prayer

Review: Answering God

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Cover image for "Answering God" by Eugene H. Peterson

Answering God

Answering God, Eugene H. Peterson. Harper One (ISBN: 9780060665128) 1991.

Summary: Contends that the Psalms, explored here, are necessary instruction in prayer, understood as answering the God who addresses us.

It is not uncommon, when the questioned “How do I pray?” to say something like, “Just talk to God, expressing honestly what is on your heart.” Eugene H. Peterson, while not saying this is wrong, believes there is a lot more to prayer and praying. First of all, he proposes that praying is a tool. He believes that it is at the center of our being human. More than that, he proposes that prayer is a tool by which God works his will in us and by which we collaborate with that work. For Peterson, the Psalms are our necessary toolbox to train us in how to pray. So it has been throughout church history.

Peterson makes one more startling claim. We think prayer is about talking to God. Rather, he believes the Psalms are about answering God. Instead of our seeking God, God comes to us and speaks amidst our sin, our despair, or even our gratitude. The Psalms coach us in answering God, leading us into true conversation with God.

Before taking us through several Psalms that answer God in various ways, Peterson addresses some basic realities about the Psalms. They are not only texts, they are prayers written as poetry. As such, they take us into the depths of both God and ourselves, giving voice to the inchoate. They are not primarily about understanding ourselves. Rather, they are about addressing the one God who has everything to do with our lives. Furthermore, they are embedded in a canon of sixty-six books, part of a larger story of the People of God. Finally, although we often pray on our own, these are prayers of a community. When we pray these, we are praying with others, across the world and across the centuries.

Peterson begins at the beginning, with the “pre-prayers” of Psalms 1 and 2. Psalm 1 emphasizes meditation on Torah as the roots of our life, our prayers. Psalm 2 then leads us into adoration of the Lord and his Anointed, his Messiah, contrasted with the rulers of this world. Then as he unfolds Psalm 3, Peterson focuses on language. He contends language takes three forms, I being the language of intimacy and relationship, II the language of information, and III, the language of motivation. The Psalms are about Language I. Psalm 3 illustrates this with its cry against enemies, its expression of trust, its cry for salvation. No abstractions here but rather the language of urgent and intimate relationship.

In the following chapter, Peterson reminds us of how Psalms are set in a story–the David story, the bigger story of Israel, and ultimately a story of which we are a part. Both poetry and life have rhythms. Peterson observes for us the rhythms of evening and morning in Psalms 4 and 5. Psalm 4 begins the day in the evening and our rest in God’s care, followed by Psalm 5, with our rising in the morning to God’s work for us in the day. Then Peterson jumps to Psalm 18, observing how God teaches us to pray by metaphor. God is strength, rock, fortress, deliverer, shield, horn, and stronghold. Prayer is not gnostic. God is described but not idolized in material terms, not in spiritual abstractions.

As noted earlier, the Psalms imply a praying community. Peterson notes the liturgical notations in many Psalms. When we pray in community, we recognize that the one who summoned us is in charge. The Psalms are liturgy, but this hardly means bland as we speak the sharp-edged expressions of desperation, repentance, longing, and wonder. Then Peterson turns to the most sharp-edged psalm many of us would excise if we could, Psalm 137, with its dashing of little ones against rocks. The focus is on enemies, and Peterson argues we need to pray our hatred of our enemies before we get to the place of loving them. So this is a Psalm we desperately need.

The Psalms are about memory. We remember our creation, our implication in sin, the country of salvation. Hence, the Psalms give coherence to the disparate aspects of our lives. Finally, the Psalms end in an effusion of praise. We are thus reminded that the end of prayer, the end of life, and indeed, our destiny is the praise of God.

Thus, Peterson sums up the Psalms in ten words: Text, Way, Language, Story, Rhythm, Metaphor, Liturgy, Enemies, Memory, and End. I found that in the concision of these words and the chapters a clear scaffold on which to hang my praying of the Psalms. Peterson not only makes sense of the Psalms without a psalm-by-psalm commentary. He also gives us a primer on Christian prayer, both its purpose, and our primary instructional text. And in introducing the Psalms as the church’s prayer book, he invites us to rise from our merely personal and often idiosyncratic prayers, to pray with both ancient Israel and the church across the centuries.

