prayer, subjectivity, and politicsdescribes and effects a position of human action in respect to God.^15
The prayer Our Father has, on the whole, been a paradigmatic pattern
for the Christian tradition of prayer and describes in words the
position of the praying person that is also enacted in the very act of
prayer.
I have in my short exposition of Our Father interpreted this prayer
as a positioning of the praying subject towards God, but this far above
all interpreted it as a mental attitude. It is, however, important to
recognize that mental prayer usually is accompanied and guided by
embodied comportment: genuflection, folded hands, raised hands,
prostration, certain techniques for breathing, etc. Prayer is not just a
mental activity but an activity that concerns the entire human
existence — even if the embodied conditions, to the detriment of the
praxis of prayer, has been neglected in a modern Western tradition
that has emphasized “soul” and “consciousness” as a contrast to
“embodiment.” The comportment of prayer could nevertheless be
understood as “an active self-manifestation to God” with our entire
human existence, body, and soul.^16 To give a more substantial de-
scription of the different versions of embodied comportment of prayer
here would by far exceed my possibilities for now, not least given their
immense plurality, but I think my point is valid in any case, namely
that it would be a mistake to limit the understanding of prayer to a
mental activity. The essence of prayer, if I may be briefly permitted to
speak about essences despite myself, could not be reduced to an inner
monologue. Prayer should rather be described as a way of stretching
out towards and addressing God with one’s entire existence — “here I
am” — and as a response to a divine address that has an irreducible
priority; it should be an address that is a truth-event that breaks with
the order of being and never could be reduced to it.^17 To speculate how
- Immanuel Kant, Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft, Werke
in zehn Bänden. Bd 7. ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, 1983, 870–874. - Jean-Louis Chrétien, “The Wounded Word: The Phenomenology of Prayer,”
Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate, New York: Fordham
University Press, 2000, 150. - I here use the language of Alain Badiou, but for the same point in a more
theological vein, see Jean-Louis Chrétien, The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For,