The Little Friar

In the past prayer was able to bring down punishment, rout armies, withhold the blessing of rain. Now, however, the prayer of the just turns aside the whole anger of God, keeps vigil for its enemies, pleads for persecutors. Is it any wonder that it can call down water from heaven when it could obtain fire from heaven as well? Prayer is the one thing that can conquer God. But Christ has willed that it should work no evil, and has given it all power over good. Its only art is to call back the souls of the dead from the very journey into death, to give strength to the weak, to heal the sick, to exorcise the possessed, to open prison cells, to free the innocent from their chains. Prayer cleanses from sin, drives away temptations, stamps out persecutions, comforts the fainthearted, gives new strength to the courageous, brings travelers safely home, calms the waves, confounds robbers, feeds the poor, overrules the rich, lifts up the fallen, supports tho...

If there were any one, particular struggle I have these days with being a Christian, it's politics.  Since it's an election year fraught with so much division over so many would-be (false!) American messiahs, I find it hard to take the Church seriously when the Church wants to endorse any one of those particular false messiahs.  I've been thinking about this for days now, and I'm quite glad that the Church doesn't have a response to those cronies, other than to point to the real Lord of lords and King of kings. Which leads me to say this:  Perhaps the one thing the Church can give American politics is prayer.  I mean that. Prayer is disruptive. The divine voice interrupts our egoism and selfishness with a still small whisper to remind us that we are not the center of the universe.  As the Church, we pray for our enemies and those who mistreat us.  That is what I mean when I say that prayer disrupts.  Egoism makes us seek revenge.  Praye...

Some years ago, a friend commented about how often I memorized Scripture -- how I knew where the text had come from as well as the wording of the text.  It was odd, he thought, that that kind of detail had been committed to memory.  Why not just memorize the gist of the story and let the details fall by the wayside? My memorizing Scripture has become a topic of discussion lately.  Apparently, when I preach and when I pray and when I speak, there are lots of inferences to the text of Scripture.  Those words are my words, and that's a bit "odd". Someone asked why I do it? Simple, I responded.  I memorize Scripture for those times when I don't have the right words.  For those times when words of my own just aren't coming, when my own words are either cold or unavailable.  Just then, the words of Scripture pop up and kiss my conversations like the Spirit popping up and saying, "There, God loves you".

Last Thursday, as I made a business trip from central Tennessee back home, I realized it was the National Day of Prayer.  Any number of the churches I passed that day had been observing the day, and several of them had cars lining the parking lot. In the midst of an election cycle, Americans, it seems, are all the more thoughtful about the National Day of Prayer. Typically, I dismiss that day as yet another exercise in national religion.  It's another effort for Christians to submit to the powers of the State in catering events that ask God to bless the United States.  Unfortunately, I believe praying "God Bless America" is putting the proverbial cart before the horse; long before we have the audacity of asking for God's blessing, we as a nation should enter into a chapter of humble repentance.  Until we're willing to do that, I'm just not all that interested in the National Day of Prayer.  In fact, even after such a period of repentance, we would st...

1. Because there was nothing else to do, I said to myself, I will read Hemingway and drink wine and think only of Paris.  So I sat that afternoon and read A Moveable Feast , Hemingway's memoir of life in Paris, and drank wine and thought of Paris.  It was 7th of July, 2005. 2.   I remember my few days in Paris as a student.  I stayed in a really bad motel and it was a disappointment.  The more irritable my host became, the more mad I responded.  But that's how it was.  Still, puny moods and attitudes were no match for Paris.  I walked along the Seine.  I roamed the boulevards.  I looked at paintings and old buildings, loafed in cafés.  I went in and out of shops along the rue St-Dominique, buying nothing.  I ate fruit and croissants and dipped them in my coffee -- I only drink coffee in Paris.  A gypsy girl begged me to let her draw my portrait. 3.   The city, of course, is older than Christianity...

David Brazzeal's Pray Like a Gourmet:  Creative Ways to Feed Your Soul is so much like a fine meal -- full of new treats and future relishes in the Christian spiritual life of prayer. Brazzeal offers a number of "prayer recipes" from his own experiences.  He describes many simple prayer activities designed to help one break out of his or her prayer-time rut.  Throughout the process, the author encourages the reader to live with gratitude and to take note of the world in which we live.  Not since Richard Foster's Prayer (which Brazzeal often cites) have I read a better book on the various practices of Christian prayer, and Pray Like a Gourmet is filled with so much creativity that I could never do the book the justice it deserves in a review. Brazzeal advocates a number of different ways to practice prayer and meditation such as walking through the park and taking note of the people you see, doing a "museum meditation" at the local museum of art, or a...

