Tag Archives: prayer

by

Thanksgiving

5 By awesome deeds in righteousness You will answer us,
O God of our salvation,
You who are the confidence of all the ends of the earth,
And of the far-off seas;
6 Who established the mountains by His strength,
Being clothed with power;
7 You who still the noise of the seas,
The noise of their waves,
And the tumult of the peoples.
8 They also who dwell in the farthest parts are afraid of Your signs;
You make the outgoings of the morning and evening rejoice.

9 You visit the earth and water it,
You greatly enrich it;
The river of God is full of water;
You provide their grain,
For so You have prepared it.
10 You water its ridges abundantly,
You settle its furrows;
You make it soft with showers,
You bless its growth.

11 You crown the year with Your goodness,
And Your paths drip with abundance.
12 They drop on the pastures of the wilderness,
And the little hills rejoice on every side.
13 The pastures are clothed with flocks;
The valleys also are covered with grain;
They shout for joy, they also sing.

–From Psalm 65

by

Sacred Reading

bookofhours

If someone had mentioned “sacred reading” to me before this week, I would have assumed they meant a literary genre — a category of books focused on sacred topics.

But since delving into Thomas Merton’s Book of Hours, I’ve come to a different understanding. Or maybe it’s that Kathleen Deignan’s use of the term in her introduction to Thomas Merton’s thought supplies the label for something I’ve known in a groping, incompletely conceived way — something both my “25 Reasons to Read” page and my blog tagline by Muriel Rukeyser gesture toward, but don’t fully capture. I wanted to quote some passages from Deignan’s explanation of sacred reading, passages I’m sure to be musing over for some time to come.

Merton wrote that “the pleasure of reading and writing poetry… ‘helps me Godward’.” Deignan explains,

Extraordinary literary artist that he was, Thomas Merton had a remarkable capacity for lectio divina – sacred reading, or reading a text in a sacred way. Practiced by all religious traditions that prize their scriptures, the art of lectio divina is the very foundation of our experience of worship and its reverberation in the silence of contemplative life. But the scope of lectio is wide and deep, because the nature of the word is the same. Merton knew well that the Word of God is not only being uttered in the sacred scriptures, but more primordially in creation, more existentially in history, more imaginatively in works of art, more immediately and personally in human experience. Because he understood the dimensionality of the Word of God he understood how to read it in all its myriad forms…

How necessary, then, to learn to read the revelatory texts of scripture, sunsets, heartbreaks, aesthetic works, benedictions and catastrophe, prose and prophecy, and all the other miraculous and perplexing “words of God” endlessly being storied forth for our deep reading. They all invite our skillful practice of the Christian art lectio divina, one of the primary modalities of Christian transformation that brings us, in both our waking and our dreaming, to the wellsprings of contemplation, the ground of the life of praise.

I wouldn’t pretend to really grasp all that I read in this little book. It gathers excerpts of Thomas Merton’s writing and arranges them as prayers at dawn, midday, dusk and evening. There are seven days worth of prayers, and I can imagine returning to this book many times.

The main purpose of a book of hours is to remind us to simply stop, to swerve out of the noise of life for a few moments at regular intervals during the day and to reorient — to aim our souls toward God. Probably the most revelatory thing about the book for me is that it showed me how difficult this is for me to do. I’ve long valued my morning time with the Lord, but to find four times during the day — even brief ones — during which I can stand aside and compose myself before him is very, very difficult.

“But we’re supposed to pray without ceasing,” I can imagine someone saying. “Can’t we shoot up prayers in the midst of living all day long? Why should we have to pull the car over and stop for a few minutes?” Well, sure. I’m an expert at such toss-ups. But all I can say is that we’re creatures of body as well as of soul, and if I make my body stop and kneel, or go “into the closet and close the door” (as Jesus put it), my mind and heart are more likely to follow.

There are some aspects of the contemplative life that I relate to, and some that I don’t understand. But I appreciated having this book on hand. This, combined with Os Guinness’ Prophetic Untimeliness, has made me very aware of the noise level of life and of the church. One of these days I’ll have a post ready on it.

by

Praying for Strangers

There are so many ways a book like this could go wrong. It could be super-saccharine. It could be self-righteous, or narcissistic, or overly introspective. It could be pushy. But in telling the story of a year in her life — the year her two sons were sent to Iraq and Afghanistan, and she made a New Year’s resolution to pray for a stranger every day — author River Jordan walks the path of authenticity, earns my liking and my trust, and inspires me.

