ken wilson online

Today is the official release date for Mystically Wired.   It’s a book about intimacy, a hallmark of the spirituality I learned from John Wimber, captured in the intimate worship songs of Vineyard.  But, as the sub-title (Exploring New Realms in Prayer) infers, the book explores new forms of prayer, new ways of praying, and new experiences mediated by those new ways.  Which, of course, are mainly old ways, forgotten, neglected or left unexplored thanks to that great blinding influence: prejudice.

I’m shocked by my own prejudices, and how easily they latch onto my faith.

Like demons.

The book is largely the product of  a slow motion flip in my experience of prayer that began near the time of my father’s death in 1999.    My normal daily devotions had run completely out of steam.  In desperation, I turned to some new-to-me forms of praying, beginning with the use of–horrors!– a “prayer book.”

Enter my first prejudice.  Having grown up in and then out of the Episcopal church of the 1950’s, I knew that prayer books were part of an old time religion that I left behind for a flashy new spontaneous, charismatic, revivalist form of Christianity.  Prayer books were for people who didn’t have the Spirit to help them pray.

Finding a prayer book was another matter though.  The Daily Office that priests use is pretty hard to find.  So I was intrigued to discover The Divine Hours, a from of the daily office for the rest of us, compiled by Phyllis Tickle, then the religion editor of Publishers Weekly.

I probably picked up for possible purchase, then returned to its shelf, a copy of The Divine Hours at Borders (the original located here in Ann Arbor) on three or four separate visits.   Phyllis Tickle was an Episcopalian.  I had never heard of her.  Plus, she was a journalist.   None of this endeared the book to me.  Owing to my pre-judgments.  I couldn’t be that hard up.

Eventually, need got the better of me, and I bought a copy and started to use it. In time, I found myself slipping into a deep river of prayer that has been flowing since the time of Abraham.  The Divine Hours became for me a portal into a new way of praying.

Next up, a book on my father’s book shelf by Anthony Bloom, an Orthodox bishop, titled humbly, Beginning to Pray.   I was clearing out my father’s apartment after his death, sorting through his books.   Decided to keep this one, despite the fact I’d never heard of Anthony Bloom and didn’t expect an Orthodox bishop to make much of contribution to my praying.   More blinding prejudice

But reading this little gem, confirmed the validity of some strange happenings in my praying having to do with silence–happenings which might otherwise have evaporated unnoticed, where it not for Bloom’s deep wisdom.

In time, I stumbled into The Jesus Prayer, a staple of the Eastern Orthodox praying tradition.  A meditative, repetitive prayer that tripped all my Eastern Religion prejudice alerts.

Somewhere in there, I got interested in nature again.  Got turned on to the woods and birds and trees and such.  Started to experience and then to anticipate finding God winking at me through his creation. In ever so subtle ways, easy to ignore, like God himself.  This direction too  is suspect, because as we all know it’s a step toward pantheism.  New age stuff.  The  neo-pagan spirituality of environmental whackos and other suspect groups.

But something happens when you hit 50 or thereabouts, or it least it did in my case.   You grow a little less cautious.

You have the advantage by then of having to have faced a few of your religious prejudices.  You realize that religion, like any other human enterprise, is  a breeding ground for prejudice, in fact.  Yes, even your rarified and purified form of religion.

And you realize that behind the door of many a bias, God waits.  So you learn to distrust your unexamined first impressions, even the ones that have been hanging around you for decades.

One of my favorite lines from the gospels is “and their eyes were holden” (Luke 24: 16, KJV) in the account of the two on the road to Emmaus.  Jesus had slipped onto their path but they were not able to recognize him.  Their eyes were holden.  Held. Restrained. Bound.

By grief yes. But also, it is likely, by garden variety prejudice. The first eye-witnesses were women, hysterical women whose testimony wasn’t valid in most courts.

And so it has been and ever shall be.  We are, all of us, prejudiced against God.  He is is the ultimate Other, whom we distrust, like all the other others.  So we miss him in the poor, and in the stranger, and in each other, much of the time.

But John Wimber used to say, “You can’t get more of God if you’re not willing to eat from dirty spoons.”

That is to say, God will knock on the door of our prejudice–if only to rattle our cage.   Because it is a cage of our own constructing.

And this, my friends, is partly why so many of us who pride ourselves in being part of the awakened, the vibrant, the personal-relationship-with-Jesus gang, are dry as a bone inside and lurch from church to church like so many zombies looking for jolt.

Yes, dry as a very old piece of Melba Toast.

Dry as a throat in the middle of the night, goading us to get up and stumble into the bathroom for a cup of water.

Tags: Anthony Bloom, john wimber, nature, prayer, silence, the divine hours, The Jesus Prayer, Vineyard

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 20th, 2010 at 8:38 am and is filed under mystically wired. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.