The mind stands dumb before its Maker

The Shadow of the Reformation :: A Short Series on Why Protestants Have Trouble With Prayer

Part Three

From earliest days, Christians were taught to relinquish their ideas about God in order to embrace (and be embraced) by the one thing mere thoughts can’t give them. This doesn’t mean that Christianity shunned the intellect; it simply means that in the end, the mind stands dumb before its Maker, and the only way to the Heart of God is through the human heart—that is, through love. So prayer, especially wordless, interior prayer, was the ultimate expression of prayer for most Christians for most of Christian history. And even if Christians didn’t all practice some form of the prayer of the heart, its value was rarely questioned, and its practice always had teachers.

To be continued . . .

I must love the one thing I cannot think

The Shadow of the Reformation :: A Short Series on Why Protestants Have Trouble With Prayer

Part Two

The anonymous author of the fourteenth century spiritual classic, The Cloud of Unknowing, and probably an English Christian monk, sums up the mainstream teaching this way: “We can know so many things. Through God’s grace, our minds can explore, understand, and reflect on creation and even on God’s own works, but we can’t think our way to God. That’s why I’m willing to abandon everything I know, to love the one thing I cannot think. He can be loved, but not thought. By love, God can be embraced and held, but not by thinking” (Carmen Butcher, trans., p. 21).

To be continued . . .

What music can teach us about prayer

Prayer is listening, resonating, participating in the fulness of God and creation. In this TED talk, percussionist Evelyn Glennie explores music as more than mere notes on a page. Rather, as an expression of the human experience. Playing with sensitivity and nuance informed by a soul-deep understanding of and connection to music, she talks about a music that is more than sound waves perceived by the human ear.

I wonder in what way(s) prayer is the resonance of sound, the sensation of something deep, even eternal...a participation in the eternal song of the Trinity.

If the Eternal Word was made flesh, that is, a human being in what way are we human beings invited to participate in the Word of Eternity, the deep music of the cosmos?

In what ways are our very bodies, offered in prayer, a "resonating chamber" for the deep music of God as Trinity and of the angels, saints, and drumming of the creation?

A little book on the Jesus Prayer

"When you pray," it has been wisely said by an Orthodox writer in Finland, "you yourself must be silent. . . . You must be silent; let the prayer speak."  To achieve silence: this is of all things the hardest and the most decisive in the art of prayer.

So begins Bishop Kallistos Ware's little booklet on the Jesus Prayer.  A theologian at Oxford University, Ware insightful draws the ancient Christian practice into the modern world.  I've written often about the Jesus Prayer or Prayer of the Heart, and commend the little book to you.

Abiding in love: entering the sixth and final stage

Continued from a previous series of posts on the stages of spiritual growth . . . These stages certainly can be thought of and experienced as an upward path. But there are dangers in viewing the spiritual life as an ascent. In our world, people tend to scratch and claw over each other to get the top of the corporate ladder, or look down with a sense of superiority over those below them. Spiritual growth does require disciple and courage, but exertion and effort and self-will nearly always end in spiritual disaster. Remember, the effort to reach the heavens with the Tower of Babel was a colossal mistake of human hubris (Genesis 11).

If Christ teaches us anything, it’s that the way up is down, the way to greatness is through humility, the way to possess All is to let go of everything.

Stage six, what I call, “abiding in love,” is the end point in the journey, the goal of the spiritual quest. When you arrive here, you realize that you’ve not been traveling up but in, to the depths of your being; you’ve been traveling down, into the fullness of your humanity. You’ve become a fully integrated person.

To be continued . . .