Living Wittily

The Lord's Prayer: The difference between repetition and mere repetition

Simon and Tony in the comments on a previous post reflect a fairly pervasive resistance to the regular use of the Lord's Prayer, whether in Sunday by Sunday services, daily or even three times daily as private or personal prayer. Coming from a non-liturgical tradition, Baptists are almost inherently suspicious of anything that sounds like vain repetition. I hope you don't mind Simon and Tony, if I quote some of your words from your comments in order to explore them here:

"I sensed that she was suggesting the mere repetition of the words had value - something I instinctivly recoil against. (Simon)

"...fear of this prayer being a mindless mantra rather than an expression of a real desire to see God's kingdom come..... Perhaps, for some, constant repetition reduces Christ's words to meaningless mumbling. (Tony)

I think it's worth qualifying those hesitations, even subjecting them to some gentle criticism -as in fact Simon and Tony acknowledge in their comments. So these few observations are not so much directed at Tony and Simon's hesitations. Their comments provide an opportunity to say more about why I think regular use of the Lord's Prayer is an important and specific formative practice for those whose life goal is following after Jesus.

1. My experience of extempore prayer in many non liturgical services (in Baptist churches and other traditions) doesn't persuade me that they are a more spiritual, sincere or worthy offering in worship than prayers carefully crafted, formed into language that has beauty and rhythm, and read or spoken from memory. To speak from memory, or read from a text doesn't preclude the heart's responsive love to God nor the mind's thoughtful adoration. Conversely, extempore prayers can themselves become mere repetition of phrases and cliches shared in a particular evangelical sub-culture.

2. The Lord's Prayer in particular is placed in the Sermon on the Mount precisely in the context of contrast with mere repetition. A double irony is possible here. Either we refuse to use the Lord's Prayer lest it be mere repetition; or we use it unthinkingly and make it mere repetition. Both I believe misrepresent the meaning of Jesus' command - "after this manner pray ye....". To pray the Lord's Prayer regularly and meaningfully is nearer the stance of intentional obedience.

3. I trust the instinct of the early church where early on, daily praying of the Lord's Prayer was a formative practice.

"...this was a tradition maintained in the living liturgy of community worship (as the first person plural strongly suggests). Almost certainly, the early Christian disciples did not know this tradition only because they had heard it in some reading from a written document. They knew it because they prayed it, possibly on a daily basis." J D G Dunn, Jesus Remembered. Christianity in the Making, Vol. I, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), p. 227 (Italics orignial).

The phrase Dunn emphasises, "they knew it because they prayed it", along with that important clause earlier, "the living liturgy of community worship", (Baptists like me take note - liturgy can be living), surely provides sufficient safeguard against reciting the Lord's Prayer from an empty heart and bored mind.

4. I trust also the practice of the church catholic through the centuries, across the world. As a Baptist I belong to a tradition that honours scripture - but then ironically balks at repeating the words of Jesus because they are liturgically embedded. But surely in approaching God as a forgiven sinner who is a follower of Jesus, I also do so as a self- concerned, earth-bound, horizon limited, ethically challenged, trying to be hopeful human being. And at such a time I confess I am more helped by the Lord's Prayer than the ad hoc meanderings of many an extempore pray-er.

5. As a young christian I learned the Sermon on the Mount by heart. I can still recite chunks of it in the Authorised Version! Amongst the benefits of repetition and regularity in reciting Scripture, especially the Lord's Prayer, are the slow absorption into mind, heart, conscience and will, of those essential values that define our discipleship and the way of the Kingdom of God.

These are just some of the reasons why it's important not to devalue repetition of scripture and prayers by prefacing them with 'mere'. Nor is it the case that such repeated enunciation of prayer and praise need be meaningless - in any case, meaningless to whom? It's God who sees most clearly into the hearts of those who mumble prayers - and whatever residue of meaning and genuine longing is there, midst the mumbling, we can be sure will be noticed, and blessed. 

