Prayer

I recently read Timothy Keller's book Prayer and I found it helpful in the ongoing quest to understand what prayer is all about. I still find myself returning to C. S. Lewis' thoughts on prayer more than to anyone else's writing about prayer but there were some helpful insights in Keller's book as well.

I blogged some years ago about my lack of interest in most of the writing that has been done about prayer as conversation with God. Much of my discomfort with that commentary is that it seems to bring prayer down to the level of  'chit-chat'. Keller in his book maintains the idea of discussion/conversation but makes it clear that this is not mere chit-chat.  In particular I liked his emphasis that this is a conversation that God Himself initiated, both through His Word and through Christ, and our prayer is a response to the conversation that He has initiated. We respond to His Word, to the life and work of Christ, and to the Spirit; it is a conversation that cannot happen without His initiation. I find this a much more clear and also more reverent approach to this idea of conversation with God than what is presented in most things I have read or heard on prayer. Keller's comments taken from Eugene Peterson about how we learn to talk, where 'all speech is answering speech, we are spoken to before we speak' was very timely input for me as I have been watching my young grandchildren learn to respond and to talk. Applying that to us in prayer, where God speaks to us in Scripture and our prayers can and should arise from Scripture was an appreciated insight.

Keller also continues with some of Lewis' thought about how prayer recognizes God as God, the One to whom we must bring our concerns since He alone is sovereign. Lewis adds to this that in prayer God grants to us the high position of  'person'. These two concepts belong side by side in my opinion. Keller goes on with this line of thought by noting that this kind of communication can only happen between persons. He points out that if God were impersonal then prayer would be an illusion. This would help explain some Eastern religions where a meditation without thoughts, words, or concerns seems to be the goal rather than the Christian concept of prayer. Keller goes on to point out that if God were unipersonal then love could only appear after he began to create, which would mean that power is more fundamental than love; love (and its results like communion between persons) would be less important than power. But if God is triune then words and communication take on a power and importance that would not fit those other alternatives. There was communication and love in the Trinity from all eternity; this makes the concept of The Incarnate Word all the richer!

These were the elements that struck me most in this book, and they all come in the first 100 pages. The remainder was more about how to practice prayer more fully, which is practical and certainly needed in our time when it seems that prayer is less abundant than the decadence of our culture calls out for. It is certainly the case that I need to cultivate the practice of prayer more than I do. I especially appreciated from the book those first 100 pages that strengthened my understanding of why prayer is fundamental in the Christian life.