Review: Prayer Takes Us Home

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Cover image of " Prayer Takes Us Home" by Gerhard Lohfink

Prayer Takes Us Home

Prayer Takes Us Home, Gerhard Lohfink, Translated by Linda M. Maloney. Liturgical Press (ISBN: 9780814688069) 2020.

Summary: What Christians believe about prayer and the various ways Christians pray and experience God in prayer.

Last year, I had the chance to review Gerhard Lohfink’s Why I Believe in God, which I named my Best Religious Memoir of 2025. His warm “theological memoir” filled with love for God motivated me to get my hands on other works of his. This is one of those.

The subtitle of this book states it is on the theology and practice of prayer. Lest you fear a dry disquisition on prayer, let me assure you I found the same personal warm of devotion in these pages as in his memoir. Here was someone who thought deeply both about the One he addressed and who clearly had devoted his life to prayer, aided by the structures of Catholicism.

He writes about Christian prayer, and that must begin with who we address. Rather than some generic “God” we address the Father through the Son and by the help of the Holy Spirit. He reminds us that we stand together in worship before the Living God, able to come face to face. We are helped in our prayers by the deep sighs of the Spirit. We do not pray to three gods, though we may address our prayers to each of the persons of the one Godhead, He encourages us that God is active in the world and that his “saving will and our prayers work together.”

Then he turns to the many forms of prayer. He reminds us of the different forms our every day speech takes and suggests that prayer is no different. He writes about petition, including a defense of asking God for things, praise, and lament. This last is a helpful corrective for “happy-clappy” Christianity. He explores the extensive material on lament in the scriptures.

I love how he introduces the Psalms as our home for all seasons, in joy and when beset by woes. They are our shelter, indeed our home, even as we make our way to Zion. He then gives instruction on meditation. This is not emptying one’s mind, but filling it with our story in scripture, in creeds, and the church’s prayers. For Lohfink, all this prayers us for the Eucharist. While this reflects a Catholic understanding, Lohfink’s discussion of the element of thanksgiving for the gift of God in Christ, manifest in the gifts of bread and cup, lifts us out of ritual into real communion.

The final chapter is characteristic Lohfink, in which he relates his personal history of prayer. His intent is not that we would follow his example. Nor does he want us to cram all the experiences of his life into our prayer practice. Rather, he wants to assure us in our own experience in both times of dryness and unspeakable joy. Here, as throughout, I sensed a brother walking alongside, not a superior speaking to novices.

Although I am not a Catholic Christian, I found much that spoke to my own prayer life. My heart was warmed by the greatness of God described on these pages and the awesome wonder of corporate worship and gathering at the Lord’s table. The chapter on Christian meditation is one of the best I’ve read. His encouragements that God is active and works in and through our prayers is truth I can never hear enough. He reminds me that in prayer, God takes us home.

Review: Not Finished Yet

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Cover image of "Not Finished Yet" by Sharon Garlough Brown, illustrated by Jessica Linn Evans

Not Finished Yet, Sharon Garlough Brown, illustrated by Jessica Linn Evans. IVP Kids (ISBN: 9781514007952) 2024.

Summary: While “painting prayers” with Gran, Wren discovers she can honestly share all her feelings with God.

An old shed behind the farm house was a wonderful place for Gran and Wren. It’s where they painted together. Some of their paintings didn’t look like much. But Gran defended the mess, saying that you finish a painting when you sign your name.

One of the things Gran and Wren like to do was “paint prayers.” For example, a painted squiggle served to say “Dear God.” Wren wanted to paint feeling special. She picked out colors that felt “special.” But when she put paint to canvas, it looked like an ugly dark blob. Instead of special, she felt awful. Gran asked her for a title to express all the feelings in the blob. Finally, she said, “disappointed.”

Gran asks her to think about and paint her disappointments. A lot had to do with how others treated her at school, or when animals died. Then she dares to admit she sometimes God disappoints her. Gran calls her brave to be able to admit that, and if Gran wasn’t disappointed with her, maybe God wasn’t. And so she paints the sad and scary things she wants to say to God.

It ends up that she does feel special. Heard. What she thought and felt mattered to God. And she signed her name. And in Gran’s embrace, Gran talks about how God isn’t finished yet with the scary, broken world and imagines with her the day he signs his name.

