Lord’s Prayer

Review: The Way of Perfection

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The Way of Perfection, St. Teresa of Avila, Foreword by Paula Huston, Translated by Henry L Carrigan, Jr. Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2009.

Summary: St Theresa’s reflections on growing in love, humility, and the life of prayer.

About a year ago, I reviewed a different, out of print, edition of this work from the same publisher. The folks at Paraclete were so generous that they sent me their “in print” edition of the same work, published for the 500th anniversary of the writing of this work. In addition to a foreword by Paula Huston reflecting on her own encounter with this work, the translation is one into contemporary English, with instances where the translator changed sentences in the passive voice to active. In reading this edition, I felt like Theresa was speaking directly to me.

The Way of Perfection breaks down into two parts. The first focuses on the spiritual life and how one of those in the Carmelites might progress in becoming like Christ. She explains the benefits of poverty, the importance of unceasing prayer and the necessity that women love each other equally without favoritism, which can wreck the harmony of a house. She instructs on detachment from all earthly affections to focus on the love of God. This includes gifts from family. She addresses answering unjust accusations:

“No one can ever blame us unjustly, since we are always full of faults, and a just person falls seven times a day. It would be a falsehood to say that we have no sin. Even if we are not guilty of the thing we are accused of, then, we are never entirely without blame in the way that our good Jesus was” (p. 57).

She devotes several chapters to mental and vocal prayer and contemplation. She urges people to pray as they are able and that the Lord is as pleased with our vocal prayers as our silent mental praying. She stresses that the state of contemplation, resting in the Lord, is a gift that may come equally to those praying vocally or mentally.

The second part turns to the great vocal prayer of the church, the Our Father. Theresa takes us through the prayer phrase by phrase, mining its richness. She marvels how much Jesus gives us in the first words, “Our Father.” She reflects on the significance of “hallowed be thy name” and “thy kingdom come” side by side, that the presence of God’s good rule on earth reminds us of the holiness of his name. She acknowledges the challenge of yielding our will to God. She tends to spiritualize the idea of daily bread, focusing on the bread of Christ. Perhaps it is well that our need for daily physical bread be a reminder of the need to be daily nourished in Christ. She emphasizes the underlying love of each other behind the prayer to be forgiven as we forgive. “Lead us not into temptation” is not a shrinking from spiritual conflict but our awareness of our vulnerabilities to temptation and the protection of God.

I’ve but touched on the richness to be found in these pages. It certainly did not hurt me to read The Way of Perfection again. I suspect that multiple readings are warranted because, in each reading, we are different people and will hear different things.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: The Lord’s Prayer: For All God’s Children

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The Lord’s Prayer: For All God’s Children (A FatCat Book), Art by Natasha Kennedy, Text by Harold L. Senkbeil. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2022.

Summary: A lavishly illustrated book designed for parents to use with children in teaching them the meaning of the Lord’s prayer and praying together in family worship.

One of the things I love about this book out of the gate is that is designed for parents to use in introducing their children to the Lord’s Prayer, walking phrase by phrase through the prayer. I suspect that as parents do so with their children–perhaps no more than a phrase a day because the reflections are rich–the parents will learn as well. How many of us have reflected on the meaning of the Lord’s Prayer?

Here’s part of the reflection on “Thy Kingdom Come”:

"Lord teach us to pray.
Your kingdom come.

Can we make God's kingdom come? No!
His kingdom comes all by itself.

Where is God's kingdom?
Wherever Jesus is, there he rules as King.
He brings us life and forgiveness, peace and salvation.
That's why we pray for God's kingdom to come."

The book is lavishly illustrated in a rich palette of color showing Jesus in a variety of settings, each connected in some way with the phrase of the Lord’s Prayer being read about. Here is an example from the publisher’s website of the “Thy Kingdom Come” pages:

One of the features I noticed is that Jesus is dark-skinned, not the fair-haired blonde Jesus many of us grew up with. Also, there are people with a variety of skin colors and features, fitting with the title of this prayer being for all God’s children.

You may also notice FatCat, who appears on every page. Children will love looking for FatCat, who visually represents an important idea in this book–the “fatness” of the catechism–that it is full of meaning. This book, and others in the FatCat series are intended to teach in an approachable manner about central texts of the faith–the Apostles Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer.

The book builds on this idea in a discussion titled “Families are little churches” that follows the Lord’s Prayer. These book reflect the conviction that the family is where instruction (“catechesis”) has happened throughout church history and that this can be as praying what we believe together a families. A simple family prayer service that may be read responsively follows in the text.

The author concludes by sharing scripture texts that informed and bounded both text and illustrations for each phrase. It was clear in reading this book that great care was given to say both what this prayer does and does not mean and what we may learn both of Jesus who teaches the prayer and the Father to whom it is addressed.

This book is a gift to parents who want to actively take part in teaching their children about the faith. The combination of the beautiful illustrations, FatCat who roams the pages, the biblically grounded reflections, and helps in translating teaching into family worship make this a rich resource packed into just 32 pages.

Tomorrow I will be reviewing another book in this series, The King of Christmas.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: The Last Things

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the last things

The Last Things (Contours of Christian Theology), David A. Höhne. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2019.

Summary: A theology of the last things that is Trinitarian in focus, centered on the exaltation of the crucified Lord, and the preservation of the believer.