My friend John asked that I offer some reflections on those prayers that seem to cross theological and denominational lines:  What I call "just" prayers. As I've discerned these types of prayers, they're perhaps one of the most consistent prayer practices in America.  You know the sort, I'm sure.  "Lord, I just want you to ..."  "God, we just need ..."  "Jesus, if you would just ..." What these prayers actually do, of course, is affix an adjective -- just -- that essentially minimizes the very petition of the prayer.  So the question left to ask is:  Why would we want to minimize God's activity in the world?  Why diminish the very thing we're asking God to do? That simple qualifier, while probably nothing more than a verbal "filler" -- allowing our mouths to get ahead of our hearts and brains in prayer -- betrays a false humility.  We think it makes God's response more special or meaningful.  But in rea...

Christians don't lament well.  I'm more convinced of this all the time.  We know how to complain but not so much how to lament.  We lack the training in it for certain, but, even when we try we can't muster any energy for it without guilt.  Guilt because we think we should have a cheerier disposition as evidence of our faith.  Everything will be okay because God's "in control", right?  We suspect that lament shows a lack of faith. Guilt is not our only hang-up.  I once spoke to a group of university students about Christian responses to evil, and I suggested that our first response is silence, followed by lament.  I couldn't read everyone’s response, the evening crowd had swelled beyond the capacity of the recital hall, but follow-up conversations showed another hindrance to lament:  The perception of inactivity.  Lament seemed too inactive, too passive for my advocacy-minded students.  Where is the courage in lament?  Wher...

Someone asked me this morning about prayer -- about God's answering our prayer in one of three ways ("yes", "no" or "not now").  Where did we get the idea?  What do I think about it? I respond: I'm not entirely sure where we get the idea.  I honestly think [these options] are wrong insofar as they go.  Because prayer is not about us asking something from God.  Prayer is relational conversation in which we ask to discern what God asks of and for us.  The problem I have is that people make prayer something we want or need from God.  This kind of praying turns God into a cosmic bell-hop that answers when we ring the bell or a cosmic soda-machine which gives us what we want when we put our money in and push the right buttons.  God isn't concerned to give us the desires of our hearts; God is transforming those desires into the desire for his Kingdom come.  Think Romans 12 here. So it's not the case that there's three answers.  Ther...

As a Dietrich Bonhoeffer scholar, I am excited to see a new edition of Christoph Blumhardt's postumely-published collection of Evening Prayers:  For Every Day of the Year.   Blumhardt was a German Lutheran theologian who was one of the founders Christian Socialism and led a theological revolution in Germany at the outbreak of World War I, proclaiming "the Kingdom of God".  Blumhardt was a significant influence upon Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth, among others.  What we find in Evening Prayers  is a collection of prayers that live and breathe in the Lord's Prayer, in the gospels.  Blumhardt has a deep spiritual life in which the Light of Christ shines in a dark world.  While the prayers were originally intended only for his closest friends, the Church has here a wealth of prayers.   Evening Prayers  is a gracious addition to my own spiritual practice.  Every pastor should have a copy in his or her library.  And utilize its spiritual wealt...

I regularly pray for the dead, especially for the damned.  As one who's known tragedy that includes the death of those  who would be counted among their ranks, it seems the most natural thing to do.  After all, I take God to be bigger, more powerful, than anything death might be.  So I deny the theological power of things like moral luck.   But it's not strange to have folks hear those prayers for the dead and damned and object:  What's the point?   Once someone has died their fate is fixed forever, they say -- praying for them will make no difference.  Really? Christians have long seen the righteous praying for the damned, with the result that the latter were rescued from hell. I offer as evidence: 1.  The  Apocalypse of Peter , probably from Alexandria in Egypt about 135 AD.  In this text, which some early church leaders considered divinely inspired, sinners endure a period of suffering in the afterlife but will ultimately a...

There are several reasons that I keep returning to the rhythm of the daily prayer office (Mattins, Vespers and Compline): 1.  Because praying the prayers of the Church is an escape from the hell of solipsism.  The more I pray by myself, the more I'm lost.  To call on God as Father with sisters and brothers is to learn my name as "child". 2.  Because praying these prayers pummels my desires and stretches me beyond my wants.  The more I share together in a rhythm of reading Scripture, singing canticles and praying prayers, the more God trains my mind to desire the only thing that matters.   3.  Because the daily office encompasses not only my own life, but also the whole world.  The world is defined by so much need --  scarcity, injustice, and oppression.  In other words, hunger.  These prayers have me whispering prayers throughout my day which name my own hungers as hungers of my world.  4.  Because the daily office prayers...