Some, who know Brown’s novel Shades of Light will recognize Wren. But even if not, the story stands on its own as a beautiful statement about how we can be honest with God about all our feelings. It even suggests how we might use the arts in giving expression to what is within us. Complementing the text, the illustrations of Jessica Linn Evans take us into the feelings of Wren. Most of all, Sharon Garlough Brown reminds us of what it means to face the sad and scary and lean into the hope that God, too, will someday be done.

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

Review: Kaylee Prays for the Children of the World

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Cover image for "Kaylee Prays for the Children of the World" by Helen Lee, Illustrated by Shin Maeng

Kaylee Prays for the Children of the World, Helen Lee, illustrated by Shin Maeng. IVP Kid (ISBN: 9781514009161) 2025.

Summary: Kaylee and her grandfather learn of needy children in the news and struggle for words to pray.

“God, do you care about this boy?

“God, do you care about all these children in the world?”

“There is so much to pray for!”

How do you pray when it is all jumble and you can’t find the words?

Kaylee and her Korean-American grandfather Halbi read the newspaper at breakfast each morning. When they see a story of a child in need, they cut out the picture and pray for the child and pin the picture to a world map full of pictures.

This morning, Kaylee sees a picture of a boy from Turkey, standing in front of a row of tents, made of blankets. He looks sad, with tears in his eyes. Kaylee wonders if God really cares for him. She looks at their world map and sees so many pictures. Children from North Korea, India, South Sudan and even the United States.

There are so many, Kaylee is not sure how to pray for all the brokenness in the world. She remembers God promises to help when we don’t have words and she prays “Help me, Holy Spirit.” And suddenly the words come as she prays in English, Halbi in Korean, and Keedo, their dog, in his own language (“Keedo” is Korean for “prayer”).

Helen Lee takes the hard questions at the heart of intercessory prayer and offers the quiet hope that God helps and hears that bears fruit in joy and peace. She also offers in this story a wonderful model of learning about and responding prayerfully to the world’s needs. She even introduces us to the Korean practice of tongsung kido, the Korean practice of simultaneous prayer.

In addition, the illustrations by Shin Maeng captures the shifting moods and emotions in this story while visually portraying the world’s children for whom they pray. In short, this briefly told story speaks to the challenges parents and children face as they pray. And it invites us to ask the Holy Spirit’s help to untangle our words and help us pray. It is a story to speak to a child’s heart. It spoke to mine.

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

Review: Being Here

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Being Here: Prayers for Curiosity, Justice, and Love, Pádraig Ó Tuama. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2024.

Summary: A book of essays and prayers, including 31 days of readings and prayers, focused on being in communion with God as we seek to live lovingly and justly in our own places.

Pádraig Ó Tuama is an Irish poet-theologian invited for a writer-in-residence program at the Church of the Heavenly Rest in Manhattan during 2020. The essays, poems, and prayers of this book arose out of the pandemic and ensuing lockdowns of this annus horribilis. The work opens with this prayer that seemed to express the longings of many of us in that year:

     Turning to the light
     the light turns to us.
     Moving toward the source
     the source moves toward us.
     Holding on to hope
     hope holds on to us.

The book opens with asking, “What is Prayer?” and answers “It’s not a passport to heaven. If anything, it’s a way of seeing here, a way, of being here.” After a short essay on the uses of the book, Pádraig Ó Tuama offers a fascinating essay on the Collect, a form he uses through the thirty-one days of prayer to follow. His most succinct summary is:

  1. Address
  2. Say more
  3. Ask one thing
  4. Say more
  5. End

Then he practices that kind of succinctness over the 31 prayers and readings that follow. For each day, there is:

  • Opening Prayer
  • Reading (drawn from literature)
  • Scripture
  • Silence
  • Collect of the Day
  • A Remembering Prayer

The opening prayer and remembering prayer are the same throughout. I found myself centering on different phrases each day. The prayers for generosity, encounter, stories, new beginnings and mutual confession in the opening are gathered up in this wonderful closing: “Because this is a way of living/That’s worth living daily.” Being here. The remembering prayer recalls the glory of our creation as very good as we look about our city and then “pray for our city/and for the cities we are” and that God would breathe renewal into us throughout our days and all their encounters. What a wonderful prayer to pray in the midst of Manhattan or any of our cities! Being here.

