how it is to be without excuse

Aside from the more or less spontaneous trips to both Zurich, Switzerland, and Vienna, Austria, as means to finalize and apply for visas, the past few weeks have been, well, still rather busy. I’ll not go into the details to spare you from the boredom, so I’ll detour and move into writing about broader events, such as for the past month (and for the next two) we have been exploring the spiritual discipline of praiseworthy speech. Like the study of prayer I conducted in January, a more detailed overview written by Mitch, who has chosen to host this discipline, may be found here. Our most recent piece of this project was to write a short essay on the idea of praiseworthy speech as it manifested first in the life and ministry of Jesus, and second in the death and resurrection. I have taken the liberty of pasting my essay here for you to read, but it’s not long, so don’t get scared and bail on me just yet. This project has been difficult because it’s not until you open yourself to accountability to others that you realize quite how injurious our language may be, whether we intend it or not. We come from a culture of “oneupmanship” and instant reaction, and it’s hard to shake off the influences you have absorbed for dozens of years. But we’re trying to anyway. So have a read of my short essay below, check out our blog for other such “praiseworthy products,” and let me know how this rubs you.

“I suppose the most interesting toehold for this project as it intersects the life and ministry of Jesus was his lifelong commitment to “telling it like it was.” In every instance of his speaking there lurked a stark denuding of the deceptive and harmful language people used to conceal deeper and more wholesome truths. If we really examine the substance of Jesus’ speech we rarely see the predominantly complimentary language we have attuned ourselves to expect from him; instead, what we see is Jesus pulling the world back into alignment by tempering the tone, gravity, and content of his words according to the needs of the situations in which he found himself. To those who needed a sharp rebuke he wielded brutally cutting and withering reprimands like a whip; to those who needed consolation or restoration he whispered compassion and advocacy like a tender mother; and to those who simply banded around him for wisdom and inspiration he levied double-edged ethical principles that struck at the establishment as much as they pierced the sincerest of hearts. As much as we echo the love of God we must remember first that the majority of Jesus’ communication orbited primarily a core of unveiling the truth, a truth that we all need to hear about the world, about near-sighted and conventional wisdoms, and about ourselves so that we don’t become like those who clothe themselves in self-deception and imperfect self-awareness, who point the finger outward to divert attention away from fractured realities and false conclusions.

And so the death and resurrection of Jesus rip away the last pretenses of crude and contented replacements for truth. The words of Jesus’ ministry culminate physically in the splinters of a cross and the tearing of the temple curtain: what stood as the groomed and impassible barriers to the divine reality were shown to be the duplicitous veils that they were, and the lingering syllables surrounding the crucifixion scene leave no doubt as to Jesus’ lifelong conviction to rescue us from the sweet seductions of untruth: “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.”

Jesus’ insistence on speaking the truth thus sticks like a thorn in the tongue, working its barb into the empty, meaningless, and lowly inclinations of speech in order to bleed out all that perpetuates the myths and lies of the unclean heart. But the blood that seeps out around this tiny prick bathes everything in one death or another: we may persist in spewing out the same lines, the same script, as the rest of the world, adding to the cup yet more death and oppression, or we may bathe our speech in the blood that triumphed over death, that life-giving flow that restores and transfuses the pulse inside, destroying the copy for the sake of the original.

It becomes to us to speak when and where others cannot, using the words of life to expose the impostors, those fraudulent claims that cannot stand up against truth spoken from an overflowing reservoir of love. Shrewd as snakes and innocent as doves we dwell in a world that has lost its way and lost its resistance, and if we who have tasted the firstfruits of salvation fail to speak with candor the truthfulness of Christ, to whom then does the task belong?”

As we’ve all quickly come to realize, the act of praying is a difficult one, especially as we come face-to-face with an acute inability to harness in words the great strainings of our hearts and minds. We know that we want to pray the stirring and powerful litanies of the biblical heroes, but the harder we try the more we find that we don’t know what to say, how to say them, or how to keep them sounding sincere. Perhaps this is the great problem of human nature: the impulse to impose our will upon others, to elicit through the precise persuasion of words the desired, predetermined ends that we deem best in a given situation. Given the facts we will always assume that we are able to deduce the best possible outcome for a situation, no matter how finite our understanding or how near-sighted is our omniscience. But prayer is that medium that thwarts us in our eloquence and shies away from our most pointed rhetoric. We can pretend to comprehend it and to diagram its sundry parts, but in the end we contain prayer only as well as we can cup water in our hands. We can tighten every muscle in our palms but the water will always slip between our fingers and away from us. It’s scope is ultimately beyond us, but yet in a way that humbles us mightily its power already resides within us. We simply must concede that perhaps we don’t and can never know everything, nor can we possibly grasp the great interconnectivity that binds human to human and human to God. In the end our eloquence and rhetoric break apart into a confused and clumsy babble, and in that great interface between desiring the intervention of change and seeking its fruition before God the full breadth of our verbal sophistication meets a sobering inefficacy.

