there might be some real intervention, but also fully aware

that that may or may not happen in this particular case, and to hold both of those things in the

light of God's presence.

Chris McAlilly 40:53

It's a very profoundly... When you encounter a person who does this, well, it's just a profoundly

moving experience. I think we've, many of us, have encountered people like this along the way,

if you think back. How to become that kind of person is, you know, I think...

Sarah Coakley 41:09

I know.

Eddie Rester 41:10

I don't remember now.

Chris McAlilly 41:10

He's so profound.

Chris McAlilly 41:10

And it's harder to kind of, I mean, you can hold out a desire for it, maybe.

"Lord make me a person like that." But I like the idea, God take me more deeply into the life, death, and

resurrection of Jesus. Take me more deeply into your action as your... Might I cooperate with

you in whatever it is that you're doing in this situation. What is it that you're asking me to

respond to in this situation? I think those are prayers that I think any of us can pray, and I think

can be helpful. You're... I think I broke in on you, Eddie, what were you gonna lift up?

Eddie Rester 41:31

I'm out of the country, yeah. I'm sitting here thinking about I'm so thankful that we've moved

into prayer, because I think this is one of the places and spaces where so many followers of

Jesus feel inadequate.

Sarah Coakley 42:02

Exactly. And that's the point, right? Read Romans eight. We can't do it.

Eddie Rester 42:09

Don't even have words. We don't even have words.

Sarah Coakley 42:11

We can't do it. And that's fine. Once you recognize that you're off, because you're asking God

to do it.

Eddie Rester 42:19

There you go.

Sarah Coakley 42:19

Prayer is God being God in us, and it just changes the whole game.

Eddie Rester 42:24

I was even thinking, I do remember now, I was thinking about, just as we think about prayer

transforming us, that intercessory prayer transforming us, I think, in a world that, right now, is

so divided and in need of healing, and we've been talking about healing, we expand that work

just a little bit. One of my professors used to talk about the power of praying for your enemies,

and to be honest about that, and to name. He would say, "name the names. It will change you.

It will change them." And it's exactly what you were talking about, because something begins

to awaken in us that's not us in relation to others. Go ahead. I'm sorry I didn't want to cut you

off.

Sarah Coakley 43:10

Praying for enemies is the real test, because you're not being asked to like them, you're being

asked to love them. How's that possible? Just as the first commandment is to love God first and

foremost, and then to love your neighbor as yourself. But what if you don't love yourself? And

so learning how to love yourself through a kind of ecstatic move into the vision of God that he,

God, has for you is the essence of prayer. It's a kind of ecstasy of perception whereby suddenly

you see that you are of profound importance to God, and that's why everybody else is of a

profound importance to God.

Sarah Coakley 43:56

It's not like saying you selfish person, you love yourself selfishly and now love your neighbor,

your enemies selfishly as well. It's breaking that whole zero sum game way of thinking down.

That's why you have to give primary attention to God in prayer, which is very, very

disconcerting, because when you try to give primary attention to God, you get sort of nothing.

It feels like you're wasting your time, as John of the Cross says, "it's a wonderful way of wasting your time,"

giving primary attention to God. And then the whole story begins to change, but

you have to stay with it, and it's so epistemologically odd, because it's not like a relationship of

the sorts that we have between humans, which are always negotiatory in some way.

Chris McAlilly 44:49

Yeah, I appreciate the just the call to think of prayer as God being God in us, and that as we

grow in the practice and as we stay with it, that the whole story might begin to change,

because we begin to see the situation, maybe even we begin to see ourselves from God's point

of view. I do find in my own life that sustaining, the disciplines needed to grow, in spiritual

practice requires a community.

Sarah Coakley 45:28

Absolutely.

Chris McAlilly 45:28

And I wonder if we might just kind of, you know, think about we've talked about all this in light

of maybe a distinctive practitioner, either medical or or or ecclesial but I wonder, if we're

thinking about this in light of how you sustain these things as a community, what does all this

mean for the life of the church? I wonder if you might speak to that. How do we become the

kinds of communities that can do this well, that can suffer honestly, telling the truth about

what's going on? You know, foster meaning, embody spiritual healing for one another in deep,

real and practical ways.

Sarah Coakley 46:13

Thank you for asking this huge question. I think we've never been, for a long time at any rate,

at such an important turning point within this country for thinking afresh about how church

communities particularly can foster the ability to live together. And the best church

communities, of course, are ones where people don't vote the same way, and that's the point.

Christ is deeper than that, but it's not just a matter of renegotiating democratic practices. I

think democratic practices are being eroded because we haven't gone deeply enough in our

church life to allow them to be sustained by something that goes beyond that.