Between the opening and remembering prayers were literary and scripture readings, a time for silence, and a collect, often thematically related. For example, from day 18, he pairs Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, with its tale of dying aspirations and the call of Life, with Matthew 20:32, where Jesus asks the question “What do you want me to do for you?” He follows with this collect:

     Questioning Jesus,
     we do not always know what we want.
     Yet what we want
     can drive us
     even when we do not know it.
     Help us find the moments to come in contact
     with those deep drives
     so that we can be moved
     toward what will
     create
     and not destroy.
     Amen.

The thirty one days follow the course of Jesus’s life from genealogy and birth to death and resurrection.

The book concludes with several brief essays and poems including one on the power of stories during the author’s struggle with vertigo amid our collective disorientation of COVID, and one on the spirituality of conflict. There is also a thought-provoking essay on Mary questioning the ways we shroud her with a kind of saccharine piety when her life, and the life she bears, is a form of resistance to Rome. And he offers a wonderful prayer for times after pandemic, asking, “Help us help us/with the time needed for integration;/with the time needed for risk;/with the time for recovery/and honor and trying old things again/and trying new things again, too.”

What Pádraig Ó Tuama brings us in these prayers is an invitation to be present both to Christ and to our lives, and the lives around us. Indeed, this is praying that opens our eyes to the presence of the unseen kingdom in our midst. Being here.

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

Review: Pray This Way To Connect With God

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Pray This Way To Connect With God, Hal Green. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2023.

Summary: A book on learning to pray, focusing on God’s initiative toward us to teach us to pray and prayer as focused on deepening our relationship with God.

“Lord, teach us to pray.” That was the longing expressed by the disciples of Jesus. Hal Green encourages us that the “good news is that God will teach you how to pray” and that the journey begins with “speaking whatever is in your heart,” that we learn to pray by praying, and that we pray as we can and not as we can’t. In a collection of readings, generally a page and a paragraph long. Green leads us into praying.

The readings are divided into eight sections

  1. About Prayer: a number of reflections on the nature of prayer: why, what to pray, how to tell if a word is from God, on distractions, and more.
  2. Breath Prayers: Explained and examples around peace, love, faith, hope, joy, gratitude, forgiveness, etc.
  3. Praying the Scriptures: A single chapter on how to pray scripture.
  4. Hebrew Scriptures: focusing on the Psalms and Prophets.
  5. The New Testament: Numerous passages from Matthew through Revelation
  6. Praying With the Saints. Prayers of the saints from Augustine to Henri Nouwen.
  7. Meditative Prayer: Resting and knowing God’s touch, breath, and gaze.
  8. Contemplative Prayer: The God Hug, Abiding Prayer, The Romance of God and more.

Green advises beginning with the prayers themselves and then going back and reading the “About Prayer.” While each reading is short, to pray the prayer meditatively may take anywhere from five to twenty minutes. This is a book to be taken slowly, taking a day or several days on the prayer in a reading.

Green leads us into prayer that isn’t about getting things from God but about communion with the Triune God of love. He speaks of desire that becomes romance, the love and being loved of lovers, of oneness with God. One senses that for those who experience this, human sexuality is a good but pale shadow of this love. This may be the journey of years. But along the way we learn to pray with scripture, to breathe in God and breathe out what is in our hearts, and to rest contemplatively with God.

There is so much wisdom here, whether it is dealing with the distraction that plagues all our prayers (that’s one of the reasons he encourages praying for five or ten minutes and not fighting oneself) or discerning if we have really heard God’s words (they are generally brief, understated, and concise, yet penetrate to the heart).

I’ve learned the most in prayer by praying along with someone further on the prayer journey, yet such people are rare. Hal Green’s book, the culmination of a fifty year journey and the leading of many prayer retreats offers us a companion who says “pray this way” and helps us to understand as best we humans can, the ways God teaches us and meets us as the lover of our souls.

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

Review: Help Thanks Wow

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Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers, Anne Lamott. New York: Riverhead Books, 2012.

Summary: The author’s account of what it is for her to pray and three types of prayer that, for her, describe what it means to pray.