Praying for Strangers introduces us to the people Ms. Jordan met in the course of her journey, giving us a glimpse of their stories and describing their reactions when she let them know she was praying for them. More than a call to prayer, she felt also a call to boldness in letting each day’s stranger know that they stood out to her in some way and she would be thinking of them and praying for them. Their reactions were almost always positive. With respect for them, Ms. Jordan shares some of their struggles and reflects on the ways her experience of meeting and praying for each one challenges and humbles her.

Occasionally as I go about my business, a face stands out to me and I pray for the person — the beleaguered mother with the cart full of children in the checkout, the grim-faced librarian coughing into her sleeve, the person lost in thought and sipping tea by the window at Barnes & Noble. But to approach them and introduce myself and tell them? To ask their name and whether there’s anything I can be praying for? That would be new territory, to say the least.

It was new territory for River Jordan, too. I found myself relating to some of the people she prayed for. But most of all I found myself relating to her. She is no more a spiritual superhero than I am, and she is not a natural extrovert either. Yet she manages to step out of herself into a new kind of compassion, and the experience yields rich insights into herself, humanity, and prayer in general. Prayer, she muses at one point, “is perhaps one of the greatest human connectors in this world. A chain that runs from one carbon life-form to another, an unseen force that makes a strong vertical leap into the mysteries of the unknown. The place where they might be captured, opened, and answered.”

If I have any reservation at all about the book, it’s that at times, Ms. Jordan’s tone can take on a bit of a New-Age, humanistic tone. There is no attempt to anchor her comments on prayer to a biblical context. But this didn’t lessen the book’s power for me. I feel a little bit like I do when I read Frederick Buechner: “Is this author believing something different than I do, or just shunning the usual language and cliches? Is he tentative because he’s on the fence, or is he just more careful with his semantics than others?” Ultimately, I guess it’s obvious that I concluded we’re on the same page in the substance of our faith. Some of the tentativeness I sensed actually makes the important point that you don’t have to have to be SuperChristian, you don’t have to have all the answers, in order to step out of your comfort zone and care about others.

All of us meet people in need, all of us want to help, but we don’t have great human or material resources at our beck and call. This book reminds us of what we can do for one another by appealing to the good and generous Father of Lights. Reading it has been an encouragement to me, and I’ve found myself looking harder at the people I meet. I’m grateful to Sherry for bringing it to my attention back in April.

There is a book trailer featuring River Jordan talking about Praying for Strangers here.

by

The Love Exchange

There’s more to prayer than petition. Most of us know this. But how good are we at cultivating the other elements of prayer? How persistent? How comfortable?

Twice lately, I’ve read of the importance of adoration in a daily time with God. The first source is Andrew Murray’s Deeper Christian Life. The second is Margaret Therkelsen’s Love Exchange: An Adventure in Prayer. It was published in 1990, and I read it back then; in recent weeks I’ve read it again. It’s not a scholarly book, but a personal one describing its author’s prayer journey and sharing one of her central practices.

The love exchange described here starts as a daily pattern: spend some time expressing your love for God, and then spend an equal amount of time affirming his love for you by faith through meditation on Scripture passages. “When we first begin this spiritual exercise it is shocking to see how little we love him,” Therkelsen warns. But keep at it. Love grows as it’s repeatedly affirmed, and so does our receptiveness to God’s love.

What starts as a daily practice becomes an avenue to what some have called holiness: a closer walk with God, a deeper flow of the Holy Spirit, a lifting of the self into God’s self-denying love for others, an increased sensitivity and power to intercede.

Margaret Therkelsen was my piano teacher in college. As a freshman I majored in music, and as a sophomore I continued to study piano with her. But even then she was in the midst of a change of direction, from piano performance to counseling and ministry in the area of prayer. As a visiting high school senior, I remember being deeply impressed as this tall, striking woman with such keen eyes and such a charismatic personality listened to me play. She taught me a lot at the keyboard, but it turned out that her main contribution to my life over the next few years wasn’t musical. I didn’t end up pursuing a career in music, but I did benefit from many conversations with her during those two rather turbulent years, conversations rich with wisdom and full of the assurance that God cared about me.

Reopening this book has brought her voice back to me in a poignant way. But it also challenges me and inspires me in my prayer life, particularly in the art of intercession. We may tend to think of intercessory prayer as exclusively verbal: someone expresses a need, someone else describes the need to God and asks him to do so-and-so. But intercession includes more than this, too — more work for the soul to do, and something other than advising God. How else could Daniel be in prayer for so long in the Old Testament? Or Elijah? Or [fill in name here]?