Finally Comes the Poet 3: "God is more for us than we are for ourselves"

I've nothing important to add to the following paragraphs from Brueggemann's brilliant book. (I don't use the word 'brilliant' often, and never as lazy superlative cliche!). Those who preach and those who listen - feel the passion of the Gospel.

"Real guilt requires real repentance. Finally, however, guilt requires a flood of self-gift from one outside ourselves. This gift overwhelms us, because the one who gives self stands in solidarity with us at great cost. Evangelical faith is a study of how God is more for us than we are for ourselves. (Rom. 8.31-39.) It is the very life of God that deals with the lingering poison of our "evil conscience", poison that causes death to us and those around us. God's way with us emerges out of God's deep love that cannot stand by while we die of the poison. In the priestly version of God's care, it is God's blood, God's self, God's own life, God's love that is passionately, generously recklessly thrown across the poison of guilt". (p.36)

"Evangelical preaching is invited to break out of the conservatism that makes God function mechanically, for such a scholastic God has no power to save. Preaching is invited to break out of the liveralism that believes we finally can manage on our own, for managing never gives life. Preaching has to do with a life poured out for us to deal with the residue of guilt left untouched by reparations". (p.36)

"The preacher renders a world not known in advance. It requires no great cleverness to speak such a world, but it requires closeness to those texts that know secrets that mediate life. These texts voice life that is given nowhere else. The preaching moment is a moment for the gift of God's life in the midst of our tired alienation. For this the church and indeed the world awaits. They wait until, finally, the poet comes, until finally the poet comes". (p.41)

Lent and putting the Lord's Prayer into practice

Our Father, who art in heaven,

Hallowed be your name.

                                                                 Reverence

 

Your Kingdom come,

your will be done

on earth as it is in heaven.

                                                                 Obedience

 

Give us this day

our daily bread

                                                                 Trust

 

Forgive us our tresspasses

As we forgive those who tresspass against us

                                                                 Reconciliation

 

Lead us not into temptation

But deliver us from evil

                                                                 Resistance

 

For yours is the Kingdom,

the power and the glory, forever

                                                                 Doxology

For several years now, from birthday to birthday, I take a passage of the Bible and try to find ways to weave it into the way I live throughout the coming year. I try to live with, and live, the text. This isn't done in a pretentious or self-help way I hope; but as a form of prayer rooted in Scripture text, and within which to practice a life of deliberate response to the grace and mercy of God.

This year I want to try to live the Lord's Prayer. I don't want to "practice praying" by praying more. I want to align my life with what I pray when I pray the Lord's Prayer. So I've tried to distil each petition into what I think is its core value, or principle of action. The terms used are convictions intended to guide attitude and action rather than sounding like the non-disruptive aspirations of the vaguely pious. Values, practised as virtues, shape character.

So what demonstrable difference would it make to pray the Lord's Prayer by practising it?

What would happen if I let this brief and condensed text shape daily practice and everyday action?

Would the Lord's Prayer said each day, - morning, noon and night, - so remind me daily of the values of Jesus, that slowly, incrementally but definitely, life would be shaped to text, and heart shaped to practice?

What these values are, how they are to be lived, the existing attitudes they call in question, the life habits they must convert, the new life they make possible, the relationships they change - it is all an experiment in prayer, not as praying but as living what is prayed. To pray without ceasing may only be possible if understood as the orientation and daily re-orientation of the whole life towards God

by reverence for the holy,

     by obedient practices,

          by daily trust,

               by intentional reconciliation,

                    by resistance to evil,

                         and all this framed by doxology.

The Lord's Prayer: Exegesis by the daily practice of the text.

Been blogging now for over two years. Mostly I'm happy doing random postings from the lengthy serious to the shorter fun stuff, from theology to poetry, from unabashed baptist stuff to the essential correctives from other Christian traditions, from book reviews to political and cultural comment. I'd like to stick with the spontaneous and unpredictable daily diet - that way personal interests, daft impulses, serious reflection, can be combined with generally directive rambling around theological ideas. 