But if we notice, the most acclaimed and most enduring prayers of Yahwistic history are not ones of elaborate wordiness or refined persuasion but of release and self-abandon to the Lord. Even among David’s most tormented psalms, in which he calls down divine wrath upon his enemies, his cries nevertheless give way to quiet surrender, acquiescing that despite the urgency of his present circumstances, his own longings should never be expected to trump things about which he knows little. And so I would like us to simultaneously expand upon prayers of intercession and revisit the prayers of presence from the first week. We discussed in our meeting yesterday that perhaps prayers of intercession are less about praying for specific things that we would want to see happen but about gaining a more godly perspective in order to frame such a prayer with more centered priorities. For instance, if Q is sick, it may be helpful to pray that Q regains health, but we could also refocus that prayer that through this sickness Q may develop a ministry or posture that is able to bring glory to God, a better relationship may develop between people around Q, or something else more relevant to Q may occur. Here we aren’t placing the majority of our prayer on Q actually recovering from the illness but rather expanding the arena for God’s work to be displayed more holistically. But not only are we through prayer refusing to limit the space for God to work in, we are also learning to trust our first impulses less. Rather than leading God to our conclusions through prayer we are instead offering up to God the fragrance of our concern, compassion, and empathy for others and, in a vastly different approach, laying these requests in God’s hands for his supervision and decision-making. In this way our prayers employ far fewer words and poise in favor of listening for the desires and will of God in these situations, imploring us to orient our hearts and minds around what God wants and about what God cares.

And so this week we will integrate concepts from both the prayers of presence and of intercession to engage what I’ll call the prayer of the heart. As the Spirit intercedes on behalf of our groanings and soulful sighs, let us pare down our prayer thoughts to something much more visceral. Enter into a time of prayer with God during which you mentally or verbally say nothing. Simply dedicate the ensuing thoughts to God as a way of laying out the conversation before him, whether what follows be joy, sadness, anger and frustration, or thanksgiving. By removing our “opinioned” side of the dialogue we leave more room for the voice of God to resonate, letting his will be heard more clearly over our own. But more than merely entering into this period of verbal silence passively, be active in listening, weighing the words, thoughts, and images that drift toward you for the clarion wisdom of God. Let images of family, friends, situations, emotions, and whatever else float up to the surface of your thoughts and spend time dwelling on them but without formulating words or thoughts to describe them. Let us trust that God knows each of these images as intimately as we do and that he seeks to insert his wisdom into each. With out human tendencies to suppress, amplify, or even omit different aspects of a situation, it’s probably safe to say that he knows these things better then we do and how best to resolve each. And as we pray, let us be aware of the peace that pervades our prayers as, through this type of prayer, we are able to more fully communicate the depths of our concern in ways that words alone could never convey. In the prayer of Soren Kierkegaard,

“O Lord, calm the waves of this heart; calm its tempests! Calm thyself, O my soul, so that the divine can act in thee! Calm thyself, O my soul, so that God is able to repose in thee, so that His peace may cover thee! Yes, Father in Heaven, often have we found that the world cannot give us peace, O but make us feel that Thou art able to give peace; let us know the truth of Thy promise: that the whole world may not be able to take away Thy peace.”

So let us be active in praying and allowing the flood of concerns we might have to spill over the narrow siphon of verbal output. This prayer confounds our insistences to qualify an effective prayer as one that can be spoken coherently and challenges us to trust the Spirit of God to pray for us with more sophistication than we might expect. And with this newfound freedom, let us be people who pray without ceasing, who can engage God more fluidly without tripping over our own words and lack of clarity to trip us up. To conclude, a repost of a passage from Henri Nouwen’s The Way of the Heart:

“Prayer is standing in the presence of God with the mind in the heart; that is, at that point of our being where there are no divisions or distinctions and where we are totally one. There God’s spirit dwells and there the great encounter takes place. There heart speaks to heart, because there we stand before the face of the Lord, all-seeing, within us. …Real prayer penetrates to the marrow of our soul and leaves nothing untouched. The prayer of the heart is a prayer that does not allow us to limit our relationship with God to interesting words or pious emotions. By its very nature such prayer transforms our whole being into Christ precisely because it opens the eyes of our soul to the truth of ourselves as well as to the truth of God. In our heart we come to see ourselves as sinners embraced by the mercy of God. It is this vision that makes us cry out, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on me a sinner.” The prayer of the heart challenges us to hide absolutely nothing from God and to surrender ourselves unconditionally to his mercy. Thus the prayer of the heart is the prayer of truth. It unmasks the many illusions about ourselves and about God and leads us into the true relationship of the sinner to the merciful God.”

