Questions Re: Common Prayer

Posted on February 22, 2012 by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

As we continue to celebrate the Common Prayer Movement that’s connecting people of faith and action around the world, I want to answer a few of the frequently asked questions we’ve been hearing. If you missed it, we’ve had some great Q&A’s on common prayer with Steve Harper and Phyllis Tickle. The good news is this: the prayer renewal that’s at the heart of The Everyday Awakening is bigger than Common Prayer. It’s bigger than “new monasticism.” While these things are part of what the Spirit seems to be stirring, it seems that many, many different movements are being united by prayer that is both ancient and contemporary, time-tested and ever new.

With the release of Common Prayer’s Pocket Edition this month, we had a chance to answer some of the FAQ’s that we’ve heard consistently over the past year. We’ve included them in this easy-to-carry version so that it can serve not only as an on the road guide to prayer, but also as a sort of tract for the movement. Here’s a little excerpt. Would love to hear what questions you have (or hear).

  1. Doesn’t God want to hear the prayers of our heart? Why should I learn and say prayers written by other people?

    Yes, Scripture says that the Holy Spirit empowers people who find new life in Christ to cry, ‘Abba.’ This is intimate language, the sort of language kids use for their parents. God isn’t just willing to hear us. When we cry out in the Spirit, God hears the voice of the One who said, “I and the Father am one.”

    And yet, as intimate and personal as this communication is, it is never private. To be ‘in Christ’ is to be part of a body that has prayed across centuries and is now praying around the world. To pray in the Spirit is to join the eternal song of all the saints who sing around the throne of God. Because, over time, some of those prayers and songs have been written down, we do well to hide them in our hearts and make them our own.

  2. Why do I need set prayers for different times of the day? Can’t I just pray the prayers I need when I need them?

    ‘Fixed hour prayer,’ the tradition of praying the hours—or saying particular prayers at specific times of day—is a practice those goes all the way back to ancient Judaism. Early Christianity picked this up because the church knew that it was called to live as a contrast society in the world. A regular rhythm of rooting ourselves in God’s realm and God’s time is a constant reminder that we are in the world, but not of it. Fixed hour prayer regular interrupts our schedules to remind us that the world has been interrupted by the kingdom of God… and we are called to be holy interruptions where we are.

  3. I’ve heard of The Book of Common Prayer. Why a new Common Prayer? What’s the point of a new prayer book? How is this one different?

    If you are familiar with the Church of England’s     Book of Common Prayer (BCP), you’ll recognize much of the language and rhythms of this prayer book. The BCP is the most beautiful and enduring prayer book in the English language, and we borrowed from it extensively. But we didn’t feel too bad when we realized how much the BCP had borrowed from the Benedictine manuals of prayer that preceded it. Common prayer is a long tradition, and each new resource can only build on those that have come before it.


Posted in Features | Leave a comment

Am I Black Enough to Be a Slave?

Posted on February 20, 2012 by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

Last Wednesday night at church we had our annual Black History Month Program, recalling all that black folks have suffered in this country and remembering God’s faithfulness through it all. Nora, who’s two now, wasn’t settling into audience participation so well, so she and I spend a good part of the evening away from the gathering. But when it was getting late, Leah took her home for her bath and I went back into the church to get JaiMichael. We stood with the whole congregation to belt out “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” then JaiMichael and I bundled up to walk home.

“Am I black enough to be a slave?” JaiMichael asked as we walked down the slope of the church’s parking lot.

“Do you mean now or two hundred years ago?” I asked.

“I mean, would they do all that stuff to me?” We talked about race for a minute, and I watched a seven year old struggle to make sense of the story this country tells him about who he is. Then we got to the cross tie in the parking lot that JaiMichael likes to use as a balance beam and he said, “Watch this, Dad. I can balance with my eyes closed.” Seven year-olds can be deep, but not for long.

Still, I kept thinking about the ways race continues to shape reality for all of us in this country. Slavery was abolished 150 years ago, but that did not end the institutionalized racism that re-emerged as Jim Crow in the South (and ghettos in the North). The Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s made great strides toward freedom and justice for all, employing the nonviolence of Jesus to abolish Jim Crow. But 50 years later, as I’ve heard my friend Rev. William Barber say, “Jim Crow has become Mr. James Crow, Esquire.” What was once “segregation now, segregation forever” has become a crusade for “law and order.” Our prison population has increased eight fold over the past 30 years. More African-American men are caught up in our criminal justice system today than were  enslaved in 1850.

What, then, do I tell JaiMichael? Is he black enough to be a slave? I know the statistics. He’s black enough that one out of three of his friends will go to prison at some point in their life. He’s black enough that he’ll be subject to random searches by the police in our neighborhood. I have a responsibility to introduce him to this reality.

