Here is the third and final excerpt from Jane Redmont’s 1999 book When in Doubt, Sing: Prayer in Daily Life. This excerpt includes some brief remarks I made about memorizing Scripture as a form of prayer. There are many other reasons to memorize Scripture: for information, to have key doctrines ready for quick recall, etc. But what I talk about here is the way memorizing Scripture is actually a means of directly communing with God.

Jane uses my remarks at the very beginning of chapter 18 to set up the much better remarks of “Matthew the Poor.” The overall chapter is not focused on memorizing Scripture in particular, but deals with the broader technique of memorization and recitation, and examines how these un-modern practices can inform the prayer lives of contemporary believers. So the chapter, which Jane cleverly entitles “Mantras for Modern Christians” (because rote memory sounds positively retrograde, but mantras sound eastern and cool), ranges through liturgy, the daily office, and praying the rosary. But I’m making a narrower point: memorizing Scripture can itself be a form of prayer.

“This memorization-prayer is a big part of my own disciplines,” said Fred one day when we were discussing the practice of memorizing Scripture passages. “I find it especially helpful because it’s one of those exercises that, as my charismatic friends would say, ‘you can start out in the flesh and finish up in the Spirit!’ That is, sitting down (or walking or working out on a treadmill) to commit words to memory does not require any intimidating gathering of spiritual energy, like the frightful prospect of actually beginning to address God with confessing and petitions in mind. But in the midst of the activity itself, you often find yourself already at prayer. It is,” he pointed out, “not quite the same thing as praying Scripture.”
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Thoughts on praise and thankfulness, taken from my contribution to Jane Redmont’s 1999 book When in Doubt, Sing: Prayer in Daily Life. This excerpt (pages 188-190) is from the chapter entitled “Daring to Raise the Alleluia Song.”

“Everything I know about praise and joyful prayer goes back to the very beginning of my Christian life,” Fred wrote to me. “There is of course the remarkable atmosphere of a living, thriving, charismatic congregation: a loud crowd, lots of emotion, and people just glad to be in church together in the presence of God. There’s a celebratory atmosphere there that’s really something magnificent when it’s going right. Jubilant music, clapping hands, and the more outgoing members of the group feeling free to dance, wave hands, sing too loud, shout, and just generally express joy physically. Not to be underestimated as aerobic exercise, either,” he joked. “That’s stamped in my consciousness from before I was reflective. It’s the matrix for all further understanding I ever got around to.”

He added: “Praise can take over the entire enterprise of prayer, and invade the rest of life as well. This is a hard thing to talk about because the last thing I can stand still for is Norman Vincent Peale happy-talk about having an attitude of gratitude. But ‘the power of praise’ is a big deal in my upbringing.
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Soon I would like to introduce and recommend the unduly neglected Adolph Saphir (1831-1891), but for now I’ll just quote him. Here is the voice of evangelical Christianity from a little over 125 years ago: clear, passionate, artful, scriptural, doctrinal, and comprehensive. If you know anybody who can still talk like this (or grow a beard like that), hang around them as much as you can.

Let us ever with adoring hearts believe in the three unions which the Church of Christ has confessed in all ages.

First, we behold Jesus, God and man, two natures in one Person; the Lord of Glory, Immanuel, God with us. Beholding Christ, God and man, we see the Father and receive the Spirit.
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It’s the Blue Knight vs. the Yellow Knight in a jousting match. Normally the victor is determined by whose lance breaks into splinters, signifying that they have struck a mighty blow against their opponent’s breastplate or shield. But in this case, the blue knight has managed a direct hit on the yellow knight’s own lance, breaking it in two. Let’s hope the judges are sharp-eyed enough to call this round accurately! (If they’re not sure, maybe they could ask the big-eyed horses how it looks from down there.)

“I’ve made a very conscious effort to train myself in the visual tradition of the church. I’m stocking my head with the symbols that Christian artists have used to portray the mystery visually.”

Jane Redmont is the author of When in Doubt, Sing: Prayer in Everyday Life (HarperCollins, 1999), a readable and wide-ranging exploration of the practice of prayer in modern lives. Jane is part journalist and part theologian (she is now an assistant professor of religious studies at Guilford College), and her books are always woven together using threads of case studies, life stories, interviews, and reportage. When In Doubt, now out of print, is a little bit like a printed episode of This American Life on the topic of prayer, in which you meet all sorts of people who tell you about their prayer lives.

One of the people you meet in the book is me, because Jane is a friend of mine from grad school days in Berkeley, when (in addition to studying for our doctorates) I was drawing comic books and Jane was working on this book. My wife Susan and I both get nice thank yous in the preface. There were three different topics in the life of prayer that Jane interviewed me about: the use of images, the role of praise, and memorizing Scripture.