Charles Williams’ Descent into Hell brought up the idea of substitution — taking someone else’s worries or burdens off their shoulders, and carrying them in their stead. It was in a fictional setting, but this to me is a picture of intercession, and The Love Exchange suggests a similar vision. In John 14, Jesus says that whatever we ask in his name we will receive, but what does it mean to ask “in his name”? This book got me thinking about how crucial it is to abide in, and to intercede from within, his love — ours for him, his for us, his for the world and for the person for whom we pray. This is one result as we mature in our grasp of “how wide and long and high and deep is the love of God.”

I appreciated this book because it gave me a glimpse of the vistas of prayer that remain to be discovered. I’m not very far along the path, but this book sheds some light on the territories ahead.

by

The Way of a Pilgrim

What does it mean to pray without ceasing?

No, really. Specifically. In practice.

How do you pray without ceasing? Do you discuss every little decision you face during the day? Do you give God status updates every minute? Do you shut yourself away from human society altogether, and interact only with God?

This Orthodox classic puts forth a different way, one that rang strangely in my evangelical ears, but which inspires a whole new conception of what continuous prayer means.

The Way of a Pilgrim is written by a narrator whose name we never learn, walking through Russia and Siberia with a knapsack containing his Bible, dry bread, and the Philokalia. The manuscript was preserved by a monk and was first published in 1884. The pilgrim wants to understand how the unceasing prayer recommended in Scripture is possible. Early on, he meets a “starets,” or spiritual father, who explains to him the “Jesus prayer”: “Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me.”  The starets assigns him to say the prayer, mantra-like, 3,000 times a day. Then 6,000 times. Then 12,000 times. Then without limit.

This is a very different conception of prayer than I’m used to, one that doesn’t center around communicating with God about ideas, events, people or interior states. Eventually it becomes merely a habit, something most evangelicals (and Americans in general) would shun because it’s so not about inventing something fresh and individual. But this pilgrim experiences deep results spiritually.

I should point out that he practices the types of prayer more familiar to me as well, as when he recommends to a maiden fleeing an unwanted marriage that she would be better off praying earnestly for God to change her circumstances than running away. This isn’t a rejection of more… cognizant? conscious?… prayer. But it is an introduction of another kind, one that becomes a training of body, mind and heart. Eventually, the pilgrim speaks of his amazement that he can live with two consciousnesses, one continually in prayer, the other conducting the business of daily life.

One thing that initially bothered me was the pilgrim’s desire to be alone. The Great Commission being what it is, I think that even those of us with a monastic impulse to retreat into solitude need to challenge that by living our faith in community. But this didn’t end up bothering me for long, because this pilgrim is given many opportunities to interact and minister among people, despite the transient nature of his relationships.

I’m still processing the book in my thoughts. There are several things I appreciate and feel challenged by. One is the concreteness of its interpretation of unceasing prayer. Is it really possible to keep one part of your mind in prayer at all times — not just frequently, but continually? When I think about it, it seems quite likely that it is possible. I seldom give my whole mind to anything. There are always several lines of mental activity going on, for all of us — an amazing human capacity that our technologies can exploit with destructive results, turning our God-given complexity into mere distractibility.

Another thing I like about this book is its insistence on the primacy of prayer — a theme being developed in our church these days as we seek to become a “house of prayer,” and an exhortation that I always need to hear. There is a sequel to this book, The Pilgrim Continues His Way, which I will probably read as well. But I’m going to close this review with one example of the pilgrim’s words on prayer. The book is filled with gems, but this is one of my favorite passages:

My late starets of blessed memory also used to say that the forces which are against prayer in the heart attack us from two sides, from the left hand and from the right. That is to say, if the enemy cannot turn us from prayer by means of vain thoughts and sinful ideas, then he brings back into our minds good things we have been taught, and fills us with beautiful ideas, so that one way or another he may lure us away from prayer, which is a thing he cannot bear. It is called ‘a theft from the right-hand side,’ and in it the soul, putting aside its converse with God, turns to the satisfaction of converse with self or with created things. He taught me, therefore, not to admit during times of prayer even the most lofty of spiritual thoughts. And if I saw that in the course of the day, time had been spent more in improving thought and talk than in the actual hidden prayer of the heart, then I was to think of it as a loss of the sense of proportion, or a sign of spiritual greed. This is above all true, he said, in the case of beginners, for whom it is most needful that time given to prayer should be very much more than that taken up by other sides of the devout life.