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Subscribe to CommentsBack from vacation Up North (f you seek a pleasant peninsula–look about you!). Spent all day yesterday cleaning up my home office, where my praying space is. In Mystically Wired I have a little section on making a physical space for prayer in your home or apartment and keeping that one spot clear for prayer. No paying bills or arguing with your wife in that space. A set apart place.
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The thesis of Mystically Wired: Exploring New Realms in Prayer is simple: Most of us only use a small portion of our brains when praying and there’s more to pray with than that. Mainly we use the parts of our brain used for study, for conversation, perhaps for problems solving, analysis, and argument. We use the rational parts of our brain. Sometimes we add the parts of our brain that sing, perhaps even the parts of the brain engaged in tongues speaking.
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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.
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Jesus, Moses and Elijah met on a mountain. The disciples fell asleep as glory short-circuited their attention span. Jesus blazed whiter than the white hot sun. Hmmmm….the most extraordinary experiences of God seem to happen out in nature, as though nature were an outdoor cathedral.
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Did you hear about the man who talked to the moon when he prayed? And to the sun and the stars, to the fish, birds, and trees. Is this allowed? Is it proper? Is it sane? Should someone take him aside and set him straight? Or was the man inspired?
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Jesus Brand Spirituality: He Wants His Religion Back is a book I wrote as an evangelical, by which I mean, as someone who cares about communicating the good news (gk. evangel) among those who have not heard good news. Right here, for example, where I live. It is based on a certain reading of the culture in which I live. We who have received and therfore have a responsibility to be and share good news, also have a responsibility to face up to the cultural context we operate in. Here’s the challenge: we have a branding problem. We who love, admire and seek to follow Jesus of Nazareth, must acknowledge that the Christian brand in America has sufferred something very like trademark infringement.
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Many pastors I know are subject to the mental cruelty of their own rumination. Oh, it’s the bane of pastoral ministry! Rumination, like a cow chewing her cud, swallowing, regurgitating to chew some more, ad nauseum, pun intended. It’s as unpleasant as it sounds when it happens in your head: going over and over the same thought, the same problem solving inner dialogue, the same rehearsed conversation for extended periods, ad nauseum, no fun intended.
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Phyllis Tickle, in her latest and greatest, The Words of Jesus, writes in the introduction about an “actualist” reading of the canonical gospels. Typical Tickle: lay it out and let the readers make sense of it themselves. Or perhaps lay it out as if she needs the readers’ help figuring out what she’s written. Well it hit me like a ton of basement block and I’ve been trying to make sense of it ever since. Not a “modernist” reading of the words. Not a “literalist” reading of the words. But an “actualist” reading of the words.
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One of the reasons you don’t pray more has nothing to do with your dedication to God or your capacity for self discipline or your forgetfulness in matters spiritual or your busy life. It has to do with your need to learn how to calm your praying brain. Too often you close your eyes to pray and it’s an unpleasant experience. You become more aware of your underlying anxiety. You become more subject to your grinding thoughts. You put up with it as long as you can, then open your eyes and move on to the next distraction. There are ways to calm yourself. Thankfully many ways. Here’s one: a way to present your embodied self to God, and it goes like this….
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There is a grinding inner world behind our eyes and between our ears. Our thoughts being grist for some mill whose operator we only seem to be. The thoughts themselves are often wrapped in anxiety, born along by fear, an unnamed and therefor wild dread, or thoughts that seem to suck the beauty out of life into the wormhole of boredom. And this is why we pray and why we avoid prayer. We seek to pray because of this, to escape it, or move beyond it; but when prayer simply leads us deeper into this grinding world, we avoid it. Ecstasy is what we seek, to stand outside of all this, or within it, to peer beyond it.
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