Anne Lamott hit bottom in her own life, struggling with alcoholism and drug abuse, and out of this came to faith as a Christian. And she began writing about it in her unpretentious, “this is who I am and my best shot at explaining what I’ve come to understand and what God still hasn’t made sense out of.” In this book, she does that with prayer and, along the way, narrating her own experiences in prayer. All of it is free of spiritual jargon, evident in her title summarizing what she thinks are three essential prayers in three words. Help. Thanks. Wow.

Help. Help is the prayer when you hit rock bottom and know that all your efforts to run life or fix someone else’s just aren’t working. It is the prayer when we are mired in broken relationships, debt, or a scary medical diagnosis. It is praying that God will help others facing the same kinds of stuff, or just trying to make it through life. It is the prayer of her grandfather, a missionary. She writes, “if one person is praying for you, buckle up. Things can happen.” (I know this. I had a grandmother who prayed like that for me.). She writes that the beginning place for this kind of prayer is “admitting the three most terrible truths of our existence: that we are so ruined, and so loved, and in charge of so little.” She shares her own “help” prayers and talks about the miracle of when we reach the place where our hearts shift and we surrender, which leads to…

Thanks. For Lamott, this is short form for “thankyouthankyouthankyou.” It can be everything from ten minutes free of obsessive thoughts to a good day of work to a season of good health. Sometimes it is a glimpse of “the beautiful skies, above all the crap we’re wallowing in, and we whisper, ‘Thank you.’ ” Thanks, Lamott proposes flows into our behavior–serving or at least not “being such a jerk.” Serving others is where joy comes, an awareness that God is having a good time watching us do this. Sin in this regard is the hard, ungrateful heart. We can’t change it–we can only give it to God to change. And those moments when grace leads to gratitude reveal the changes God is working. Thanks.

Wow. It’s the gasping response to something of incredible wonder or terror. Sometimes it is the response to climbing between clean sheets that feel so good on us. There are so many wonders for her from dinosaurs to the cosmos to boys to Monopoly and Sylvia Plath. She believes “spring is the main reason for Wow.” It is the extravagance of a God who “keeps giving, forgiving, and inviting us back. And it is blackberries eaten slowly.

Amen. This chapter sums up her thoughts on prayer and discusses the place of “Amen” in her prayers. She concludes:

“Let it happen! Yes! I could not agree more.Huzzah. It is a good response to making contact with God through prayer, and to praying with people who share the journey, and to most things that are good, which much of life can be. So it is, when we do the best we can, and we leave the results in God’s good hands. Amen.”

There is so much good in this account of prayer, a life of prayer woven into all of life, into all the moments of help, thanks, and wow, in which we become aware of both our desperate need of God and God’s utterly extravagant care. All of this comes in Anne’s self-deprecating demeanor (she suggests that “Help me not to be such an ass!” might be a fourth great prayer). She likes a version of the Serenity Prayer that prays, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the weaponry to make the difference.” As with so much of Lamott, you laugh at one moment and catch your breath at a bracing insight the next. If you want to learn to pray but have been put off with books that just seem more spiritual than you ever hope you can be, Lamott may be the place to start. “Help, Thanks, and Wow. Amen” seems a pretty good place to begin.

Review: Prayer in the Night

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Prayer in the Night, Tish Harrison Warren. Downers Grove: IVP Formatio, 2021.

Summary: Both an introduction to Compline and a phrase by phrase reflection using one of the loveliest of Compline prayers.

Keep watch, dear Lord,
with those who work,
or watch,
or weep this night,
and give your angels charge over those who sleep.
Tend the sick, Lord Christ,
give rest to the weary,
bless the dying,
soothe the suffering,
pity the afflicted,
shield the joyous,
and all for your love's sake.
Amen

Over the last year of the pandemic, I’ve posted on Facebook prayers, morning and evening, (“Collects”) from The Book of Common Prayer. The prayer above, from of the office of Compline, is one of my favorites, and often I think of particular people as I pray each phrase. During the pandemic this has included the working and weary medical personnel, the people keeping vigil for those in ICUs, the sick and sometimes the dying, those afflicted with long-COVID, and others who struggle with chronic pain and illness. Amid this all I think of the joyous including new parents, graduates, and all of us who have received vaccines. I think of angels watching over and guarding us in the vulnerable moments of our nightly rest. I rest in the care of the Lord who watches for love’s sake.

