Tag: Prayer

Things that make me happy

  1. A regular routine.
    Getting up at the same time; going to bed at the same time; having the same sorts of events each day take up roughly the same portions of the day… Things I do repeatedly, I get better at. The better I am at something, the more mind space I have to improvise and work on other projects.
  2. Free time.
    Somebody a bit more snobbish might call this “quiet time.” Either way, it’s not incongruous with the above point. It’s the purpose for it. I want a regular schedule so I can block big open spaces to sit and think. The key is the biggest blocks possible. A two hour block is twice as good as two 1-hour blocks, which would be still better than 4 ½-hour blocks. Every chaotic experience requires a certain margin of time before I’m able to operate smoothly again. This cuts into the free time that I have available on paper.
  3. Plenty of time to read, reflect, and write.
    As before, this is the whole purpose of the point above. I can always squeeze a little reading into the crevices in my schedule, but reflection and writing require nice big blocks. And it’s only when I’m ready to write that I first begin to notice that I’m becoming happy. It’s the foundational joy of an ordered mind.
  4. Prayer. Continue reading “Things that make me happy”

Yesterday’s

Second attempt:

  1. Introverted inversion.
  2. Copper-bottomed theology?
  3. Excellent.
  4. Cotton Mather:Charismatic Puritan.
  5. Fixed gear = bleh. But check out the wheels on that sucker.
  6. Great news: Sherlock shaves his chest.
  7. I remember cracking a windshield with the defroster after an ice storm. Would this have worked then?
  8. Amen!The only people that Wal-Mart ever hurt were people who were hoping to charge premium prices for commodities.

    9. As for me, something I’ve been praying about lately is a sense of spiritual sluggishness. Everything’s right as rain, but it’s hard to pray, hard to pursue any spiritual disciplines. At least, it’s easy to go through practices, but when it comes to engaging the heart… I feel tired.

    Amazingly, since I’ve been praying about this, the greatest sense I’ve had has been of peace – almost to the point of feeling lackadaisical. And honestly, I think that may be right. Even a marathoner can afford to strain himself. But a pilgrim has to trek. The important thing is being steady, and a strain one day can lead to discontent the next.

Secret prayer

For the last few months, I’ve been re-reading Charles Hambrick-Stowe’s History book on Puritan devotions, The Practice of Piety. I ran across this quote-ridden paragraph today:

Regular secret prayer was not only a means of grace but also the primary and most necessary means. New Englanders continually pointed to the dire consequences of the neglect of prayer, making much of the failure, suicide, or criminal conviction of those who “never used Secret Prayer” and “frequently omitted Family Prayer too.” Thomas Shepard said that the voice of the Lord “singles a man out” and is heard by a divine and newly created “internal spirit of prayer.” The other means of grace, both public and private, were preliminary to the awakening of this ability to pray in faith. “Is it not the end of Preaching, that you may learn to pray?” John Cotton demanded. True prayer required faith, so that “a man must not fetch his prayer from his parts, as will, memory, understanding, or ability, but from the Spirit, who is the prayer-maker.” In fact, the English Puritan John Preston defined prayer as “the voice of God’s own Spirit, that is, such as arise from the regenerate part which is within us, which is quickened and enlarged to pray from the immediate help of the Holy Ghost.”

Corollaries

* Prayer is more important than Bible reading.
* Prayer is clumsy and ineffective without a sufficient Biblical foundation.

One of my difficulties in prayer the last 7 years or so has been that my theology was changing.

When I was in high school and earlier, I was pretty proficient in prayer. That is to say, I found it relatively easy to pray – frequently, in private or in public, and for relatively sustained periods. But going into ministry school, college, and even seminary, it became increasingly more difficult to pray, because I had a hard time agreeing with the sort of things I was used to saying when I prayed. I would start to pray something and realize I didn’t really think that was the way it worked. To give an example, I might have prayed something highly metaphorical, along the lines of “Lord, I pray that you would pour out your Holy Spirit in my workplace, that your river would flood in and overwhelm them, so that they are consumed by your fire!” And in the middle I would get stuck by the mixed metaphor. Moreover, it would occur to me that I really hadn’t said anything more significant than “Lord, please do something about this,” which of course left me with a very short prayer. It began to occur to me that I really didn’t know what I was talking about and that I therefore really didn’t have anything to say.

As I’ve been becoming more “essentially reformed” in my perspective, my sense of not knowing what I’m talking about has been lifting. I was helped especially last year by teaching Ephesians in my New Testament class. Ephesians has just the sort of big picture perspective that I needed to get into my mind. And that perspective has helped dramatically in my prayer life, as Valerie can attest. But now I have a new problem:

I can again pray now for nearly hours on end, but despite my best efforts, I can really only pray Ephesians.

A Pleasure

One of the most powerful college experiences I ever had happened while I was alone in my room, doing homework. I had just come out of a class on poetry in which the basic rules for the sonnet were introduced, and we were told to try our hands at it. As I was packing up my things, I wrote down a single line of pentameter:

She stood and broke her alabaster box

I had some thought of rhyming “box” with “fox,” and I went back to my room to play around with it. Five hours later, I had finished Memorandum.

I’ve always been pleased with that poem, but the effect on me of writing was profound far beyond the pleasure of a nice bit of verse. The sensation of executing something flawlessly after hours of profound mental exertion was cataclysmic on my psyche. (Rather unlike the previous sentence.) I really don’t know how to explain the rush I got.

The only other times I have experienced a similar sensation have been times of intense prayer, when the very heavens have been opened, or during powerful worship services where God clearly and profoundly made his glory known. And here I had gotten nearly the same sensation from writing a poem. It made me think this was exactly the sort of thing that the character Eric Liddell talked about in Chariots of Fire. “When I run I feel His pleasure.” It is the certain pleasure that comes from functioning in accordance with the nature God has given you.

Judge then, my increasing dismay, as over the next two years I slowly realized how infinitesimal were my chances of successfully embarking on a career as poet. Judge my consternation as I have come to terms with how difficult it is to establish a career as a writer of anything. Judge my surprise at my experiences of the last few weeks: Continue reading “A Pleasure”

Mystic

I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m a mystic. But I’ve discovered that word makes some people, particularly non-charismatic evangelicals, nervous, so let me explain. By “mystic” I mean a person whose devotional life is characterized by intensely affecting spiritual experiences. These experiences may be in the realm of simple theological insight, or they may take more literary forms. At times they may cross over into the realm of prophecy; that is, dreams, visions, words, and phrases laden with theological context.

From a natural perspective, mysticism can come from two sources. It can be personal, or social: On the social spectrum, mysticism can be presented as something to aspire to. Some Christian traditions – the Pentecostals, the Orthodox, some revivalist traditions – present mysticism in such a way that it seems to be the only way to have a properly Christian devotional life. At the other extreme, some traditions, particularly the Reformed and Protestants as a whole, seem to perceive mysticism at best as something useless, at worst as something suspiciously unchristian, smacking of Papism, adding to scripture, even beckoning the demonic. On the personal spectrum, a person could be naturally predisposed to have certain kinds of experiences, or they could find themselves completely unable to do so, or they could be somewhere in between. (Please note that, for the sake of simplicity, I’m lumping what a person thinks about these things in with the social scale.)

The difficulty, of course, comes when a person’s natural predisposition doesn’t align very well with the tradition they find themselves in. Continue reading “Mystic”