I was reading through the Greek text of the Lord's Prayer tonight, when I happened upon a fresh -- at least for me -- idea.  I had always encountered the prayer in traditional renderings with traditional patterns of speaking it.  According to those patterns the prayer opens with two thoughts.   1. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name 2. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven I always took "on earth as it is in heaven" to qualify both "your kingdom come" and "your will be done".  However, the revelation for dim-old-me was that it also qualifies "hallowed be your name". The prayer is three requests that all run in parallel Your name be hallowed [on earth as it is in heaven] Your Kingdom come [on earth as it is in heaven] Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven I had missed this insight because: (a) the traditional English translations obscure the parallelism by having a different word order in the first r...

Is there hope for a world gone wrong? Is there hope in the midst of hatred and violence?  In his poem "God's Grandeur"(1877), Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote: "The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed.  Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell:  the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs-- Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings." Hopkins was of course writing about the destructiveness of an industrialized world.  But the poem's conclusion applies eq...

Perhaps the one act that marks off being Christian  (more than any other) is forgiveness . In a very radical (as in the root ) way, Christians (both corporately and individually) are marked as forgiven and forgiving people.  At the beginning of Christian life, Baptism dramatically enacts God's forward-giving and -accepting of us into the very triune life.  The past is "washed away".  All our guilt and shame is removed.  Or, more appropriately, the past is drowned  and left behind, floating corpse-like in the water.  In that way, baptism does what we humans can't otherwise do:  It breaks the power  of the past.  So when we emerge from the water, there's a "new life", wholly open to a future with God's Kingdom.  Thing is, forgiveness isn't left in those waters.  Each day, every moment, we're sustained by that very forgiveness.  "Forgive us our debts!", the community prays at multiple points in the day.  That's because w...

The trouble with praying -- my  praying -- is that I sin so often.  And so boldly.  Sin makes it difficult for me to pray.  That's because sinning makes me believe that prayer is so "holy", and I'm so un holy.  Thing is, if I'm sick, it's also difficult to get me to go to the doctor.  So these things really must be related.   But how? From the perspective of despair, sin (and sickness) are an admission of my humanity.  So any seeking of healing -- either in spirit (through prayer) or body (by getting to the doctor) -- confronts my bull-headed notion that I should be complete in myself.  I know enough, I'm "good enough". But am I?  It's interesting to me that Jesus refused  to be called "good".  " No one is good -- except God alone" (Luke 18.19).   No, I'm still too much like the "rich young man".  I depend on justifying myself in the face of rules.  And those rules can always do nothing more than shine a ligh...

Theologians are notorious (and not in a good way) for thinking new thoughts.  Rather than thinking on my own about prayer, I thought I'd cobble together some of the Church's best wisdom on prayer.  I haven't tried to track down source references, but I can if anyone is interested.  Two rules from John Chapman:  " Two rules for praying: 'First:  pray as you can, and don't try to pray as you can't.  And second:  the less you pray, the worse it goes.'" The essence of prayer from John Climacus:  "Hunger is the stuff of prayer." The spiritual methods of prayer from Thomas Merton:  " Concerning the influence of scientific method on monasticism:  'The idea was that if you set up the right conditions, a kind of laboratory for prayer, and if you carried out the experiment according to instructions, you would get the desired result.  This concept has by now evolved into the simple pharmacology of contemplation:  you take the right pill a...

My mind is burdened with a thousand different prayers tonight.  Each with its own depth and wordlessness.  So I begin to formulate some thoughts on prayer.  1.  What is prayer?    It is the eyes of the world looking back at God (Pavel Florensky).  2.  Can theology penetrate into the mystery of prayer? Yes:  Theology burrows into prayer as the ant makes its tiny tunnels in the earth's immense dark turning orb. 3.  Once when I was sleeping, the sound of rain on the roof became, in my dream, the hammer of war drums beating in a jungle:  A real sound, vibrating in my ears, echoed in the chamber of my dreams.  In the same way, the vibration of eternity echoes in the chamber of our world when people pray. 4.  Prayer is restlessness and silence and sadness.  It is jubilation and a cup running over and the sound of all the gum trees clapping hands.  5.  "We do not know how to pray" (Rom 8.26).  True words! ...