Images and prayer make a funny combination for most evangelical Protestants, and that includes me. In the overall flow of the chapter (on “Gazing”), my point of view is introduced fairly late, after a Greek Orthodox historian (hi Jim!), a latina Roman Catholic theologian talking about the virgin of Guadalupe (hi Nancy!), and a scholar whose interdisciplinary work has focused on this exact topic (hi Margaret!). So I show up among all these iconophiles as the Protestant who’s more than a little bit squeamish about the religious use of pictures, but who has properly evangelical reasons for bringing visual experience into the presence of God. Need I add that When in Doubt, Sing is not mainly addressed to an evangelical audience? But Jane’s the best sort of liberal, and gladly made room for my point of view along with the rest.

Here is what I said on the subject of images in Jane’s book, When In Doubt, Sing: Prayer in Daily Life, pages 80-83. (more… )

There are some people whose lives incline you to listen seriously to whatever they say. Samuel M. Zwemer (1867-1952) was such a person and lived such a life. So his little book, Taking Hold of God: Studies on the Nature, Need, and Power of Prayer (Grand Rapids, Mich: Zondervan, 1936), had my attention simply due to Zwemer’s credibility as a missionary. Reading it, I was delighted to find that it contained an account of prayer which would have been moving no matter who penned it.

The title, Taking Hold of God, comes from a phrase in Isaiah 64 –a chapter which Zwemer tantalizingly calls “one of the five great chapters on prayer in the Bible” (what are the other four??? ). Isaiah begins this chapter by saying that noone has heard or seen what God has prepared for those who wait on him, and moves through confession that human righteousness is like filthy rags. Then in the seventh verse comes what Zwemer call’s Isaiah’s “definition of prayer:”

There is no one who calls upon your name,
who rouses himself to take hold of you

“It is a bold definition,” says Zwemer. “Literally (in the Hebrew text) he says that prayer means to rouse oneself out of sleep and seize hold of Jehovah.” Prayer, calling on the name of the Lord, is waking up and grabbing hold of God. What we have here is “the pathos of a suppliant who is in deadly earnest; the arms, the hands, the very fingers of the soul reaching out to lay hold of God; man’s personal, spiritual appropriation of deity! No wonder Paul calls Isaiah very bold!”

I am intrigued by the part about waking up, but Zwemer instead develops the image of “taking hold,” exploring how we reach out to God and take hold of him with all of our faculties: our mind, affections, will, memory, imagination, and conscience. “Taking hold of God,” in other words, is about the total and all-consuming nature of prayer, and the way it involves all that we are.

Our minds: We should “study to know God with all our mind,” rising above all created things no matter how great and godly, to God himself. “By the exercise of our intellects, illuminated by His Spirit, we must strive to understand His being and attributes, to adore Him for our creation and preservatin and his daily providence.” Zwemer notes rightly that many long passages of the Psalms and the book of Job “consist almost entirely of this intellectual adoration of God.”

Memory: “Thanksgiving is the exercise of our memory in the presence of the source of all blessings.” Amen.

Emotions: In the presence of God, we can express all of our feelings with the confidence that God knows them anyway, so here at last is someone from whom we can hide nothing. “I used to think I could fool God,” said a man I studied the Bible with in college, “but now I see that I can’t even fool my friends.” It is in secret prayer before God that we can exercise all of our emotions safely and properly. “Here they need not be stifled. The only cure for hypocrisy is to lay hold of the source of all sincerity –secret prayer. This is what David meant when he said, ‘Pour out your heart before Him.’ The scum, and the dregs!”

Zwemer could have said, “what is highest and what is lowest,” or “the top and the bottom,” but instead he followed the liquid imagery of “pouring out,” and went for the top layer (scum) and the bottom sediment (dregs).

In his 1965 book How to Be Rich: The Success Secrets of a Billionaire Businessman, J. Paul Getty (1892-1976) tells the story of how he quit smoking. On a vacation in France, he woke up at two A.M. in his hotel room, craving a cigarette. Finding none in his pack, none in his jacket, none in his luggage, he decided to make the hike to the nearest all-night vendor, at the train station six blocks away. It was pouring rain in the middle of the night in a small town in France. In Getty’s own words:

But the desire to smoke gnawed at me, and, perversely, the more I contemplated the difficulties entailed in getting a cigarette, the more desperately I wanted to have one. And so I took off my pajamas and started putting on my clothes. I was completely dressed and reaching for my raincoat when I abruptly stopped and began to laugh –at myself. It had suddenly struck me that my actions were illogical, even ludicrous.

There I stood, a supposedly intelligent human being, a supposedly reponsible and fairly successful businessman who considered himself sensible enough to give other people orders. Yet I was ready to leave my comfortable hotel room in the middle of the night and slosh a dozen blocks through a driving rainstorm for no other reason than that I wanted a cigarette –because I felt that I “had” to have one.