Sarah Coakley 46:59

And I don't know whether you're aware of a very searing book by Lauren Winner on practices,

in which she attacks... She's kind enough not to attack me directly, but she does allude to me

as someone who has been underlined along with Alistair McIntyre and others since the 1980s

the importance of the practices of prayer for the sustaining and deepening of Christian life. But

she rightly points out that our churches can be very happily engaged in prayer practices which

ward off the possibility of this going deeper. And we ought to be hermeneutically suspicious

about the possibility that that is what's happening.

Sarah Coakley 47:51

There is never any deepening capacity of the sort that we're after without some real fragility

and vulnerability in our prayer life. And I'm contentious in this area, because I've always

argued, and not everybody agrees with me, that if there isn't some arena of deep quiet or

silence in the life of a parish and its prayer, not necessarily in the main church service on

Sunday, but somewhere in the parish life, there has to be this going deeper. It doesn't really

matter how you do it, but there are ways and ways of doing it, which then become a sort of

arena in which the spirit can work more deeply and spread to others.

Sarah Coakley 48:37

If everything is chat and everything is talk and everything is jollification, we're actually warding

off the possibility for this kind of transformation. And that's step number one, and that's very

important for plotting our liturgies, whichever denomination we belong to. We shouldn't be

coming to church to start chatting socially before we even worship. This is a huge problem.

Would you agree? We should be coming to church to prepare to meet Christ, which is actually

rather a frightening thought. And especially within Protestantism, I think we've we've lost the

sensibility that our coming together is a transcendent act, but in some sense, ought to be filling

us with awe and with expectation and with a certain sensibility that we could be under

judgment.

Sarah Coakley 49:37

We need to go back to Bonhoeffer and Barth here, I think in these days. We're not just coming

together as a club. We're coming together to be changed, and whatever we plan as ministers

that make that sensibility more likely, and that will be different in different churches and

different denominations, I think is very important.

Chris McAlilly 49:58

I'm thinking about, you know... One of the services that comes up in our parish life on a yearly

basis, and it comes up at the at the beginning of November, All Saints Sunday. And I think that

that's a time within the life of our parish where we're both remembering that Christ is Lord, not

only of this time and this space, but all time and all space, and that we kind of place ourselves

within this communion of saints, those who we've loved and that we've lost, those within the

life of the parish, then also those who've been lost through time. And it's... You know, every

year there's a transformative dimension.

Chris McAlilly 50:47

It has... There's space within the practice and the day where we can do work beyond the

moment of death or grief, with some of... All of that rises up within the context of the parish

and and it is an opportunity for the meaning of our grief, for the meaning of our pain or

suffering to be transformed in the presence of Christ and one another. And that's one of the...

I'll be thinking about it differently as we're doing some of the planning this week about some of

the work that the liturgy can do for the parish. What about you, Eddie? Any takeaways from the

conversation for you, as you think back to your setting?

Eddie Rester 51:33

Well, I just think that coming together is a transcendent act is... I took a lot of notes today. I just

think that holding that as our great hope is that there's more happening as we gather, as we

sing, as we sit quietly, as we talk with friends that they're continuing to remember that God's at

work, doing the good work of healing, even as we're doing the best that we can to do the work

of worship. God is doing something greater among us. So I'm thankful for that, and just thankful

for your time today to spend a little time talking with us, journeying with us as we think about

healing and prayer. It's been a joy today. Thank you.

Sarah Coakley 52:21

Thank you so much. And at All Saints, it seems we're not just remembering those who've died,

but we're also being reminded that we're all called to be saints. And that means a lot of

change, right? And every, every work of worship is a great longing to be transformed, and for

change, right? And every, every work of worship is a great longing to be transformed, and for

our world to be transformed. And that's what as Christians, we believe is possible, and we've

got to keep not disbelieving that.

Chris McAlilly 52:57

Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, if worship is a transcendent act and it holds out the possibility

that there can be hope for transformation, that there can be healing, not just on the personal,

individual level, but that it could be something that could be more broadly shared, and that

would lead to a kind of flourishing, I think, not giving up on that possibility, I think, is one of the

things that I'll take forward. And not reducing healing, all healing to physical healing. And you

know, we're all going to die, but that doesn't mean that there's not a healing that's possible,

not only for us as individuals, but us as a community, us as a nation, us as a world. So thank

you.

Eddie Rester 53:37

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Chris McAlilly 53:45

If you would like to support this work financially, or if you have an idea for a future guest, you

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