At the same time there's a couple of bigger projects I'd quite like to play around with. I've already started a weekly Brueggemann conversation Friday by Friday. During Lent I'll start another regular weekly posting as an experiment with biblical text. Nothing ambitious - just an attempt to exegete the chosen text by performative practices! And the chosen text is the Lord's Prayer.

Instead of trying to exegete the meaning of the text first - supposing I try to live it while also trying to understand it, allowing reflective study and reflective practice to shape each other?

It could be an experiment reflecting on and recording the cost and consequence of living out of a text that is itself living, and active, and pierces to the marrow - to the core of who I am, and to the heart of what's important.

Anyway my plans for Lent are to live daily with the Lord's Prayer. I'll say more about why and how in the next post.

Desideratum: The English Poems of George Herbert

desideratum. Noun
- something desired as a necessity; 
- essential, necessary, requisite
- anything indispensable;
"food and shelter are necessities of life"; "the essentials of the good life"

This book has for some time been a desideratum. Too expensive for me to justify the expense.

Given to me for my birthday from Sheila. One more of those accumulated kindnesses that strengthens marriage "like seasoned timber",(1). Each kindness a sacrament of friendship, making grace as undeserved favour less incredible, because so often encountered in the generous being-thereness of those special others in our everyday life.

(1) Checking the reference in my new book :))  the phrase is from Herbert's "Vertue", line 14. The note on the line says "wood matured and tested (through the trial of the seasons)". Just so!    (pages 316, 319) 

Responsible recycling and life-instruction on my birthday

 

Nice paper eh?


Was used by a distant member of the family to wrap my niece's daughter's birthday present last week. (can't bring myself to say grand-niece).

But there was half of it left.

So it was used to wrap my birthday present as well.

Said present was a limited edition cartoon print of a laid back cat, whiskers in non twitching mode, relaxing and sleepy, - and with a matching birthday card with the clear instruction to go ponder and change my ways. Wonder if there's a night school where you can learn laid backness; would need to be a beginner's class.

Utmost Art. George Herbert and the proper reticence of "Prayer (I)"

PRAYER. (I)         

PRAYER the Churches banquet, Angels age,
        Gods breath in man returning to his birth,
        The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth ;

Engine against th’ Almightie, sinner's towre,
        Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
        The six daies world-transposing in an houre,
A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear ;

Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,
        Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,
        Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,

        Church-bels beyond the stars heard, the souls bloud,
        The land of spices, something understood.

***^^^***

Is there anywhere in the poetry of our langauge, a richer meditation on what prayer could, or might be? No cutting of mystery down to size here. Instead an opening up of theological possibility and spiritual option. The absence of the verb to be, and therefore the reluctance to define, mean Herbert is not saying what prayer is - instead he links a catena of images, suggestive rather than definitive, biblical and classical, allusive and elusive, but each of them hinting at why, in the words of one of Herbert's greatest fans, when it comes to devotion, "You are here to kneel / where prayer has been valid." (T S Eliot, 'Little Gidding', The Four Quartets)

I have a copy of this sonnet, written out in calligraphic script by a friend, since died, who learned calligraphy as a Japanese POW, sharing the same prison compound as Laurens Van der Post. That sheet of paper (along with another by R S Thomas, 'The Musician', worked by the same artist which I posted earlier), are the nearest I possess to literary Icons - combining disciplined skill and art of production with the crafted literary beauty of content. The Herbert sonnet I've looked at, read and re-read, know by heart, and its depth and range of reference to human longing and frustrated spiritual reach, still astonishes, and reassures.

Then some years ago I published a paper on "Prayer (I)", exploring the subtle and complex imagery Herbert has woven together, doing my level best to appreciate Herbert's utmost art. At no stage did I do more than skim the surface. Which is to be expected when studying a supreme exponent of metaphysical poetry, whose passionate goal was to write verse worthy of the One whose praise was beyond human words, yet whose Love made silence impossible. So I keep coming back to this poem, heartened by its power to resist the solvent of critical analysis, and encouraged that it frustrates overly curious theologising. Reminds me again of Eliot's words:

You are not here to verify,

Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity,

Or carry report. You are here to kneel

Where prayer has been valid. 

