God owes us nothing

Reflect on gifts given and received at Christmas, and spot the key to a whole lot of wisdom.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A large stone house is wrapped in a red ribbon and bow.

Howard Dickins, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

One of those difficult Christmas Day moments is opening a present from someone, only to realise you forgot to get them something. Or the reverse – expecting a present, but not getting it. It leaves you feeling awkward. Like you owe them something. Or they owe you.

The familiarity of the Christmas story also plays into this. We know how it goes. God gives us the baby Jesus. He does it every year. If he didn’t we’d feel short-changed. After all, life is hard sometimes, and, surely, God owes us something.

God Owes us Nothing. This is the title of a book by the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski. The book is actually about Blaise Pascal and the way the Catholic Church rejected the legacy of the great St Augustine when it rejected the Jansenist frame of mind in the seventeenth century, but that's by the by. What got me thinking again is the title: God Owes us Nothing. It's a powerful thought, maybe on first sight depressing, but the more I have thought about it, the key to a whole lot of wisdom.

If God owes me something and he doesn't provide it, I lose faith in God. Our natural cry 'it's not fair' when something bad happens to us reflects this same basic idea – that we somehow deserve fairness or justice.

Kolakowski's point is that this is essentially the insight at the heart of the Augustinian tradition in Christianity, something that runs through much mediaeval thought, to the Middle Ages, through Luther, Calvin and then on to Pascal and beyond.

If God owes me something – happiness, wealth, health or whatever, I will naturally feel short-changed if I don't get it. You regularly hear stories of people who believed in God, until a friend got ill, or died, or they encountered tragedy in the raw, or experienced the aftermath of an earthquake, a war or a tsunami, or encountered real suffering and 'lost their faith'.

I suspect this kind of thing happens because deep down we think that God owes us something, and if God doesn't give it, then the problem is with God – either that he is unkind, or simply doesn't exist. God should step in every time we make a bad choice, or someone else does, because, basically, he owes us. If God owes me something and he doesn't provide it, I lose faith in God. Our natural cry 'it's not fair' when something bad happens to us reflects this same basic idea – that we somehow deserve fairness or justice.

'Gifts' make us grateful, always delighted with the new things that come, and a bit more philosophical about the stuff we lose.

To begin however from the perspective that God owes us nothing – that we have no rights over him, no claim on him, means that everything we do get comes as a gift – as a sheer delight, something to be deeply grateful for. Every breath, friendship, act of kindness, chocolate, football, mistletoe, wintry walks on bright December days – all these are gifts not rights. It suddenly turns everything about my life from something I feel I have right to, and moan mercilessly about if I lose it, to something that is a true surprise.

To that extent the Dawkins atheist brigade have a point – we should not think the universe is made for us, or that we are any more than specks of life on a distant planet, and we should give up our delusions of deserving divine intervention when things go a bit wrong. The essence of Christian faith is the faith that although we should not expect to receive any divine favours, the surprise is that we do receive so much from the hands of God. Despite our insignificance, we have been privileged by God to play a key role on this planet of reflecting his image to the rest of creation, caring for it on his behalf. We do often enjoy gifts of health, laughter, sport, music, shelter etc., and these are neither random accidents of a faceless universe, nor things we have a right to expect because of our inherent deserving, but gratuitous, free gifts from the heart that beats behind it all. And most of all, we are given the gift of Christ as a brother, a friend and a rescuer.

It is so much better to view everything as unexpected and gratuitous gift than as a right. 'Rights' make us grasping, holding onto things and insisting on them – they centre life around me and what I deserve. 'Gifts' make us grateful, always delighted with the new things that come, and a bit more philosophical about the stuff we lose. In the Christian life, if I think God owes me something, then grace and mercy will not seem a miracle to me at all – after all, it's only what I deserve. If God owes us nothing, his grace, the gift of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, his provision of my needs are all miracles, things I don't deserve and thus to be given thanks for with a constant sense of wonder and amazement.

As you look around the living room post-Christmas at the gifts you have been given, whether wanted or not, try to think of them as given from people who owed you nothing, yet gave you something. And then think of everything you receive each day as pure, surprising, delightful gift. And then take that into the new year. It might lead to a truly thankful and (relatively) more carefree life. It is perhaps the key to happiness.

Article

Creed

Music

Spiritual formation

3 October 2024

4 min read

Sing, pray, manifest: what’s the difference?

Song, success and the search for someone who loves.

Jamie Mulvaney

Jamie is Associate Minister at Holy Trinity Clapham, London.

A colourful graphic overlay of praying hands over a band playing.

