The single most widespread American misunderstanding of prayer is that it is private. Strictly and biblically speaking, there is no private prayer. Private in its root meaning refers to theft. It is stealing. When we privatize prayer we embezzle the common currency that belongs to all. When we engage in prayer without any desire for or awareness of the comprehensive, inclusive life of the kingdom that is “at hand” in both space and time, we impoverish the social reality that God is bringing to completion.
Solitude in prayer is not privacy. The differences between privacy and solitude are profound. Privacy is our attempt to insulate the self from interference; solitude leaves the company of others for a time in order to listen to them more deeply, be aware of them, serve them. Privacy is getting away from others so that I don’t have to be bothered with them; solitude is getting away from the crowd so that I can be instructed by the still, small voice of God, who is enthroned on the praises of the multitudes. Private prayers are selfish and thin; prayer in solitude enrolls in a multivoiced, century-layered community: with angels and archangels in all the company of heaven we sing, “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty.”
We can no more have a private prayer than we can have a private language. A private language is impossible. Every word spoken carries with it a long history of development in complex communities of experience. All speech is relational, making a community of speakers and listeners. So too is prayer. Prayer is language used in the vast contextual awareness that God speaks and listens. We are involved, whether we will it or not, in a community of the Word — spoken and read, understood and obeyed (or misunderstood and disobeyed). We can do this in solitude, but we cannot do it in private. It involves an Other and others.
Currently reading: Where Your Treasure Is: Psalms that Summon You from Self to Community by Eugene H. Peterson 📚
Moral transformation isn’t something we do; it is something that happens to us, often in unexpected and painful ways. With few exceptions, the pattern is fairly uniform: life must break us in order for God to break in. Grace initiates, enables, empowers, sustains, and completes the whole process.
Currently reading: The Age of Choice by Sophia Rosenfeld 📚
Finished reading: The Open Secret by Lesslie Newbigin 📚
So much still to chew on here. I’ll have to re-read several sections in the coming weeks and months…
Even when the church has done its best to discern the signs of the times, to understand what are the powers at work in the world, and to point to the issues where decisions have to be made in the conflict between the reign of God and the power of evil, this understanding is partial, limited, and distorted. The human situation is more complex and subtle than even the best Christian analysis can penetrate. Therefore the church cannot make a total identification of conversion to Christ with a particular set of ethical decisions based on its own analysis. It must speak to the best of its ability about what obedience to Christ will involve. But it must also recognize that its own ethical perceptions are limited and blurred by its own sinful self-interest. In preaching Christ it will certainly make clear (perhaps more effectively by example than by word) that conversion will have ethical implications. But it must also be ready to be surprised by the fresh insights of the converts into the ethical implications of the gospel and must expect to have to revise and correct its own patterns of obedience. This point is obscured when we think of mission in terms of “foreign missions.” In this case the sending church is insulated from the correction that it needs to receive from the new converts. Mission, as I have insisted, is not just church extension. It is an action in which the Holy Spirit does new things, brings into being new obedience. But the new gifts are for the whole body and not just for the new members. Mission involves learning as well as teaching, receiving as well as giving.
The church misunderstands itself if it thinks that it is itself the place where the truth and righteousness of the reign of God are embodied as against the reign of evil in the world. This ancient temptation to identify the church with the kingdom of God seems to be present again in some manifestations of the theology of liberation. The relation of the church to the kingdom is a more complex one and, I am convinced, can be truly grasped only by means of the trinitarian model.
Conversion is to Christ. It is primarily and essentially a personal event in which a human person is laid hold of by the living Lord Jesus Christ at the very center of the person’s being and turned toward him in loving trust and obedience. Christ is the Son of the Father by whom all things are made, sustained, and ordered toward their true end, anointed by the Spirit to proclaim the kingdom of his Father and to manifest it in bearing upon himself the sin of the world.
Conversion to Christ is therefore also commitment to be with him and with all who are so committed to continuing in the power of the same anointing, proclaiming, and bearing. It is commitment to follow Jesus, with all who are so committed, along the way of the cross—the way of fearless and trustful encountering and enduring the power of evil in the contemporary world.
The company of those so committed and so following does not possess in itself the fullness of understanding or of obedience. It is a learning community. Part of that learning will be the prophetic discernment in the power of the Spirit of the issues where evil is to be encountered and endured. Part of it will be the receiving of correction and enlargement by those whom the Spirit calls in discipleship. The Spirit is not the property of the community but is its lord and guide, going ahead of the church and using both its proclamation and its endurance to bring fresh people to conversion. The church cannot lay down in advance for such people what commitment will mean but must, like Peter in the house of Cornelius, learn from them new lessons about its own obedience. As a learning community that can only press forward from partial to fuller understanding of the Father’s reign, the church will know that it cannot impose its own ethical insights at any one time and place upon those whom the Spirit calls into its company. It must always press on toward fuller obedience but at the same time proclaim Christ as Lord above and beyond its own faulty obedience, and expect and welcome the correction of those whom the Spirit calls into commitment to Christ.
