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Religious Book Store > Religious books beginning with G
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God Has No Religion: Blending Traditions For Prayer |
Author: Frances Sheridan Goulart
Published: 2005-04 |
List price: $14.95
Our price: $11.21
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 Dishonest scholarship
Throughout the ages, most humans have considered their religious worldview the one true Way. This has led to three different modes of thinking: Those who believe that the truest way is to serve all gods and include all religious thoughts, those who believe only one god -their own- should be served, and those who thought all religions too confusing, contradictory or fraught with error to be a reliable guide to understanding the world.
Frances Sheridan Goulart's "God Has No Religion: Blending Traditions for Prayer," falls securely in the first category. This is the way of Hinduism and those who are inclined to mixing religious traditions without regard to the moorings of those traditions will certainly like this book. This volume tackles an important but sensitive question: How to pray, what to pray, and how to pray in a way that is real and satisfying to the individual, and how to apply those practices one values from another tradition. "God has no religion" builds on such books as the Oxford Book of Prayer by containing traditional and modern prayers from other traditions, but Goulart goes further in that she does not make Christianity the primary focus of her collection, and she crafts exercises to challenge participants to step out of their own spiritual tradition. After three introductory chapters which deal with prayer practices, she gets down to the core of the book which are a collection of prayers. Each prayer comes from a specific tradition and is accompanied by a brief Origin note and Options which aid the seeker to flex spiritual muscles. Often the prayers contain italicized sections which the author suggests can be changed to another tradition or removed.
The book's intention seems to be to help the religious seeker better capture the infinite varieties of human worship.
In the first chapter, "Prayers and Praying in the Twenty-first Century" Goulart states, "twenty-first century seekers revere the past but aren't held hostage by it. Almost half of all Americans under thirty, and one-third of those over seventy, think the best religion is one that borrows from all religions." Such statements will make the analytical reader suspicious. Goulart deftly manages not to name the study. Furthermore, while only one sentence specifies "Americans," that specification is so closely linked to "twenty-first century seekers" that a subtle mismanagement of statistics becomes immediately apparent. Although evangelical Christianity and fundamentalist Islam are rising in many non-western culture, it is clear that to Goulart only American societal development that matters. Americans who can distance themselves from the American tendency to believe that "where America goes, the world follows" will be offended at Goulart's apparent western solipsism. Later when Goulart's imprecise writing melds with the American solipsism, we encounter this "Holier-than-thou" spiritual comparison: "21 percent of us think we are more spiritual than our elders." Presumably a book about spiritual diversity should avoid spiritual comparisons. By the time I finished the preface, and read Goulart's definition of "Blessed be" as "A Feminist way of blessing what has passed and what's to come" I had grown so wary about the author's, imprecise writing, lack of directness, and casually-tossed off statistics that only advertising executives, journalists, fact-checkers, and teachers reading term papers would understand my annoyance. Certainly, it would have been more honest to state that "Blessed Be" is of wiccan or neo-pagan origin. I found myself researching almost every prayer or commentary in Goulart's book. Never had I dreamed I would thumb through Vine's Expository Dictionary, the Book of Common Prayer, Greek Dictionaries, and the Oxford Book of Prayer while reviewing a book.
Goulart abridges several prayers and gives adaptations of others. Comparing the wording of prayers in God Has No Religion with the same prayers in the primary sources, I noticed that Goulart made some interesting changes. For instance, Goulart's version of one prayer --"For Today" reads thusly: "O God: Give me strength to live another day; Let me not turn coward before its difficulties."
But in the Book of Common prayer, it actually reads: "O God: Give me strength to live another day; Let me not turn coward before its difficulties or prove recreant to its duties." It's a small change but a telling one.
In the Options section of each page, Goulart gives the reader the opportunity to pick and choose what aspect of a certain prayer to remove. It is probably understandable to many seekers that Goulart should "adapt" The Lorica of St Patrick - a prayer soaked in Christian symbols- but her adaptation so frees the prayer from its moorings that the reader wonders if perhaps Goulart hasn't gone too far. There is so much heavy-duty tampering that her "abridgment" of the Lorica that St Patrick seems more of a worshiper of Gaia than a Christian. And the fact that she doesn't acknowledge that the portion of the prayer she chose is so unlike the major heart of the prayer, makes the reader cringe. Here was censorship by misdirection. Oftentimes, the abridgement and adaptations not only gut the traditional heart of a prayer but they soft-soap the worshipers' duty towards the Supreme Being. For instance, when Goulart abridges Michelle Balek's interreligious prayer "A Prayer For Global Restoration," the hard-hitting aspect of the prayer is removed. Certainly a modern interreligious prayer is already so inclusive, Goulart doesn't need to further strip it.
