My introduction to the ancient Arabic myth of djinnis was a case of cultural malpractice to say the least, with a hefty dose of patriarchy and misogyny on the side, for I am old enough to have watched “I Dream Of Jeannie,” a 1960’s television sitcom that was all belly-dancing subservience and moonshot. The only thing authentic was the chaos caused by the magic.
You get closer to the mark reading “The Arabian Nights,” or perhaps Salman Rushdie’s modern re-telling, “Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights,” which amounts to, of course, one thousand and one. It is in that classic set of tales that you find such well known and oft filmed stories as Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, the Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor, and the best known of the djinni tales, the story of Aladdin and his Magic Lamp. For younger generations, this is what a djinni is, this blue shapeshifter, whether animated and voiced by the late Robin Williams, or digitized and played by Will Smith.
The thing with supernatural creatures is that while they have rules, they are also wily. You’ve got three wishes, but like real life, you’d best be careful what you wish for. And don’t try to wish for more wishes, ’cause Djinni don’t play that…
As most often told, the story of Aladdin and the Djinni that lives in his magic lamp is a morality tale, meant to teach us a lesson about what is really important in life, versus all of the things we try to tell ourselves are important, but maybe aren’t. In the world according to Disney, love and character are the important things, not wealth and flash. Character is worth more than a gold-plated commode.
We have something a bit like this going on in today’s reading. God is going to grant King Solomon one wish. What should an Ancient Near Eastern king at the dawn of what we now call the Iron Age want? As noted in scripture, one might wish for a long life, or possibly great wealth. Given the precarious physical location of the short-lived united Davidic kingdom, halfway between two great river valleys that could sustain large expansionist empires with large armies, there is a compelling argument to be made for requesting a huge army of his own or at least an impenetrable border. But that is not Solomon’s wish.
Solomon does not ask for something for himself. He asks for wisdom, which reveals a little bit of a paradox, for in requesting wisdom, the king revealed that he was already wise.
This is sort of how I think about prayer. Now, I’m not going to go down the dark theological alley that asks why some prayers get answered and others don’t. All that can come of that sort of thing is a spiritual mugging, and besides, it is fine if you personally choose to believe in a God who grants wishes in an arbitrary and capricious way or based on some super double-secret plan, but I don’t. Not that I deny the existence of miracles. I just think they happen a million times a day, big and small, hard-coded into creation itself. Sometimes the only answer to the question is “God,” even if we don’t really know the question itself.
No, I think prayer works sort of like Solomon asking God to make him a wise king precisely because I believe prayer is a sort of kenosis, a Greek term for self-emptying. It is admitting our lack of control, what the great German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher referred to as our “utter dependence” from wence we come, the divine mystery we name as God. Prayer is letting go of our need for control, and our need for control is based on our fear, which is our original sin. Prayer is by its very nature a confession, a moment of un-sin.
And while there are times when we are at the end of our rope, when we come before God in abject spiritual poverty, I believe we are at our best when we are praying for others, not ourselves. For everything we learn from the Hebrew prophetic tradition, everything we learn from the life and teachings of Jesus, is about the not-self, the other, the vulnerable and the helpless.
I don’t necessarily know what prayer does, though I suspect it has more to do with re-wiring our own selves, re-configuring the ways we are entangled in a mysterious and miraculous universe, than somehow cajoling God into doing things our way. Or maybe it is just about getting out of the way, getting our plans out of the way, getting our hubris out of the way, to let God happen. If you know how to fix it and have the ability to fix it, why are you praying? Get to work.
If, in one way, prayer is a confession, a confession of our powerlessness, a confession that we are not in control, it is also very much, in another way, a connection, a spiritual wrecking ball tearing down the illusory walls we have built between ourselves and God, between ourselves and Creation, between ourselves and one another.
What will you ask of God? What do you ask of God? How can you be transformed by prayer?
Wisdom? Less “me” and more “we”? A transcendent self that gets lost in prayer and music and art and love?
Of course, it isn’t all asking. Anne Lamott wrote an entire small book that says there are really three great prayers, help, thanks, and wow. I try to always structure my prayers with a thanks before a help, but I could do with a lot more wow. And there is wow-worthy stuff all around us all the time, in the garden, on the news, in the sky.
Less “me”, more “we”, more “wow”… now. May I have the wisdom to know, as the psalmist sings, that this is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.
Amen.