Now this type of prayer will probably feel for us the most familiar since it comes as more or less a ‘verbal’ conservation with God. And as this prayer is typically utilized, we tend to relegate prayers to praying on behalf of the sick or hospitalized, needs related to one’s job, security, and future, or encompassing prayers for the poor, sick, and marginalized. And we usually temper these prayers with a conciliatory “if it be your will,” to allow for the possibility that our specific request may or may not be the kind of action God was leading toward in that situation. On a theological level, though, this kind of intercessory prayer often situates God behind a great cosmic desk across which we float our requests and appeals for his consideration, to which he may or may not attend based on the contours of the divine will that already contains and has effectively answered the outcomes of each of our requests. Thus, in the traditional framing of intercessory prayer, events of the universe have already been determined and sorted out and we humans with our limited vision can only play very minor roles in the decision-making process.

I would challenge us, then, to take on intercessory prayer truly and as its name implies: as interceding before God on behalf of the world. To put it bluntly, it is more than playing “clean-up” for a world that we find already in disarray but is a deliberate re-visioning of how things ought to be, how they can be when the people of God raise their voices and calls for revolution to the one who seeks to make all things new. Intercessory prayer is refusing to accept the gradual breakdown of order and taking proactive steps in bringing about redemption for the lives and events that inhabit this world. In this prayerful intervention we take our very cue from Jesus himself, “who died, yes, who was raised to life, who is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us” (Romans 8:34). It would seem, then, that at the very center of the divine life is an ongoing conversation of advocacy, in which those who are attuned to the rhythms of God’s heart speak for those who cannot always speak adequately for themselves. Those whose vision is obscured by unbelief, seemingly impossible situations, or hesitancy toward the efficacy of prayer yearn for the kind of intercession that true prayer harbors in order to rescue them otherwise dire circumstances. The created world groans under the yoke of its material exhaustion for release. The principalities of evil tear across the face of the earth with almost unchecked freedom over against the cries of the redeemed. The cosmos cries out for the advocacy of ones who desire to set things right again.

And it begins with prayer. But not just prayers cast up into the sky in vague hopes that they somehow find their way to the throne of God; they must carry the convictions that things can change and that, because of our prayer, the courses of breakdown might be opposed. In John 15:7 Jesus urges his disciples,“If you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.” The oft-overlooked dependent clause of this sentence reveals the true character of the prayer life: abiding in Christ. Prayers don’t necessarily solve the problems of the world by the mere fact that they are prayers. No, for true change to take place we must first strive to be one with Christ, as he is one with us. And this oneness, this abiding in Christ, has been the point of our prayer project thus far, so we shouldn’t feel overwhelmed if we aren’t there just yet, but coupled with this spiritual intimacy must also come conviction. As the parable of the persistent widow goes in Luke 18:1-8, we must be willing to stand up for the (physical, spiritual, relational) injustice that we see around us and be convinced that, if we only persevere in our intercession, things will change.

And so intercessory prayer takes shape around a core of anticipation. They are prayed not with vague hope but with expectancy, with confidence that what we see isn’t what we have to see and that our urgent desires and dreams actually mean something to God. If we truly are co-laborers with Christ then we can take assurance in the fact that God does hear and does take into account our earnest prayers and that, like the prophets of old, we can change the mind of God. To drive home this point more eloquently, in his book The God Who Risks John Sanders writes:

“Our prayers make a difference to God because of the personal relationship God enters into with us. God chooses to make himself dependent on us for certain things. It is God’s sovereign choice to establish this sort of relationship; it is not forced on God by us. God once asked Moses to leave him alone so that the divine anger might grow against the people (Ex 32:10). God repeatedly instructed Jeremiah to stop praying for the people (Jer 7:16; 11:14; 14:11; 15:10). Why would God say such things if Moses and Jeremiah had no impact on the divine life? James says that the prayers of righteous people make a difference (Jas 5:16). The prayers of God’s people make a difference not only in the lives of the people but also in God’s life. For Abraham Heschel, God is not at home where his will is defied. Thus “to pray means to bring God back into the world … to expand his presence … His being imminent in the world depends on us.” Allowing for overstatement, Heschel is correct that God takes our prayers seriously and weaves them into purposes and actions for the world. God desires a deep personal relationship with us, and this requires genuine dialogue rather than monologue. The fellowship of God desires entails a give-and-take relationship wherein God gives and receives from us.”

So this week let us begin to imagine that prayer is not a one-way street but rather an honest dialogue between the Creator and the Created. As we traverse this town and interact with people whose conditions in life may or may not be obvious, as we communicate with family and friends back home, and as we seek daily transformation in our own lives, let us be active in interceding to God, imposing on God our most heartfelt and sincere requests as they correlate with the abiding presence of Christ. I will ask us this week also to engage in a little prayer walking, taking 30 minutes to an hour at least once this week to immerse ourselves in the injustices we see around us.

And last but not least, I want us to resume a little bit of journaling with the following questions as we battle with this idea of true intercession:

How do you work through the idea of unanswered prayers? How do you feel about them? During prayers in which you ask for or pray about certain things over and over again, how do you find peace in yourself if what actually happens occurs differently that you expected? What does this say about the nature of intercessory prayer or about the nature of God’s activity in this world? How are we to position ourselves at this intersection of our will and God’s?

