FALLING DOWN

I had a dear friend who once described her prayer life as spending some good time on her face. It struck me as a strange image at the time because I was unfamiliar with the ancient devotion of making prostrations. This very well-established practice, though, has a rich purpose and place in the Church’s life of prayer, and is worthy of our consideration for a moment.

I must confess: I am bad at making prostrations. I remember the first time I practiced praying this way. I was in the prayer chapel as an undergraduate at Biola. Stretched out, face down on the carpet, I mostly remember thinking how scared I was of someone else walking in and seeing me and thinking I was weird. In all the times since, I have to admit that this anxiety has never fully departed from me. In the liturgical moments that require it, I still feel the resistance in my body to conform to the ground, to sink into it. I tense up, and so there is an almost humorous antagonism between my form and the earth.

Part of this difficulty is a matter of culture. I was raised as a Western Christian in an evangelical setting. The proper postures of prayer were standing (with arms raised if you were really pious but only during a moving worship set), sitting (where we spent most of our time in church) and kneeling (very rare and usually only at a ‘cry night’ or the emotional crescendo of a youth camp). I remember, though, walking awkwardly into an Orthodox church in St. Petersburg and seeing an old woman near the iconostasis. She was praying with her rope, and then calmly knelt and then prostrated. Her movements were fluid and obviously practiced. I knew what I was seeing, but I was confused by not having seen it before. As I learned more, it surprised me that this was pretty much normal in Christian practice, not just historically but also in contemporary settings. My comfort with and expectation for sitting in church was much more the exception than the rule.

In time, I realized I needed to learn how to pray with my body--and had spent most of my upbringing praying with my mind. As I moved closer to the sacramental traditions, I grew increasingly convicted of how disembodied my practice of the Faith had become. Learning to make the sign of the cross, to bow, genuflect, kneel, and eventually prostrate...these emerged for me as anchoring practices during what I now understand was a massive reorientation of my imagination of the Church. They were not disconnected gestures, but inextricably linked to the incarnational nature of the Body of Christ. They were not a kind of secret handshake for the initiated; they were how we formed in loving God with all of ourselves. They were a return to a necessary realism when it came to worship.

Gestures and postures, though, still seem to encounter great skepticism in American Christianity. I’m a bit surprised, considering how many people I know who are dubious of traditionally Christian movements while at the same time welcoming the practice of Tai Chi and yoga. Perhaps it is a matter of expecting to find unfamiliar practices among unfamiliar cultures, whereas it might be unsettling to find that Christians have been doing this for centuries and for a reason that is distinctly Christian. Like yoga, Christians have always engaged the body as a means of formation. But unlike yoga, Christians have done so with respect to a specific person. 

Traditional postures and gestures assume, very literally, that there is a divine person before us to whom we present ourselves, souls and bodies. We do not seek to be absorbed into an impersonal force or primal energy. We answer the call to stand (or kneel or bow) before God and to live like we really believe we’re standing before Him. In the liturgy as we worship together, this is scripted for us as a way of teaching us what is really present among us. That’s why we genuflect--because Jesus is actually in the room with us, and when you come before the King, you bend the knee or bow profoundly. His presence is not a metaphor or a symbol, and neither are the ways we respond to his presence. He comes among us--we’re at the very least a bit rude not to acknowledge this.

I believe, though, there’s a deeper reason I don’t feel easy about kneeling or prostrating. I am persuaded that one of the causes for my anxiety over being on my face is that I have an aversion to falling down. Like sitting in traffic, waiting a few minutes for a reservation, or, heaven help me, languishing at the DMV--falling down represents to me an interruption, a rude impediment to my getting things done. ‘I have things to be doing,’ I say, ‘how annoying to have been tripped up!’ I strongly suspect this is a problem in me because even when I enter the sanctuary of the church--God help me--I sometimes find it tedious to genuflect as I try to go about my work. Falling down reminds me that, more often than I’d like to admit, I am not in control. Falling down is a reminder that my intentions and works are liable to be disrupted by Another. That shakes my sense of self-confidence and chastens my ego.

Falling calls me back to reality. As a priest, it is a reminder that, like the Apostles, I do not go my way. But as a man, fundamentally, it is a reminder that I am going to die. I will return to the dust of the ground and each time I get dusty while kneeling or prostrating, I am reminded of my dustiness. I am scared and angry about the thought of having an end. Prostrations, I suspect, will always have a twinge of this reaction, but I don’t believe it will always be as difficult, because there is something at work in me that resists my resistance, that calls me through my falling down to the One before whom I fall. This is humility--rooted in the word ‘humus’ or soil. Humility embraces the soil, embraces that God raised us up from the earth in Creation and He will surely do so again in the Resurrection. 

Revelation tells us that falling down is a kind of destination, a skill demonstrated by the master worshippers around the throne. As St. John records: “And whenever the living creatures give glory, honor, and thanks to the One seated on the throne who lives forever and ever, twenty-four elders fall down before the One seated on the throne, and they worship Him who lives forever and ever, They cast their crowns before the throne, saying,’Worthy are You, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for You created all things; by Your will they exist and came to be.’” Falling down is not an interruption to life--it is the thing itself, essential to the most important work a Christian can do. And if that’s true, then it’s probably time to start practicing. 

As Jesus said: “Whoever exalts himself will be humbled. But whoever humbles himself will be exalted.”