Thus it was with great delight that I discovered on opening Prayer in the Night that it is organized around this loved prayer. Tish Harrison Warren takes us through her own journey of praying compline, most notably one night with her husband in an emergency room as she hemorrhaged severely during a miscarriage. She introduces us to Compline, the last of the prayers of the hours or offices, to be prayed at night before retiring. She writes of how Compline helped her at a time of loss of a baby and of her father:

“Compline speaks to God in the dark. And that’s what I had to learn to do–to pray in the darkness of anxiety and vulnerability, in doubt and disillusionment. It was Compline that gave words to my anxiety and grief and allowed me to reencounter the doctrines of the church not as tidy little antidotes for pain, but as a light in darkness, as good news.”

Tish Harrison Warren, p. 19.

In succeeding chapters, Warren offers reflections on each phrase of this prayer that come out of her lived experience with praying it. She begins by discussing the God to whom we pray in the dark, and how the prayers operate as cairns, rock structures, that help us keep on the path when we can only feel our way along in fog or the dark. She then turns to the way of the vulnerable–those who weep or watch or work, taking the phrases in reverse order. She concludes:

“Taken together, working and watching and weeping are a way to endure the mystery of theodicy. They are a faithful response to our shared human tragedy–but only when we hold all three together, giving space and energy to each, both as individuals and as the church.”

Tish Harrison Warren, p. 75.

From this she turns to what she calls “a taxonomy of vulnerability.” She describes her renewed understanding of the care of the angels in our sleep as she prayed for her first child each night. Her reflection on sickness includes insights into the wonders of our bodies that we often take for granted until illness. In weariness we are offered rest, one to learn from, and one who intercedes for us. Prayer for the dying reminds us of our own death and how we are taught to live in light of it and our resurrection hope. Suffering and affliction take us into new places of dependence upon God in our weakness, and call the church into depths we are reluctant to go. Then there is the risk of disappointment in joy and our need to be shielded here as well.

Finally, Warren concludes by exploring how God invites us into a deeper encounter with his love. In the night. When we doubt. In our illness and vulnerability. In suffering and affliction. The love of God, revealed in Christ, is the last word of this prayer.

The writing about goodness, truth, and beauty one finds in Warren’s prose is humbling. All I can say is what is found in this book is so much better and richer than my summary. Warren helps me pray a prayer I’ve loved with deeper meaning and consciousness of my vulnerability and the depths of God’s care. She offers good direction for all of us facing “night” in our lives.

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

Review: Spiritual Practices of Jesus

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Spiritual Practices of Jesus, Catherine J. Wright. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2020.

Summary: A study of three spiritual practices of Jesus found in Luke’s gospel considering them in the first century context of his readers and the writings of the earliest fathers of the church.

Catherine J. Wright does several things in this book I have not seen before. First, she focuses attention on what the scriptures, and specifically Luke’s gospel have to say about the spiritual practices of Jesus. She does so systematically, looking at all the passages around a particular practice.

Second, she asks the question of how Luke’s earliest readers in the first century would have thought about the particular practice in question. In particular, she keeps in mind the intention of first century biographies not only to inform but also transform the readers. Consideration is given to the regard given the practice in the wider culture and how this might shape their reception of Luke’s account.

Finally, Wright looks at the earliest church fathers and their interpretations and responses to Luke’s gospel. This offers tangible evidence of how the church understood and received these accounts in their setting.

Wright focuses on three practices, each which recur in numerous passages in Luke: simplicity, humility, and prayer. For each, she offers commentary on the text, then discussion of the practice in first century culture, and thirdly, she goes back to the specific texts from the first overview and discusses what the early church fathers had to say about the text. Through all this, she both summarizes the practice of Jesus and draws compelling contemporary applications for the church.

For example, she considers the parable of the rich man and Lazarus and the rich man who approaches Jesus., noting the lack of generosity with both, the unwillingness to be dispossessed of wealth for the care of others, and in the latter’s case, to pursue the kingdom. Wright notes the expectations in both Jewish and Greek literature for the rich to be benefactors. In learning from the fathers, we learn that Chrysostom considered the failure to give alms to the poor to be theft. Basil of Caesarea teaches that “the more you abound in wealth, the more you lack in poverty.” Wright then concludes with this trenchant application in her summary:

Perhaps one reason for the emphasis on radical almsgiving is the lens through which early Christians look at wealth. In their opinion, we don’t really own our wealth. It is placed in our care by God so that we may bestow it to those who have less than we do. Therefore, when we spend our wealth on ourselves alone, we are essentially stealing from the poor (and thereby from God). The reverse is also true. When we give to the poor, we show ourselves to be good stewards of the resources God has trusted us with, and we are, in essence, giving to God. This attitude could not be further from the attitude that many Christians in America have today.