Coldplay.com

No one should be surprised when Coldplay release a song called 'We Pray'. Yes, the band's back catalogue is already peppered with references to the divine, but prayer in song is remarkably unremarkable.

Just do a quick search on Spotify: Coldplay are hardly alone. In recent years our purveyors of prayer have notably also included HAIM and Elda Good. Go a little further back: Leonard Cohen, even Take That and Duke Ellington. Which song do you immediately think of when I mention Bon Jovi? And who could forget Madonna, Dionne Warwick or Andrea Bocelli with Katharine McPhee. Prayer makes good music sales.

A recent poll by Skylight showed that 61 per cent of Americans pray. And, 9 in 10 of those believed they'd received an answer to prayer in the past year. If prayers and songs are both places for us to process emotion, then the genre overlap is hardly surprising.

But when you think about it, these songs at their essence sing about a spiritual practice. The spirituality is sometimes overt, and sometimes prayer is useful as a device for something else (Nick Cave's immortal line: 'I don't believe in an interventionist God / But I know, darling, that you do…'), but whichever way you slice it, we sing about prayer because prayer is one of our deepest instincts. We get meta about our metaphysics because the divide between the sacred and the secular simply isn't there. 43 per cent of respondents to this recent survey were almost as likely to pray in nature as they were in a house of worship (46 per cent). We pray for all manner of reasons, which is the premise of Coldplay's song, why 'we pray'.

This instinct seems to have also birthed the song itself. ''We Pray sort of wrote itself like some of the good songs do,' Chris Martin recently revealed. 'In Taiwan, in the middle of the night, I woke up and the song was in my head, and I don't know where it came from. So, the sound of it sort of dictated itself and that's all. I just sort of followed the road map that it said.'

The ambiguity of the song's origins also matches the huge scope within the song for the listener to interpret as they wish. Coldplay have fascinatingly added a 'blank verse' version online where people can ad lib their own prayers within the song. This is not unlike the practice of many 'charismatic' worship leaders, providing a space for deeply personal expressions of prayer within a corporate religious experience. And whether you're at Glastonbury or alone with you and your AirPods in the park, the offer is not only to connect with a higher power, but to reflect on why you're doing so at the same time.

What if the power instead resides not in the person praying, nor in the prayer itself, but in the recipient of the prayer?

We may not all have the musical genius of Martin, but many of us similarly profess an innate desire to pray, regardless of religious beliefs. Studies come and go showing that praying can also have emotional benefits.

So, the question arises: is there power in prayer? If the power is in the act itself, then it's on par with manifesting.

The act, and thoughts of manifesting may have the same motivations as prayer for many, but it can be argued that manifesting is not in the same category as prayer. Much like The Secret or The Power of Positive Thinking, manifesting the latest new age trend where your mind achieves your aspirations: you can simply manifest that new job, relationship, or Ferrari. But the practice has its limitations, and its critics. Vox's senior correspondent Rebecca Jennings reports that 'Overestimating the power of one’s thoughts, which is a symptom of OCD among many other disorders, 'could be very dangerous to people who already have anxiety disorders, but potentially, it might even be enough to start those symptoms happening in someone who originally doesn’t', according to cognitive neuroscientist Rhiannon Jones.

I recently spoke to a couple of women in their early 20s who'd just returned from a manifesting conference. Manifesting may have the same motivations as prayer for many, but it can be argued that manifesting is not in the same category as prayer, even though this hugely popular practice could be understood as a secular form of piety, potentially rivalling that of the devout. But what if the power instead resides not in the person praying, nor in the prayer itself, but in the recipient of the prayer? Martin hints that the prayer itself is not the power. He sings 'Only by his grace', and 'for someone to come and show me the way.'

Simply searching on Spotify with the keyword 'pray' is only the tip of the iceberg for prayerful songs. Many of them don't include the word, yet still meditate on prayer. For instance, U2 sang 'I waited patiently for the Lord, he inclined and heard my cry' - a reworking of King David's Psalm 40 where he is lifted out of the miry pit. The psalm's final verse begins 'But as for me, I am poor and needy; may the Lord think of me.' This is not so much a song of spiritual practice, but desperation. It can be hard even to pray when you're stuck in a rut. And in his helplessness, David finds that there is someone who fills his mind with thoughts about him.

I've recently sat with people who've in some form of prayer thanked God, the universe, even the day itself. The blank space is there. The space is for us to fill. But what if we are not praying into the void? Because far and above any personal experience or benefit of prayer, the ordinariness of prayer is really quite extraordinary: We pray. Someone is listening.