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We're beginning a series about the Psalms. I'll be working my way through the Psalter with Martin Luther as my companion. I hope you'll join us.The evangelical way of praying has a lot to commend it. Find a quiet place, preferably first thing in the morning. Sit. Close your eyes.
Start talking to God…
It’s simple, straightforward, and has served a lot of people quite well over the years. Over the last four years, however, I have come to recognize that it is only one way of praying. What’s more, many Christians reach a place in their spiritual journey where ‘evangelical prayer’ is no longer a helpful way of entering the presence of God.
I hear objections in the background. Other types of prayer aren’t as intimate. Won’t using written prayers mean that our prayers aren’t really ours? Isn’t repetitious prayer, well, repetitious? Didn’t Jesus warn against babbling like the pagans?
It’s not that we need to get rid of evangelical prayer altogether. What’s necessary is that, from time to time, we supplement it with some other form of prayer that more readily connects with where we are spiritually and physically. After all, we weren’t created for prayer so much as prayer was created for us.
I have found prayer quite difficult over the last several years, especially the last year with a young child in our home. In my case, it has been ever so easy for what I felt should have been earnest, intimate conversations with the father, to turn either into intellectual discourses on the nature of existence or the repetitious saying of half-digested statements about how bad and I am and how badly I need God’s forgiveness. In short, I have been stuck in prayer. What’s more, I have found it incredibly difficult to persist in prayer because sitting still and focusing for such a long period of time (10+ minutes) seems almost impossible, conditioned as I am by twitter and facebook to almost instantaneous inputs of information.
What to do? I began the Orthodox practice of praying “The Jesus Prayer” some time ago. It goes like this: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.”It has it’s roots in the words of the tax collector in Luke: “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner” (18:10-14).
It’s a great way to center oneself in order to be able to engage in liturgical or spontaneous prayer and the reading of Scripture.
It can also be supplemented with the use of prayer beads/rope. This is a tool designed to aid us in prayer by helping us to focus on the task at hand by giving us something to fiddle with. It was invented, initially, to give illiterate monks a way to say a consistent number of prayers. The typical rope has 100 knots or beads. The one I use has 33. My practice is to center myself by saying the Jesus prayer (one per bead, 30 on mine) and then a gloria patri for every knot (there are three on my rope). Do this 3 times and find that by the end of the practice I’m more focused, calm, and ready to continue in God’s presence through other forms of prayer and engagement with Scripture.
For the last couple of months I have been using a Lutheran prayer book and have been reading the Psalms from Luther’s book of Psalms (with his commentary). This week I have switched to the using the Presbyterian Book of Common Worship. At other times I have used Phyllis Tickle’s The Divine Hours or The Episcopal Book of Common Prayer.
Prayer is a lifting of the hear up to God. And, as such, it is central to the Christian life. That’s why it’s so important to realize that one form of prayer will very often not be sufficient to take us through every stage of life. During times of trial and fatigue, it is important to have access to other ways to connect with God. The Jesus Prayer has been such to me.
From Rod Dreher at Crunchy Concomes a quote from political philosophy John Gray. It expresses quite nicely my own frustration with what passes for conservatism in today’s United States.
Conservative thought, in this new historical circumstance, is likely to be a mixture of fashionable techno-utopianism — such as the proposition, recently seriously advanced, that the virtual communities of the Internet can replace the local communities that free markets have desolated — and opportunistic fundamentalism. This is not a form of thought from which enlightenment or guidance can reasonably be expected. The enduring human needs which conservative philosophy once acknowledged are not now addressed by conservatives, partly because meeting them entails radical and — for today’s conservatives — unwelcome changes in current economic institutions. Meeting these human needs — for deep and strong forms of common life, fulfilling work and a rich public environment — demands re-embedding the market processes which neo-liberal policy has emancipated from any kind of political control or accountability in the cultures and communities they exist to serve. And this is a project, little short of revolutionary in its implications, that no form of conservative thought today is willing to contemplate.
Rod Dreher at Cruncy Con links to a fascinating piece from the New Republic. Read it here.
In it, Nordhaus & Shellenberger (two environmentalists) explore why environmentalism seems to have real difficulty gaining popular traction. Their conclusion is that environmentalism is essentially a movement in and of cultural elites (like many other important movements like, for example, civil rights):
The problem is not that most greens are elites, per se, but rather that too few of them acknowledge the material basis for their ecological concern and that too many reject the modern project of expanding prosperity altogether.
More:
…[T]he truth is that, while we often talk of our desire for greater community and interconnectedness, we choose ever more privacy, autonomy, and personal freedom. Few of even the most ardent greens could seriously imagine subsuming their individual identities to a pre-agrarian tribe, or abandoning their office jobs for a life of hard agricultural labor. The retreat from older forms of community, and the move toward greater individuation, is universal and largely positive. Colin Beavan and Michael Pollan lament, respectively, the loss of community and the loss of connection between humans and the land. But both choose to live alone with their families in cities, not on agricultural communes, and both express themselves as unique thinkers and writers.
I watched a clip of Brennan Manning yesterday, which has been reverberating in my heart for the last 24 hours. Here is is:
The question that I keep coming back to is this: what if the only question Jesus asks me at the Judgment is, “did you really believe that I love you just as you are, not as you should be?”
If this question is, as Brennan suggests, the one essential question that divides the true Christian from the cultural Christian, then I’m afraid to answer it. So often God’s love and acceptance of my seems to theoretical, so contingent upon my performance.
Lord, have mercy.
I had been wanting to watch Steven Spielberg’s Munich since it came out in 2005. I was vaguely aware of the events of Munich 1972, but not in any particular detail. It was three years before I was born, after all.
I basically knew that some or all of the Israeli Olympic team had been taken hostage by Palestinians. I knew that there was a rescue of some sort, that failed. And I knew that the Mossad (Israeli’s CIA, basically) had tracked down and assassinated many of those who had played a part in the planning of the Munich attack.
Talking to my father over the phone recently, I told him we had seen the movie and asked him whether he had. He hadn’t.
However, he told me that in 1972 he and my mother were living near Dusseldorf (about 5 hours from Munich) in, then, West Germany. They watched the news while they ate dinner on the small patio of their flat and, presumably with much of the rest of the world, watched with horror as the gruesome events played out.
For more information on Munich 1972, there is a well-written wikipedia article.
By way of summary. Several members of the Israeli Olympic team were taken hostage in September 1972 by operatives of a group named Black September. This group was known to have ties to Yasser Arafat’s fatah movement. 
The hostage-takers demanded the release and safe passage to Egypt of over 200 members of various terrorist groups who were in prison in Israel (two were in prison in Germany).
The German government devised a rescue plan. However, owing to several strategic and tactical plunders, the attempt caused the death of all save three of the terrorists (by sniper) and all eleven of the hostages (at the hands of the terrorists).
The three captured terrorists were later released after Black September hijacked a Lufthansa jet in October 1972. These released terrorists flew to Libya where they were treated as heroes and gave media interviews.
The response of Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir was swift and determined. She vowed that those responsible for planning and financing the attack. Operation Wrath of God was the Israeli mission to identify, locate, and execute those responsible for Munich who were living in Europe. A similar mission, Operation Spring of Youth (1973), focused on Beirut.
Operation Wrath of God is thought to have lasted as long as twenty years.