Let us be active in this world, not only passively receiving the outcomes of brokenness. Let us confront the powers of darkness and prevail upon our God for his intervention. Let us intercede and believe that it will be done.

So here’s the second prayer focus for our month, the prayer of the ordinary. Like the more introspective prayers of the presence of God, this, too, will be a prayer of the presence of God, only one that shifts the focus to distinguishing the more “active” presence of God as he appears in our daily lives. It is one thing to find opportunities to cordon off time solely for “being with” God in silent and meditative prayer, but it is another to take that state of being with God out with you into the normal routines and chores of daily life. Therefore, this type of prayer depends less on a specific format for praying and more on a kind of prayerful awareness of the steps we take during our days. We can be confident that the presence of God goes with us wherever we go, but so many times we fail to integrate it meaningfully into our activities, interactions, and thoughts. A prayer of the ordinary, then, becomes a posture for framing the events of a day as perhaps God would see them. This has two prongs to it.

The first is learning to invest the tedium of life with a spiritual purpose, as though in that very action you are working to bring praise and honor to God. It is not among our immediate reflexes to turn ordinary experiences into prayer, but in doing so we have a chance to blur the edges between the sacred and the mundane, acting out in our actions the same kind of blessed conversion that takes place when we pray to our divine Father by means of feeble and inadequate words. We should not imagine our mortal limitations as a “lesser” condition, however, but as simply the medium we come by de facto, a state which we can change no more than the zebra its stripes. In other words, we come before God as we are: distracted, imperfect, and shouldering responsibilities that are necessary for sustaining our lives and commitments. But in and among these various responsibilities God still weaves his Spirit so that we need not divorce spiritual meaning from recognizably “dull,” “routine,” or otherwise “human” labors. Our humanity is not an obstruction but a blessing in which God has chosen to reveal himself, for he chose not to manifest his own son as the gilded and pristine Super Jesus of nativity scenes per se but in a dirty, crowded barn, as a prologue to the ordinary life of a carpenter. And it was while sweating through the toils of carpentry that Jesus increased in divine wisdom and favor, not in the pampered halls of rabbinic teaching.

So as we engage the prayer of the ordinary, let us look upon our days and our schedules not as hindrances to spending time with God but as opportunities in which to dedicate your activity to God. May our activities be as cherem, things committed or devoted to the Lord for his total ownership. Be it going to the grocery store, writing emails, breast feeding, researching information on a topic, cooking, doing homework for language school, or any one of a countless number of “non-liturgical” acts let us permit God to take possession of and redeem otherwise “unimportant” routines for spiritual purposes. Let our work become our prayer. Let us sanctify our works, our chores, our daily exercises for God, remaining conscious as we perform them that they now possess a nobler character than just the act in and of itself. If we render our lives in these godly tones, tinted with heavenly hues, we just may begin to notice the presence of God shining more clearly and more unexpectedly out of otherwise untended aspects of our lives. As Richard Foster warns in his book Prayer, “If we cannot find God in the routines of home and shop, then we will not find him at all.” In so doing we are able to extend the range of Paul’s exhortation to “pray continually” as we refuse to limit the breadth of spiritual activity to those “neat” and “clean” times of study, prayer, and formal worship.

The second prong is a prayer of reflection on the presence of God. It is more or less a prayer of consciousness, using our times of prayer as a way to discover all of the ways that God has been present with us throughout the day and how we have in turn responded to that loving presence. How did you see God today? Which faces did God wear as you rode the tram, bought groceries, went to class, visited an agency, ate in a restaurant, or strolled through the park? What opportunities crossed your path to be the hands of God or hear wisdom from the voice of God? What glimpses of the Kingdom of God entered your vision? What can you learn from all that you experienced today about yourself, about God, or about the virtuous life as a Christian, missionary, and human?

In a way this prayer is largely self-revelatory as it implores us to be completely honest and unabashed with ourselves and with God, who challenges us to uncover all of those carefully-hidden areas that need to be cleansed, purified, healed, or encouraged. At the same time, it is all too easy to practice this prayer in the extremes: dwelling on all of the negative aspects of our lives so that we do little more than suffocate ourselves in unworthiness or else whitewashing over the trouble spots in order to paint a shinier picture of ourselves than what really exists. We must remember to invite God into our self-examination as a loving and attentive guide into confusing territory, one who can point out but not condemn, encourage but not flatter, protect, comfort, and in all things clothe us in grace.

And so through these two types of prayer my hope is that we might grow toward greater self-awareness and a more acute sense of the very active presence of God. In this way we will come to grasp prayer not as an activity for bracketed and eloquent periods of worship but as a way to transform the rhythms of our lives into a tune that harmonizes with the song of the Creator and Sustainer. As our schedules get increasingly busy, praying the ordinary is a way of rescuing us from anxieties over devoting enough time to the spiritual disciplines or, more specifically, to prayer.