Catherine J. Wright, p. 63.

She offers challenges around humility as the mark of the early Christian but forgotten in the contemporary church’s quest for power and influence. She notes the practice of continual, fervent prayer by both Jesus and his early followers and the superficial practices that characterize most of our Western churches.

As we hear of the practices of simplicity, humility, and prayer in connection with our Lord, we say, “but of course.” What Wright’s close reading of Luke’s gospel, and consideration of Luke’s earliest readers does, is challenge us to see what this meant for those who called, and call themselves disciples. As Wright traces this out, it becomes apparent that many of us have not looked very closely at Luke’s narrative, not the Lord of whom it is written, if measured by the lack of correspondence between our lives and His. Wright does not bludgeon us with this truth but beckons us to join Luke’s early readers in the embrace of these practices out of love for the one who called us and models and teaches them for us to live into.

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

Review: The Possibility of Prayer

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the possibility of prayer

The Possibility of Prayer, John Starke. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2020.

Summary: We both long for a rich prayer life yet think it impossible for all but the spiritual elite; this work points to the possibility and practices that invite us into that life.

Many of us approach this matter of prayer deeply torn. We long for a rich relationship with God, and yet our fast-paced, disruptive lives, makes such prayer seem the preserve of a spiritual elite. We long for transformation, yet struggle with prayer seeming to be a non-productive practice in our “show me the money” world.

John Starke names the issue for us:

   The Bible challenges our utilitarianism. The prayers in the Psalms use words of waiting, watching, listening, tasting, and seeing, meditating and resting. It’s remarkable how inefficient these actions are. They aren’t accomplishing anything. There isn’t a product on the other side of these prayerful actions. Yet over the years they bring steadfastness, joy, life, fruitfulness, depth of gratitude, satisfaction, wonder, an enlarged heart, feasting, and dancing. (p. 7).

Starke contends that the possibility of prayer rests in a God who became incarnate in his son and who cares so deeply for us that he knows our tossing at night as well as the hairs on our head. While we pray in our nooks and crannies, we also pray in the heavenly places with Christ, entering into relationship with a God who is gloriously “heavy” [the meaning of glory], holy, joyful, beautiful, relational, and available. He suggests as we read scripture considering how Father, Son, and Holy Spirit might be speaking to us, inviting us into deeper communion with the triune God.

He addresses one of our greatest barriers, which is a reactionary heart and way of life, a habit of the heart where we ignore living out of an inner life and are shaped by our responses to circumstances that only the slow, quiet work of prayer may shape. Prayer can be painful because it calls upon us to expose our vulnerabilities, and our sins to God. Learning to pray means learning to wait, to dwell or abide with God amid the ordinary, the mundane, when nothing special seems to be happening between us and God.

Starke then considers the practices that take us into this “possible” life of prayer. He focuses on the practices of communion, meditation, solitude, fasting and feasting, sabbath, and corporate worship. I particularly appreciated the chapter on fasting and feasting, particularly Starke’s recognition that we more often associate spirituality with the fasting side of this rather than a rhythm of both. I also found this striking  insight from Psalm 77:10-12 on the distinctive character of Christian meditation:

The psalmist is not engaging in passive exercises. This is not the gentle emotional work of relaxing and trying to empty your mind. It’s fighting. These are intentional habits: I will appeal; I will remember; I will ponder; I will meditate. Christian meditation is fighting, grasping for joy, It’s intentionally and regularly remembering and pondering the history of God’s power for his people. If you coast, you lose. (p. 111).

Starke offers spiritual wisdom borne of his own spiritual journey and pastoral ministry among busy New Yorkers. He encourages us that engaging with God is possible for ordinary saints if we begin to pursue the slow, quiet ways of prayer, and persist in a relationship that, over time, can bring great joy and transformation.

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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.