There are many books about the last things or the end times. This work takes a different approach. The author contends that the Lord’s prayer is an eschatological prayer, that the focus of each of its petitions is the full realization of the kingdom of God in the person of the crucified and risen Lord through the work of the Holy Spirit. This includes the preservation, purifying, and protection of those whose hope is in the crucified and risen Lord.

The book is written for those (all who have ever believed in Christ), are living in the Middle. It is both about what God has promised us for the future but how this is already being fulfilled in our lives. It concerns how God has already established a relationship and a people, and how we will one day be perfected.

The chapters focus around each of the petitions in the Lord’s prayer. At the same time, he discusses these through the lens of interacting with Karl Barth’s theology of the Word and Jurgen Moltman’s theology of hope. The first three petitions for the hallowing of the name, the coming of the kingdom, and the doing of God’s will on earth as in heaven are the what, how, and why of God the Father’s purposes through the Son in the Spirit. The prayers for daily bread, for forgiveness, and for deliverance focus around what we need to make it to the resurrection, and our eternal glory with Christ.

I found this the hardest “read” in the series. I think this has to do with the author’s engagement with Barth and Moltmann throughout, and a conscious effort to emphasize the work of the persons of the Trinity throughout. The introduction to the series speaks of making this accessible to educated laypeople. The author appears to assume a familiarity with Barth and Moltmann that may be true of seminarians, but probably only a minority of others. I founded the presentation stronger where the author connected themes in the Lord prayer to the rest of scripture, establishing the eschatological “arc” of this prayer.

I had looked forward to the completion of this series, this “last” volume of which had been long-awaited. While there were elements I appreciated, particularly the structuring of the work around a prayer many of us pray daily or weekly. But I had hoped for more in a series that had set a high standard of theological reflection accessible to the educated layperson. What the book did make clear is that we will not be disappointed by the God who keeps all his promises both for the exaltation of the crucified and risen Lord, and the resurrection hope of we, his people.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

The Power of a Blessing

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Sometimes you get surprised by the familiar thing that you suddenly see in a different light. The word “blessing” gets tossed around a good bit and, I have to admit that when I hear people talking about blessings, I just hear, “yada, yada, yada.” That is until the other day when a speaker made me take a fresh look at the powerful impact of spoken blessings.

The speaker was R. Scott Osborne who has written The Book of Blessings. His website offers the book in .pdf form for free and also has a link to the App Store for “The App of Blessings.” He shared with us how he got into this as he observed some of the blessings that surround Jewish sabbath observance. He adopted some of this in his own home in a Christian version of this practice, and then began each week to find a blessing in scripture that he would pray for each of his daughters. As these accumulated in a journal, he felt God speaking to him that he needed to research this. Out of this came the conviction, in his words, “When we speak blessings from the Bible, we are literally imparting God’s blessing. The Lord has given us this authority along with the freedom to use it” (from the website). The idea is that when we speak these blessings, we act on God’s behalf. God is the one who blesses but we become instruments of blessing as we speak these words.

At first glance, I’m tempted to think there is something a bit formulaic or superstitious in such things. Yet as I reflect further, it occurs to me that this actually squares with what I believe happens each Sunday when we read the scriptures aloud publicly in worship. In some churches, the congregation will stand as the reader comes into their midst with the gospel. And when this is done, it is not just to read a text, but the belief is that in a fresh way, God is present in the midst of his people speaking to them through this word, written and spoken. In some contexts, this is spoken of as a “performative speech act”, that which when spoken brings into present reality the thing spoken of.

Isn’t this what, in a habitual and not often thought about way, we do when we say “God bless you” when someone sneezes? We are actually praying (or at least wishing) good health for the person whose sneeze may mean the onset of a cold or worse. And isn’t this (if you participate in such things) what we are doing when we pray the Lord’s prayer, or other prayers of the Bible in our circumstances, or even for a particular person. Someone once said in effect that the best way to know we are praying what God wants for a person is to pray the prayers we believe God inspired.

During Scott’s talk he shared this “model blessing” from the book of Numbers:

May the Lord bless you and keep you; may the Lord make His face shine upon you, and be gracious to you; may the Lord lift up His countenance upon you, and give you peace. (Num 6:24-26, NKJV)

While I’ve heard this many times, for some reason, when Scott spoke this, I remembered something I’ve not thought of for a long time. This is the blessing my dad spoke over me each night when as a child I said my prayers before bed. Remembering this alone was a blessing. I remember not only the love I felt from my dad but also the deep comfort as I snuggled in bed and thought about the fact that God would keep me through the night, that his face shone with approval upon me as his child, that he looked toward me and gave me his peace. Like many children I had night fears at times, and as I recalled, this was one of the things that banished them.

I can’t help wondering if there was more to it than that. I feel that I’ve lived a blessed life in so many ways and often in my work and, even in pastimes like singing, or writing, or even working in the yard have a sense of God’s pleasure upon my life. I don’t think there is anything special about me in this but rather wonder if in fact my father in these blessings was an instrument of the blessing and protection of God in my life. I know in fact that this was true in many lives he touched and remember even in his last years that there was a particular patient in the assisted living unit where he lived with whom he would pray regularly.

I’ve sometimes spoken of the idea of “blessed to be a blessing”. Often I think of this in terms of my actions, but I am also challenged to wonder if the practice of praying and speaking blessings on those I care for is something I’ve overlooked.

I wonder if any of my readers have stories of receiving or giving blessings, whether in a Christian context or not. I would love for you to add your story of blessing to mine.