If you are participating in this at all, please don’t see this additional type of prayer as a replacement for the presence prayers of the last two weeks but as yet another dimension to the complex discipline of prayer. Please continue to practice resting in God’s presence and uttering the breath prayers as you can and wish, for no one prayer will ever exhaust the resources that come from communication with God in this way.

So here goes: my best (and very fledgling) shot at fleshing out a working apology for the purpose and value of prayer. Given the wordiness with which I tend to write I don’t think I’ll be able to whittle down a response to one neat take-home sentence, but at the same time I think to be able to do so would do strong disservice to the potential inherent in prayer. It’s just too big, too reverential, too historically significant to summarize poignantly. But I’ll try an impressionistic rendering and hope that, from a distance, it seems cohesive.

I suppose the short version of it, though, would be that prayer (at least as it blooms in my own life) is a return to zero. In a world climate that seeks first the accumulation of misinterpreted virtues and necessities prayer rebalances the equation, leveling the false heights and turning down the volume on soulless clamor. In other words, at the heart of prayer is a cessation of interference from all that doesn’t belong to the internal being, the place where everything insignificant grinds to a distant halt in deference to the patient and more immediate motion of God. It is a place of solemnity but of utmost familiarity, as though the far-reaching expanse of God chooses to dress itself with attire that we can understand and hold in our minds, in order to condense that boundlessness into something bewilderingly intimate and personal. In so doing the infinite crosses a threshold into the finite (as far as words, feelings, and the pursuit of wisdom can be finite), and in praying we ourselves cross back over that same threshold, elevating what originates in our physical lives of cause and effect, material certainty, and embodied interaction to a higher spiritual designation. For in a way prayer exists as an archetype for the very kingdom of God: a way of bringing about through oftentimes voiceless groans an ancient and yet unrealized expectation for the world. Be they prayers of intercession or thanksgiving, desperation or quiet submission, in their very origin they rewrite the base texts of this life in such a way that envision and call nearer an existence held together by mercy, fairness, and love. Encoded deeply into prayer is a hope for what can be, an intuitive and spiritually-affirmed sense of the world being put back together: hubris becomes humility, the poor in spirit are blessed, and swords become plowshares.

And as I write this I notice that the language I’m using is predominantly spatial, expanding around a metaphor that allows us to conceive of prayer as if it were something that could occur substantively in three dimensions. But as I’m learning, perhaps this isn’t so far off the mark. Prayer is more or less an instrument, a method for seeking and attaining the restoration of things in this life, or, as I speculated above, a way to collapse or bridge two sides of an ontological threshold. Prayer is the facility by which we enter into the very presence of God, the agency by which the Spirit can shove aside the peripheral matters of our lives in order to make room for God’s activity in bringing about the salvation and restoration of his people. Too often we affix the presence of God to natural phenomena or limit it to actions performed in his name, but the presence of God resides within us as temples for his spirit (cf. Hbk 2:20; 1Cor 6:19), and prayer wakes us up to that fact. Modernity has left us a legacy that has encouraged us to segment our lives and regard the various facets of our lives as insoluble solutions, but in order to truly cohere our identities, self-perceptions, aspirations, circumstances, and relationships we have to unlearn those deceptive lessons and be diligent in seeing those various columns, entablatures, and friezes of our lives as the temple they bring into signification and, more importantly, the spirit they house. We must seek out above all else the way back to the heart and back to that patient presence within that never escaped us after all.

We must return to zero.

And so we pray. We pray in unproductive and unmarketable rhythms with self-uncentered words of love and grace in order that we may relocate the most perfect companion we could ever want, allowing him to reclaim the space he needs to gently but firmly reshape and sort out our internal prerogatives and desires. Prayer is a way to feel at home again in your own skin, to cease those restless yearnings and rediscover a personal potential that has precious little to do with worldly success. But most importantly (for me at least), it’s a way to find rest at the end of a long journey. My soul has been weary and my horizon clouded, but my determination to encounter God has found its restful pace along the unpredictably firm path of prayer, and I thank God for crossing over the threshold to rescue me from ruin and restoring me to his presence.

As we are now thick in the middle of the Prayer Project here in Olomouc (see previous post), one of the things that I am asking of the teammates is to engage in a little journaling to help us process and capture succinctly our responses to certain weekly stimuli regarding prayer. I thus framed this first week around “the basics,” getting back to the roots of how we would actually define the purposes and contents of prayer. In many ways it seems an easy and automatic response, but I am of the opinion that what happens on Sunday mornings and around dinner tables is only a narrow reconstruction of the cosmos-shifting power inherent in true prayer with God. We just haven’t done it real justice. So to that effect I present a recent blog post from Keith Brenton, a minister at the Pleasant Valley Church of Christ in Little Rock, to get the wheels spinning. I hope he’ll pardon the blatant copyright infringement:

God already knows what we want and need - the latter, probably far better than we ever will.

He knows Who He is, and how powerful, and how magnificent, generous, kind, just, worthy of praise …. He is not Tinkerbell that He needs our applause to bring Him back from some deathly torpor - for He does not slumber nor sleep.

So what is the purpose of prayer?