The author's choice of modern prayers can also be suspect. In describing the origin of a prayer entitled Heart of Compassion, Goulart writes "This prayer is inspired by the belief that Jesus' position as a son of Mary rather than of Joseph in Jewish Palestine suggest that Jesus was perceived as illegitimate and suffered with Mary the rejection of society. His compassion for women and children may have stemmed from this experience." Even if we ignore the Biblical fact that neither enemies nor apostles ever hinted that Jesus was illegitimate (quite the contrary- the people in his hometown called him The Carpenter's Son) the scrutinizing reader is left wondering what exactly does Goulart mean by "the belief" ? Whose belief? The belief of the people in Mary's day? The belief of the one who wrote the modern prayer? And how are we to understand the phrases, "The belief suggests" or "may have stemmed" Suggests to who?
Another moment of suspicion arises in the Origin section of "Forgive Us Our Debts," where Goulart writes "A translation from the original Aramaic by Neil Douglas-Klotz" of the line "And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors" from the Our Father. What was translated from the Greek as debts or offenses can actually be understood as "hidden past" "secret debt" and `inner fruit.'" While I'm open to finding the therapeutic in the Lord's Prayer, Douglas-Klotz' mistranslation of a word which means "a debt owed but unpaid" as "secret debt" is clearly at odds with the meaning found in every Greek Bible dictionary. It's not that Goulart has considered a modern prayer as traditional, it's that she often bypasses those aspects of a prayer she considers inconvenient and often uses the idiosyncratic beliefs of untraditional clerics and contributors.
The organization of the materials, and the resources will make this book much loved by the uncynical searcher, but those who understand that we live in an age of generalized truthiness, an age of almost-true memoirs, and scripted reality shows will find themselves like the Berean synagogue searching the Scriptures to see if those things are so. The prayers listed in the book do indeed have a form of godliness and are of the sort the comfortable healthy westerner would admire: but they do not speak to those who live oppressed by sickness, poverty, disease, sin. One wishes Goulart had had the moral courage to not use words so slickly and to leave the many prayers as she found them. Why hide the origin of "Blessed Be" for instance? In her attempt to market the idea of blending traditions together, she has created a collection which is not only clearly suspect but a book of prayers spoken to a vague, undemanding, filtered and stripped-down God.
Not recommended.
 A collection of prayers from diverse religious sources
God Has No Religion: Blending Traditions for Prayer is a collection of prayers from diverse religious sources, from Mother Teresa to the Holy Qur'an to Gandhi, Native American traditions, and more. Each individual prayer is represented with options for when it is most applicable, suggested non-theistic versions, recommendations for focus, reflection, and closing, and a great deal more. An introduction offers a brief overview of prayer practices across various faiths, and the "prayerware" such as the Catholic rosary that go along with them. A deeply spiritual book written for individuals of all beliefs, written in the passionate conviction that the meaning and spirit of the prayer itself and the sincerity behind the sentiment uttered is what truly matters far more than the denomination to which the original prayer is attributed.
A Lovely Book
I first heard of this book when our priest read from it during Mass. I loved the reading and it prompted me to ask him about the book; thus, I bought a copy for myself. I can highly recommend this book as a lovely set of prayers, diverse in their content and origins. I especially love the readings and prayers for the animals. Dostoyevsky has a particularly beautiful prayer in here for the animals and all creation. A book like this teaches us to be kindler and gentler in a society that isn't always that way. Highly recommended reading.
Toward a Deeper, Richer Prayer Experience
If you are among the half of Americans under 30 and the third of Americans over 70 purported to believe that the best religion is one that borrows from all religions, this is your prayer book. And even if you don't fit that description but long for more meaningful prayers or find yourself in interfaith gatherings calling for prayer, you will value this a useful resource. The author opens with brief descriptions of common prayer practices from lectio divina to walking meditation, and prayerware from beads to cymbals, chimes, and bells. Twelve chapters are devoted to separate types of prayer, such as prayers for the earth and the animals, blessings, litanies and mantras. Each prayer is labeled according to tradition/path (as Catholic/Christian; Interfaith; and Christian Feminism) and accompanied by a brief explanation of its origin and options for use.
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