The church lives in the midst of history as a sign, instrument, and foretaste of the reign of God. But this does not mean that in the life of the church there can be at any point in time a simple identification of the justice of God with the justice of a particular political cause. The church has too often fallen into that trap. To refuse the identification is not to fall into some kind of idealist or spiritualist illusion. It is not to detach the interior life of the soul from the business of doing justice and mercy in the life of society. It is simply to acknowledge that all human causes are ambiguous and all human actions are involved in the illusions that are the product of our egotism. It is to confess that final judgment belongs to God, and that when people usurp that prerogative they fall into self-destructive blindness.
The issue may be put in another way. If we acknowledge the God of the Bible, we are committed to struggle for justice in society. Justice means giving to each his or her due. Our problem (as seen in the light of the gospel) is that each of us overestimates what is due to us as compared with what is due to our neighbors. Consequently, justice cannot be done, for everyone will judge in his or her own favor. Justice is done only when we all acknowledge a judge with authority over us, in relation to whose judgment we must relativize our own. It is the business of an earthly judge to represent that higher judgment. Because the judge is also a sinful human being, his or her judgment will also be corrupted by self-interest, and the judge may have to be overthrown in the name of the justice of God. A just society can flourish only when its members acknowledge the justice of God, which is the justice manifested and enacted in the cross. If I do not acknowledge a justice that judges the justice for which I fight, I am an agent not of justice, but of lawless tyranny.
At this point the Christian has to be aware of the trap set by Marxism. I am not here questioning the Marxist analysis of the nature of capitalism, which I find very convincing; I am speaking of the Marxist understanding of human nature. The most obvious feature of the dedicated Marxist is extreme moralism. For the Marxist, evil is always something external to oneself. It is the “class enemy” that constitutes the locus of the evil against which one has to fight. Consequently there can be no thought of forgiveness and reconciliation. There are only two realities—the oppressor and the oppressed, the exploiter and the exploited. The oppressed and exploited are the exclusive bearers of truth and righteousness. There is no truth or righteousness over them, so to speak, that is able to judge and forgive them…. When the “oppressed” acquire power, absolutely no check exists upon their use of that power. There is no righteousness over them that can judge them…. Those who identify themselves as the representatives of the “oppressed” are in a position to combine unlimited self-righteousness in respect of themselves with unlimited moral indignation in respect of their opponents. This is the most characteristic feature of the dedicated Marxist. Since there is no transcendent righteousness that can judge and forgive both the oppressor and the oppressed, the way is open for unlimited self-righteousness.
The church can only represent the righteousness of God in history in the way that Jesus did. It is enabled to do this by being constantly reincorporated into Jesus' saving action through baptism and the Eucharist and through the preaching and hearing of the Word, which explains these and applies their meaning to the actual situation. The heart of the matter is reached in the celebration of the Eucharist. Here the ultimate horizon of grace and judgment touches the present moment. Here the church has to learn to live by the grace that forgives but does not condone sin and under the judgment that exposes sin and yet keeps open the way of repentance.
The ideology of the free market now has nothing to limit its claims. There is no visible countervailing power. There seems no sign of a check to its relentless advance. And its destructive potential, both for the coherence of human society and for the safeguarding of the environment, are formidable. The ideology of the free market has proved itself more powerful than Marxism. It is, of course, not just a way of arranging economic affairs. It has deep roots in the human soul. It can be met and mastered only at the level of religious faith, for it is a form of idolatry. The churches have hardly begun to recognize that this is probably their most urgent missionary task during the coming century.
I enjoyed watching Godspeed, and was arrested by this line from Eugene Peterson: “There’s no place on this earth that’s without potential for holiness. Or maybe…the potential for unearthing holiness, right where we are, with these people we are with.”
A deep part of the puzzle of human living is that our desire to be understood and loved is often buried under a fear that if we were seen, the other wouldn’t and couldn’t, looking right at me, say “I love you.” Life is often a cruel combination of “sighing to be approved” (George Herbert) and yet living among others as what Taylor Caldwell calls “sealed vessels” (The Listener). Trapped in this habit of hiding — of shame and secret-keeping — any “I love you” feels like it comes with a footnote: The “you” that is loved is not actually you, but only what Thornton Wilder describes as our poses and “postures before a mirror”: the image we show the world while under the surface hides a lonely, longing, yet still unseen someone.
God’s love is a for-us-as-we-actually-are kind of love. This is one significant implication of God speaking, of the word becoming flesh, of that enfleshed word being promised in bread and wine and water: embodied love that makes contact with actual humans. This love also makes contact with real rather than ideal people through the diagnostic word that unmasks us, that finds us in our hiding, that speaks louder than our lies. To quote Wilder again, he says that what we are gesturing towards when we say art is “true” is that when a painting or poem or song or sculpture encounters us we find ourselves saying, “Oh, that’s the way it really is.” God’s need-unveiling, honesty-evoking love is like that. It reveals what really is. It digs deeper than our denial and reveals that God has “searched me and known me” (Ps. 139), that before this God “all hearts are open, all desires are known, and no secrets are hid” (Collect for Purity). And here — where and when “you” can only mean “you” — the gospel gives the one who “loved me and gave himself for me.”
Thinking with The Alcestiad, you might say that the distinction between law and gospel describes the language God speaks so that those God loves can hear, receive, and experience that love. God unearths our honest need, and so says, “I know you.” And to “you” — with no footnotes — God speaks his first, fundamental, and final word: “I love you.”