My best guess is that its purpose is to help us realize how much we owe Him, how much we need Him, how much He loves us and wants to hear our voices and hearts, and see our downcast or upturned faces - however stained with tears or illuminated with joy - yearning to see Him and hear Him and know His comfort.

Prayer is a gift, you see, that transcends any answer He might give to any request we might pose or any praise we might offer or any thanksgiving we might express. It is our connection with God through His Son, through His very Spirit; our chance to touch God the Father, Creator and King - and for Him to touch us. A few moments in His lap each day. Or an entire waking lifetime in recognition of His presence. It’s His gift to us. It’s our gift to Him.

That’s my best guess at the purpose of prayer. What’s yours?

So I’ll let this simmer for a little while, let you think about it, and then I’ll come back with my account of things.

In other news, we are currently hosting our dear friends from Arkansas, Kyle and Mandy Breckenridge and Tyler King. They arrived on Sunday and brought with them the beginnings of 3 inches of snow, so during tours around town, slipping and sliding to dinner in the square, and trips back and forth to each others’ homes quite a few snowballs have found their way into the air and as decorations on each others’ jackets. But it’s already beginning to melt today, a fact confirmed by the pleasant sound of unfrozen water drumming out a morning greeting on the metal window sill beside my bed. I suppose such joy couldn’t last forever.

So, I’m off to it. Have a great Tuesday!

I suppose it’s time to swat away all of the crickets that seem to be inhabiting this blog and restore it to its once near-perfect sheen. Or at least it’s just time for to start writing again…. I think it would be almost hopeless for me to try to condense all of the events of the past 4 or 5 weeks into a single post with any real justice, so I’ll just resume by carving a little slice out of the present and hope you accept my apologies for poor blog maintenance.

So with the exception of a few make-up classes here and there our language school days are up, and we have successfully made it through two semesters of Czech. Our language learning is by no means concluded, however, and even though we may no longer be going to the university for our classes, we will be recruiting private tutors early next year to continue our studies with a more personal and individualized approach. I think that we had expected to be further along in Czech than we actually are, though, and our still ‘novice’ status with speaking is frustrating to a group of people with multiple college degrees, respectable work histories, and a strong desire to get an edge on this language. But daily we impress ourselves with our minor victories, like getting a sentence out and it actually being declined properly, with the right verb tenses and everything. It’ll be baby steps for probably a couple more years, but for people who “want it now” it is teaching us patience daily as well.

And we have now passed through the thick of the holiday season now, but we had the great privilege of welcoming both the Shockleys (Christie’s family) and the Andersons (Mitch’s entire clan) to spend Christmas and the New Year’s with us. It was great spending time with them, but for a group of people from the South, I think our sub-zero temperatures gave them a bit of a rude awakening. The temperatures haven’t been over the freezing mark for about four weeks now, and everything has crystallized into brittle hardness. And yet nothing I would yet deem worthy enough to be called ’snow.’ For me this comes as an outrage, for by my reckoning, if it’s gonna be cold then at least we ought to have heaps and heaps of snow as a way of distracting us from the chill, right? But despite the blizzard-fostering conditions outside, there remains nothing more than a few wayward snowflakes to tantalize us. Oh well, we still have January and February to go, by far the coldest months around here.

But to warm us all up in the meantime, I have recently released my latest newsletter, so you may download it promptly here and read all about our missional capers over the past few months. Perhaps the most significant event is the arrival of our newest teammate, Evan Lukáš Keen, born on December 28th to Corey and Sarah and to a waiting room full of exhausted but exhilarated teammates. You can check out pictures of our precious little mascot here.

And so with the change of calendar dates comes for us a change of perspective. It has been part of our team anthem for a while now that we are a people of prayer, but we have only gradually become aware of the limits to our understanding of what prayer actually is and can be. And so begins the Prayer Project for Team Olomouc, a month-long exploration into the heartbeat and lifeblood of prayer itself. I’m actually conducting our study for the month, and over its course we will be hitting the reset button in a way and starting back at the beginning, relearning what it means to enter into the presence of God and truly commune with him, basking in the mysteries of love, relationship, and peace. Each week we will try on a different kind of prayer type, testing out each kind — and ourselves — to reclaim the fuller breadth of this spiritual discipline than the narrow, single-intentioned routine it has become for many of us. We have already begun extended times of meditation (or rather times of simply leaning over the railing and losing our gaze in the fullness of God) and breath prayers, simple theological formulae used to center the one praying toward a certain idea, which are repeated all day long in the span of a single inhale and exhale. The shape and focus of our prayers will change every week, then, in order to expand our spiritual repertoire. The way I see it, prayer is not about binding yourself to a certain prescribed method but about customizing preexisting options into more personal and more fulfilling avenues to relationship with God.