But we also know another reality. We are members of the church that learned to pray in brush arbors when Master wasn’t looking for God to make a way out of now way. We’re inheritors of that great tradition of black and white folks who said God didn’t make anyone to be slave, so they would create an underground railroad of safe houses to usher slaves to freedom. We are a community that remembers there is no shame in going to jail for doing what is right—that sitting down to a meal together may be illegal, but it’s right. And right will win in the end. We celebrate black history month so that we can remember this reality too.

In the context of our present prison industrial complex, I’m exited about Project TURN. Inside North Carolina prisons, classes meet every week that are made up of half incarcerated students and half seminary students from Duke Divinity School.

Women in a. Project TURN class

Small as they may  be, these classes are spaces like the 1960’s lunch counter where those who are legally segregated can sit down together and begin to imagine a new future. I continue to be amazed by the way this experience is leading to new friendships and new imagination, both for the students who come from the outside and for the students who are incarcerated. The beloved community is coming to life behind razor wire. Truth is, no walls will be able to contain it. God is creating a new society within the shell of the old.

Thankfully, as we find our way forward, our church has taught me a song that I can pass on to my son. It says, “Before I’ll be a slave / I’d be buried in my grave / and go home to my Lord / and be free.”

Yes, JaiMichael, this old world can be terribly mean. And I sure wish I could spare you from its troubles. But what I know is that Jesus has met us in the midst of this mess. And if you hold onto Jesus, you’re free. Even if this world’s system kills you, it can’t make you anything less than a child of God. God, my son, is greater than any force that will come against you.

For more on Project TURN, see a recent article by its director, Sarah Jobe and another in  The Christian Century.

Posted in Front Porch | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Common Prayer Movement

Posted on February 15, 2012 by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

Gandhi once said, “Prayer is not an old woman’s idle amusement. Properly understood and applied, it is the most potent instrument of action.” At the heart of Gandhi’s movement, which was rooted in the nonviolence of Jesus, was a constructive program centered by prayer. Wherever he was, Gandhi hosted common prayers first thing every morning. Christians often joined him. They recognized a truth that was also at their heart of their own faith.

As the world aches in desperation for social change, real radicals are learning to pray. It’s why I’m so excited about Common Prayer as a tool to unify diverse communities in prayer and action. When the hardback released a year ago, we also launched www.commonprayer.net, inviting individuals and communities to gather around these prayers and songs, celebrating a way of life that makes it possible for us to become the answer to our prayers. We said, “Common Prayer is more than a book. It’s a way of life.” Over 170 groups around the world threw parties to celebrate: http://commonprayer.net/parties

Over the past year, an extended community of 70K-plus pray-ers has grown steadily, mostly by word of mouth. (You can connect with some of them on Facebook.) We’ve received letters from people who met neighbors because they learned they were praying the same prayers, then started gathering to pray them together each morning. We’ve heard from Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland who wrote to say, “Thank you. These are prayers we can pray together.” We’ve heard from elderly couples who said, “We’d never found a way to pray together in our marriage, but this works.” Scores of new monastic communities, university fellowships, and churches have adopted Common Prayer as a rhythm of life in the neighborhoods where they live and work.

We’ve also heard from scores of pastors who’ve made Common Prayer part of their daily devotional life and are beginning to start small groups within their congregations that gather to pray the offices. One wrote to say that he gave a copy to every graduating high school and college student in his congregation this year. “We gave them a Bible when we baptized them,” he said. “Common Prayer is a book that will help them grow in their faith and put it into practice.”

A year later, I’m delighted that we’re able to release a Pocket (or Purse) Edition of Common Prayer this month. I got my first copy the other day.

Jonathan smiles a giddy smile to welcome CP Pocket Edition.

I’m excited about this Pocket Edition because I believe the folks who say these prayers everyday are just the beginning of a movement. What we keep hearing is that when people share about a faith that brings prayer and action together in daily life, it’s infectious good news to their co-workers, neighbors, and strangers along the way. This is why I’m excited to be able to carry Common Prayer with us. Now we can hand these prayers to the person beside us on an airplane or bus, to the friend we meet for lunch to catch up or the young person who asks for spiritual counsel. It’s a portable form for regular users. But it’s also a sort-of tract to share with others. (We even included a few pages of FAQ’s at the back for someone who’s never heard anything about ‘liturgical prayer’ or ‘ordinary radicals.’)

To celebrate this movement (and to learn about the breadth of what’s happening with common prayer today), I’m conducting interviews with mentors and wise guides in liturgical prayer. I’ve already had a couple of great exchanges with Steve Harper and Phyllis Tickle. Look for more interviews in coming weeks.

If you have a story to share about Common Prayer in your life or community, I’d love to hear from you.

Posted in Features | Leave a comment

Where God Happens

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

Every once in a while, I stumble across a conversation that sounds familiar. Not only are people speaking my language, but they’re talking about the things that seem to matter most. Call it a moment of recognition. Call it a soul connection. Whatever you call it, it’s a gift. And gifts are to be celebrated.