Thus J.P. Getty took a step back from himself, saw the situation from outside, and had to laugh at the little tobacco sticks that were somehow in command of the great businessman. The comedy of the situation came from the contrast in scale, because this silly little habit just did not measure up to the stature of the intelligent, responsible, successful, sensible commander of men. Getty crumpled up his empty pack of cigarettes, and with it he crumpled up the tobacco habit in one decisive movement, a triumph of will power over the force of habit.

C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) never did kick his own tobacco habit, and probably stayed home a lot precisely to avoid getting in desperate situations like Getty’s midnight foreigner nicotine fit. (more… )

The editorial staff at Middlebrow regrets to inform our readers that a picture published here recently does not meet our own high journalistic standards. We are issuing a retraction and correction of that image and are currently investigating our policies for accepting images from freelance contributors.

The image in question was provided by our freelance contributor Grendal B. Firedrake, and was published with the caption “Unidentified knight attacks city for no apparent reason, causing giant clouds of smoke to billow into the sky.” (more… )

“Worldliness is an immense number of allowable details issuing in an unallowable end.”
— Frederick W. Faber (1814-1863), Self-Deceit: A Comedy On Lies, A Way Of Overcoming Them

In Colossians 1:10, Paul prays that the Colossians would be able to “walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him.” In its original Greek, it’s a a rougher sentence, reading something like this: “to walk worthy of the Lord in all pleasing.” Most responsible translations do something to smooth that out, because even to make sense of the phrase, we readers need to know what the word “pleasing” is pointed toward. Clearly it’s pointed toward the Lord who was just mentioned: Walk worthy of the Lord, with the maximum possible amount of pleasingness to him.

“Pleasingness” — Not a word. In Greek it’s areskeia, and it is used to describe the way underlings behave toward kings. “It is used especially of ingratiating oneself with a sovereign or potentate,” notes one commentator, which explains why Aristotle does not consider areskeia to be a virtue. The comportment of underlings toward overlords is not generally a pretty picture. We have a lot of words for this behavior: obsequious, sycophantic, servile, fawning, toadying, smarmy, truckling, unctuous, etc. Most of these words have dropped out of common English usage, to be replaced by the decidedly crude term “brown-nosing.” It is bey0nd me, by the way, how we could surrender a half-dozen perfectly good words to oblivion and accept in their place a scatological vulgarism as our primary way of referring to this behavior. But I digress.

It’s easy to see why the moral vocabulary of the ancient world would use “pleasingness” or “eagerness to please” in a negative sense. It’s bad enough to see a yes-man just waiting eagerly for the next command, but areskeia goes to the next level: It implies a servant whose attentiveness to his master’s will is so all-consuming that he tries to anticipate his master’s desires and fulfill them before they are even spoken. Not only is every one of his master’s wishes this servant’s command, but the forecast of an inclination toward the possibility of some future wish is enough to get this servant hopping. Having a co-worker like this is just too much to bear.

And areskeia exercised toward humans, no matter how legitimate their human authority may be, is always bound to degenerate into sycophancy. In fact, Paul combines areskeia with the word for human, anthropos, to refer scornfully to an inferior kind of servanthood in Colossians 3:22: “man-pleasing,” anthropareskeia.

Of all this Paul is quite aware. But somehow he is capable of using “eager to please” (or “in all pleasingness”) in a solid, positive sense as well. What transforms the word is its object: the Lord. With such a Lord as Jesus Christ, how is a believer to “walk worthy?” By walking “in all pleasing,” with the eagerness to please which expresses itself in attentive devotion to the will of the Lord. Paul’s vision of Christian maturity, the completeness which he prays the Colossians would experience, rises above simply obeying individual commands as they come. It rises to the level of earnestly inquiring after the Lord’s will and being eager to please him.

While this positive sense of areskeia is not unique to the New Testament, it does make more sense in a Christian setting than in its pre-Christian uses. Before Christianity, who had a lord worthy of such obedience? A Greek lexicon from a previous generation, Herman Cremer’s Biblico-Theological Lexicon of New Testament Greek (4th edition 1895), is organized around “the language-molding power of Christianity,” tracing the way Greek words “received a new meaning, impress and a fresh power” from the Gospel. Cremer loved to trace the way the same words could mean such different things in the transition from pagan to Christian usage, as “the spirit of the language expands, and makes itself adequate to the new views which the Spirit of Christ reveals.” This is what happens with “eager to please.”

(Aside to Professor Nietzsche: Yes, yes, we know all about the genealogy of Christian morals and the dark workshop where these values are forged. And we also know about the darker workshop where you carried out your transvaluing. If all the Christians you ever met were toadies (and I’m not sure I trust your testimony on this score, given your interesting relationship to truth), that does not prove that they invented a lord to truckle up to. Perhaps they had in fact a true Lord but served him unworthily, with an obsequiousness they learned from human relations? They stand condemned on that ground. But in that case there is a standard against which to judge them, and yourself.)