“The great thing is prayer. Prayer itself. If you want a life of prayer, the way to get it is by praying…. You start where you are and you deepen what you already have.” (Thomas Merton)

And so it begins. I ask for your prayers as we each endeavor to discern the limitless potential of prayer in our own lives and as a frame for the ever-evolving work here in Olomouc. I will try to start posting my reflections on the month more often, as a way to siphon from my head the milling thoughts and put them out here for your reaction. I’m looking forward to the adventure!

For several reasons, it’s been a while since I’ve written.

The hosting problems that I thought I had cleared up per my previous post reared their nasty binary heads and beset my poor site again. But all seems to be functioning at the moment, so let’s all hold our breaths.

On a more favorable note, Mitch, Christie, and I left last Saturday for the annual Euro-American Family Retreat in Rotheburg, Germany. After 12 hours on 5 different trains - and narrowly escaping a German rail strike - we arrived exhausted but in good spirits for the 3 days of speakers, worship, and general fellowship. Tony Coffee, preaching minister at his church in Dublin, Ireland, arrived as a well-prepared and moving keynote speaker, and Dale Hawley, a rather gifted family therapist at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, presented several terrific lectures on managing conflct within relationships. And in between these most refreshing times of spiritual refocusing we took lazy though chilled walks around the town, strolling among houses and shops that seem to have sprung from the pages of some rustic fairy tale about marauding dragons, damsels in distress, and Hansel and Gretel era gingerbread houses. An ancient medieval wall circumscribes the town, offering its visitors a walk around the entire urban center on uneven paving stones, dragging their fingers along worn wooden railings long polished from decades of touch.

I’m not sure what I had in mind before going in, but the retreat could not have come at a better time. The past month and a half have seen a steady stream of friends coming through town, but, while we have loved every minute of their visits, we have become rather weary and I think all of our spiritual lives have taken a hit amongst all the activity. So this occasion to simply come and be fed and be given permission to relax in ourselves came not a moment too soon. And even though the 12 hour train ride back home drained some of that reclaimed energy, our hearts felt lighter with a return to the grace-filled embraces of a loving Father.

And on the way home from Germany we swung over to the Prague airport to pick up our good friend Jessica Mosley on her whirlwind week and a half tour de Europe (well, primarily the Czech Republic and Paris). The weather has been kinda lousy, but we’ve been doing our best to dazzle her with all of the ceaseless action here in Olomouc.

So between all of these goings-on I have not felt much like writing, but I decided it’s time to jump back in the saddle.On a parting note, our teammates Josh and Sarah Beall have finally rejoined us after a 3-month separation. They have been in the States since August trying to diagnose and treat medically Sarah’s nagging health concerns, but after so long a frustration we joyously helped them off a tram late Saturday night and escorted them back home.

It is for this reason that we have delyed our Thanksgiving meal until today. We observed in memorium the American holiday on Thursday with a bountiful meal of Chinese food, knowing that we’d have our fuller celebration today with every Thanksgiving luxury we could scrape together. So as I sit and type Mitch and I have corn and green beans cooking on the stove and a pumpkin crisp baking in the oven. And when they’re done in a few minutes we’ll cart our goods over to the Keens’ apartment and promptly dine like kings and queens. I just hope we can keep our fingers out of the edible goodness until we get there!

Okay, so for once the great delay in posting is not my fault. You may have noticed that my site has been a bit inaccessible for the past few days, and I have everyone else but me to blame for this. Completely outside of my control, the hosting company I use to post this web-based delight of the senses suffered inexplicable viral interference and consequently crashed about a week ago. They finally got me back online as of this morning, but this is the last straw as far as I’m concerned, and I am now in the process of packing my bags for another hosting company, one with a far more agreeable package for storage, service, price, etc. So it’s been a bit of a hassle for me for the past week trying to sort out all this web junk, but I think I can finally hone in on the light at the end of the tunnel. I’m just glad it wasn’t something that I did:)

In other news, we totally got snow on Tuesday! For an unseasoned guy from Texas, the presence of snow for more than five minutes and five flakes is still quite a thrill. Granted, it didn’t last more than the afternoon, but we are expected to have snow all weekend so I’m trying to bottle up my frivolity until I can rush out into the much-anticipated winter wonderland. The way I see it, winter simply has no welcome in my book unles it brings snow. Snow makes the long months of limited sunlight and frozen fingers all worthwhile, granting its sufferers somewhat of a distraction in the form of snow, which thus inspires such fun activities as snowball fights, building snowthings, and snowball fights. And it also prevails upon you to throw snowballs.

Of course, along with all of its precarious footing and soaked jean cuffs, winter also tends to sneak in covert little changes in my thinking and overall disposition. Perhaps I’m simply just not used to serious winters and the lingering despondency that it brings, but as the nights grow longer I find its cold grip ratcheting up a few more notches my sense of melodrama and wistfulness. Lots of navel-gazing, staring out at nothing, and crisis-tinged moods exacerbated by befitting music and literature; here St. John of the Cross’s ‘long dark night of the soul’ adopts a far more literal rendering, though perhaps with less of an intentioned onset. I can only hope that this is more of a universal phenomenon than just what seems to happen to me, the seasonal lottery winner, but I am determined not to let it happen quite as powerfully this year as it did the last. My footing in this foreign city is much firmer than it was a year ago, and that tightened perspective on settlement carries a good deal of weight. And with it comes not necessarily a clearer discernment of purpose here just yet, but surely a clearer idea of going about making ourselves useful in Olomouc, of being looked to to address a certain perceived need. And that, that idea of being needed, is so essential to our human estimations of worth, for better or for worse. In a moral sense it probably comes out neutral, but to feel yourself as needed, as acting out some key part in something bigger than yourself, is one of the great traits of human triumph, rescuing the soul from feeling like more than some obscure cog in inconceivable machinery.