Is peacemaking creative intervention or unwelcome intereference

Speaking with a good friend yesterday about one of those situations common in the life of any community, organisation, or church. The new minister does things differently. My friend's dad is a long-standing member, previous officebearer, but doesn't like the changes. And as well, in the first year of ministry the minister has only spoken to him once, and hasn't visited. You can see both sides - probably nothing deliberate, or intentionally hurtful on the part of the minister, but on the part of the elderly member an understandbale sense of rejection, a lost sense of significance and belonging.

My friend who is as fair minded and courteous and responsible a person as I know, with a good sense of humour and a high ethic of loyalty, feels torn both ways - the minister is doing a good job in a hard place all things considered, but dad isn't happy, and has started going elsewhere most Sundays. With some justification he feels he's now like many of his age, unnoticed and surplus to requirements nowadays. How to sort this before dad leaves. How to alert the minister to something they really should have noticed and recognised for themselves - it isn't that big a congregation.

So my friend says she wants it sorted - "but it isn't my place to tell the minister there's a problem." She's not being deliberately difficult or unhelpful - she genuinely feels interference would be wrong.

Which raised for me the following questions we went on to discuss

• If not her place to intervene, then whose place?
• When is it "our place" to become involved in a relationship breaking down and try to sort it?
• Is peacemaking ever possible without some third party being willing to risk the initiative, and isn't that each Christian's "place"?
• And if efforts at peace-making, seeking to be a bridge of reconciliation, is seen as unwelcome interference, isn't that the risk worth taking?
• Scaled up to the level of community and nation, isn't such a breakdown in communication and the resulting looming breach of relationship, something that calls out for third party risk taking?

So two further questions

• Is peacemaking creative intervention or unwelcome interference?
• Are there times when even if it is seen as unwelcome interference, conciliation is a Christian imperative that can't always be risk managed?

William Stringfellow and "What befits Christian witness?"

William Stringfellow asks at the end of his essay on 'Discernment', "What befits Christian witness?" In a world as dangerously broken as the one we now inhabit, sense-surrounded by the life denying noise of Babel, how is Christian witness to be evidenced? Here's his answer:

" In the face of death, live humanly. In the middle of chaos, celebrate the Word. Amidst babel, speak the truth. Confront the noise and verbiage and falsehood of death with truth and potency and the efficacy of the Word of God. Know the Word, teach the Word, nurture the Word, preach the Word, define the Word, incarnate the Word, do the Word, live the Word. And more than that, in the Word of God, expose death and all death's works and wiles, rebuke lies, cast out demons, exorcise, cleanse the possessed, raise those who are dead in mind and conscience."  (A Keeper of the Word, page 305)

Dorothy Sayers, Trident submarines, and the Triune God?

Yesterday I posted the delightful poem of Dorthy Sayers, a form of compline in verse, gently urging gratitude as the defining disposition of life. I also posted on the nonsense of nuclear subs colliding because they were too good at hiding from everyone, even their friends. An evening prayer of thanks for friendship, forgiveness, laughter and wisdom, contrasted with a road traffic accident on the ocean floor. The irony of two cloaked submarines colliding, is matched by a further irony in my juxtaposition of a post on gratitude for life's blessings and a post on weapons of mass destruction

And here's another ironic twist. Dorothy Sayers near the end of The Zeal of Thy House, one of her plays, has one of the characters compare the creativty of the Triune God with human creativity which is the mirror image of divine activity - (forgive the gender exclusive 'men' - Dorothy would have been front of the queue to have inclusive language set as the gold standard in communication).

Children of men, lift up your hearts. . . .
Praise Him that He hath made man in His own image,
               a maker
And craftsman like Himself, a little mirror of His
               Triune Majesty.
For every work of creation is threefold, an earthly
           Trinity
to match the heavenly.

So the Creator God makes the multitudinous creatures of the sea, and calls them good; and we make submarines with Trident capability and the powers that be try to tell us they are good - but just what kind of God does Trident mirror?