To the Reader
To the Reader
This book has an activity title: Praying. That is precisely what it is about. It is a heart-to-heart affair in which two Christians who try to pray and wish they prayed better share thoughts about what they are doing with people whom they envisage as being like themselves. It was a challenge to write, and we hope it will be a challenge to read.
Praying is of the essence of Christian existence, and it involves beliefs, emotions, values, hopes and fears, certainties and uncertainties, knowledge and ignorance, so there is a good deal for us to write about. But the discussion will be practical as well as theoretical. Our aim is not just to clarify Christian understanding but to foster Christian living. In real praying, head, heart and hands go together. “I will pray with my spirit, but I will pray with my mind also,” says Paul (1 Cor 14:15), and his words show the true path for the inner life. Then our hands must be ready to move, as God through our praying shows us that they should. We pray that in every case both spirit and mind will be fed, and prayerful Christian obedience advanced by what we have written.
The study of spiritual life as such is common these days, and that increases the ever-present danger that we will settle for exploring the theory and theology of prayer and go no further. All of us are inclined to kid ourselves that knowing about something is as good as doing it. Not so! J. I., for instance, knows a great deal about the English game of cricket and can talk cricket with other enthusiasts at the drop of a hat. But he is not a cricketer, for he has never actually played the game. Again, he loves classical music and knows a fair amount about it and can talk music with professionals, but he is not a musician, for he can neither compose music nor play an instrument. And if you get joyfully musty in a library researching prayer, yet end up with no time, energy or motivation to do more than mumble a few goodnight words to God at the end of the day before sleep sets in, you are not a praying person. We give warning that nonpractitioners will be left behind in the exploration of praying on which we now embark.
Let us continue on a personal note for a moment. As a Christian believer J. I. sees himself as a traveler on Bunyan’s pilgrim path, and as a theologian (which is J. I.’s public identity) he sees himself as a catechist, one who teaches Christian basics to new believers and adult inquirers, seeking both viva voce and by writing to make and mature disciples of Jesus Christ. As a Christian pilgrim and a catechist theologian, he seems to himself to be very much a needy junior in God’s school of prayer—a feeling that Carolyn shares about herself. Detective writer Martha Grimes likes to title each of her books after an unusually named English pub, and one such is Help the Poor Struggler. We gratefully borrow that phrase to make the point that in fact we are all, so we believe, poor strugglers in our experience of praying. So this book will look to God and search the Scriptures for the help we all need.
The paradox here is that while prayer is unquestionably natural, necessary and normal for Christian people, it constantly proves in practice to be the very opposite of plain sailing. Commands and encouragements to pray, with narratives of people doing it right and models for us to imitate and use, abound in the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, and the New Testament specifically is full of them. Jesus taught his disciples that “they ought always to pray and not lose heart” (Lk 18:1) and told the story of the persistent widow to make his point. “All prayer,” says Paul, is part of the armor of God that every Christian must put on; all believers are to be “praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication”—that is, all appropriate forms of prayer in each situation (Eph 6:18). “In everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God” (Phil 4:6). “Pray without ceasing”—in other words, keep on praying (1 Thess 5:17). When Jesus’ disciples asked, “Lord, teach us to pray” (Lk 11:1), he replied: “When you pray, say: . . .” and gave them the Lord’s Prayer, which he also gave as a model in the Sermon on the Mount after making three points about how not to pray, saying “Pray then like this: . . .” (Mt 6:9); that is, using the prayer not just as a formula but as a pattern. It all sounds so clear and straightforward. And yet . . .
Yet we end up struggling, and not just over making time for prayer or finding a place for it. Thoughts wander, hearts that ardently longed to be praying freeze once we start, and we dry up. We thought we knew what we had to say to God, but our minds lose focus as soon as we start to say it, our muddle reduces us to stumbling, using words that do not express our meaning, and finally our muddle descends into silence. If we try to use that silence as a time for listening to God, we find ourselves randomly dreaming. And if we recite set prayers or psalms at such a time, our words feel hollow and unreal; our heart does not seem to be in any of the things we are saying. Why these bewilderments, which we all know so well? To be told that they have something to do with sin, the anti-God allergy in our spiritual systems, that operates as a disruptive force in all of our communion with God is absolutely right, but this insight does not get us very far. What we want is help to pray properly, with reality and integrity and reverent concentration, here and now. Is such help available? That is the question to which we now address ourselves. Good praying is at once both duty and delight, but often we must begin where prayer is primarily duty. As we grow in the knowledge of prayer and in the practice of praying, however, God will sanctify our efforts and delight will come upon us. We urge you to please read on.