So as the daylight hours continue to wane, and the wind howls relentlessly on the other side of thin glass panes, I will hold my hands protectively around that defiant flicker of an internal flame inside, shielding off the prying darkness and stoking its tender coals. And then I’ll hurl a well-aimed snowball at Mitch or Christie and take off running, feeling that same wind carry me along in the cradle of peace.

So as of this past Sunday, October 28th, we here in Olomouc celebrate our one-year anniversary of life on the field (and there was much rejoicing). 12 months ago a bright-eyed band of travelers left out of Little Rock, Arkansas, to meet their destinies on Czech soil, and after an eventful calendar of countless travels, international visitors, and a few trials here and there, we stand here one year older but in possession of an “in situ” wisdom and learning that seems to have taken longer to acquire than it actually has. In the throes of such a milestone event I clench and unclench my fists anew, testing out new blood, new energy, and take inventory of all that has transpired since my tenure on American soil expired. I’ll spare you the more personal (and for you, probably more boring) details of coming to grips with life in a new place, but despite the new sparkly wonder of it all, dark clouds hovered at the fringes, pregnant with doubt, challenge to my central identity, and an affront to that which we would call “a calling.”

The way your perceive the world and your position in it undergoes quite a phase change when trying to gain entry into another cultural point of view, but the friction increases when you try to transfer what you thought was a universal/transcendent part of your identity, namely your Christian identity. In such new environs you discover just how embedded in cultural trappings it really is, and you are forced to face the disparity that exists between universal and circumstantially-situated worldviews. So for Christians, the idea of placelessness is far less simple a concept than we like to imagine, and this put me through quite a wringer for months. I daresay that my identity has not altogether resolidified, but at least I have a greater appreciation for such thinly separated ideas as “cultural” and “supracultural,” if indeed the latter is truly ever attainable this side of death.

But aside from the dark nights of intropsection (and with the sun going down at 4pm in the wintertime, these nights can be long), our time here has been quite positive, with many unexpected friendships, warm reception by people around us, and a continued increase in language ability. So I thank God for his provision to my humble team over the past year, and look forward to who knows how many more.

And as if I could celebrate such an event without gifts, without further adieu I present to you my latest playlist. This particular listing tends to slow things down a bit, given to the somewhat introspective month its assembler had. But they can’t all be foot-tappers and hand-clappers, can they? Sometimes we all need a little reflective navel-gazing. So, as always, I’ll ask you to arrange the songs in your iTunes according to the list below, otherwise the geography of the musical effect will lose portions of its grandeur. You wouldn’t want to discover all the slow songs grouped together and then the few “peppier songs” huddled at the end, now, would you?

1. Moonbabies - “Take Me To The Ballroom”
2. The Shins - “Pink Bullets”
3. Jose Gonzalez - “Teardrop”
4. Reubens Accomplice - “Life Is Easy”
5. Portugal The Man - “Crystal Magic”
6. Portugal The Man - “Black Magic”
7. Reggie & The Full Effect - “What Won’t Kill You Eats Gas”
8. Athlete - “Flying Over Bus Stops”
9. U2 - “Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own”
10. Sugarcult - “Back To California”
11. Lovedrug - “Everything Starts Where It Ends”

And so as not to skimp on my malfunctioning playlist from last month, I here repost September’s line-up, with hopefully more success this time around. Please let me know if either of these links fails to come through - I would hate to deprive you of such time and effort.

1. The Cribs - “Men’s Needs”
2. The White Stripes - “Little Cream Soda”
3. Blackpool Lights - “This Town’s Disaster”
4. Brand New - “Welcome to Bangkok”
5. The Reindeer Section - “Tout le Monde”
6. The Forecast - “One Hundred Percent”
7. Eddie Vedder - “Hard Sun”
8. Last Winter - “Don’t Forget to Write”
9. The Twilight Sad - “Mapped By What Surrounded Them”
10. Califone - “Bottles and Bones (Shades and Sympathy)”
11. 1997 - “Water’s Edge”
12. Architecture in Helsinki - “Heart it Races”
13. Regina Spektor - “Edit”
14. Athlete - “In Between 2 States”
15. The Submarines - “This Conversation”
16. Cool Hand Luke - “Cinematic”
17. Plastic Operator - “Folder”
18. Harvey Danger - “Old Hat”
19. U2 - “Numb (New Mix)”