I’m especially grateful for conversations that are happening today about faithfulness in place. I talked to the dean of a liberal arts school last week who said his students are so into Wendell Berry he’s afraid they’re all going to just go back home when they graduate and buy a farm. While their agrarian impulses may be a bit romantic, they’re rooted in a recognition that speed and placelessness have fragmented contemporary life in a way that social networks and jet plane cannot piece back together. It’s not just undergrads who are realizing this. There’s a veritable movement, especially among so-called “emerging adults,” of people who simply want to find their place in the world.

A couple of years ago, I wrote The Wisdom of Stability to uncover some of the church’s ancient wisdom for just such a movement as this. I wrote it because I needed it. But as I’ve talked to young people on college campuses over the past year (from Duke University to Denver Seminary, Calvin College to Furman University), it turns out other people need this wisdom too. Monastic wisdom interjects into the exciting conversation about staying put and paying attention the great hope that Christian tradition might have not only resources to sustain us, but also a gift to offer the world.

I’m delighted that the folks over at Christianity Today are hosting a space for this conversation about place at their new blog This Is Our City, featuring reflections on the particular challenge of living out our faith in Portland, Richmond, Detroit, New York, Phoenix, and a Seventh City–that is, the place where you are.

I was glad to join the conversation this week with an intro to some of stability’s wisdom:

Early in the 6th century, Benedict of Nursia wrote a rule of life for monks who were longing for community and connection with God. Some 1,500 years later, the Rule of Benedict is one of the most lasting and widespread guides for religious life in the West. Benedict knew that the spiritual seekers of his day had big dreams and great hopes, not unlike the inner stirrings that had inspired his spiritual journey as a young man. Benedict did not squash human ambition, but he saw clearly that if we want to ascend to life with God, it matters a great deal which ladder we climb ….

Like the African American spiritual written a millennium later, Benedict insisted, “We are climbing Jacob’s ladder.” The angels going up and down from heaven to earth presented a practical lesson for Benedict’s community: “Without doubt, this descent and ascent can signify only that we descend by exaltation and ascend by humility.” The way that leads to life, Benedict told his followers, is a way of humility. According to the Rule, people who follow this way of humility promise “stability, fidelity to monastic life, and obedience.” The threefold commitment is made as one promise, Benedictines say, something like the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are said to be one essence. But it’s striking to me that Benedict decided to put stability first in his list. If we’re going to climb Jacob’s ladder toward the humility of Jesus, Benedictine wisdom says the first thing we need is a stable place to begin.

You can read the full reflection and join the conversation yourself at http://www.christianitytoday.com/thisisourcity/7thcity/placelessculture.html?paging=off.

 

Posted in Features | Leave a comment

From the Circle of Prayer: Phyllis Tickle

Posted on February 8, 2012 by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

To mark and celebrate the release of the Common Prayer Pocket Edition this month, we’re running a series of interviews with scholars and wise elders who’ve helped to shape the common prayer movement that is at the heart of The Everyday Awakening in our time. If you missed it, you can check out my interview with Steve Harper here.

No one has been more important to the contemporary renewal of liturgical prayer than Phyllis Tickle, the founding Religion Editor at Publishers Weekly and widely respected commentator on religion in America. Her Divine Hours, designed to invite individuals into the ancient practice of fixed-hour prayer, have set the standard for contemporary prayer manuals.

At the very beginning of our Common Prayer project, Shane Claiborne and I conferred with Phyllis, who graciously and helpfully served as an advisor to our project.

Phyllis at her writing desk.

After taking us through the ins and outs of various details related to the publication of liturgical materials in our initial conversation, she paused and said with great seriousness, “But listen: you can’t mess around here, boys. You’re dealing with the very song that’s sung around the throne of God.” I recalled her admonition every morning I worked on Common Prayer. It was a delight to get to converse with Phyllis again about the renewal of liturgical prayer and what it might mean for us in our time.

JWH: With your Divine Hours, you’ve been inviting people into the practice of fixed hour prayer for over a decade. What is your sense of who’s drawn to liturgical prayer? Why are people using prayer manuals and how are these tools shaping their relationship with God?

PT: In the mid-1990’s, when Doubleday first approached me about the possibility of compiling a set of contemporary prayer manuals for the keeping of the liturgical hours, they spoke in terms of “the liturgically mobile” as being the perceived audience.

“Whatever,” I asked, “does that mean?”

Well, it seems it meant—and quite accurately so—that vast numbers of American Christians were [and are] on the move toward less idiosyncratic and more foundational practices of faith.

The head of Doubleday Religion at that time, a devout Roman Catholic named Eric Major, further quipped, in answering me, by saying, “These days it’s born a Baptist, die a Methodist; born a Methodist, die a Presbyterian; born a Presbyterian, die an Episcopalian; born an Episcopalian, die an Orthodox…liturgically mobile…liturgically on the move…liturgically going home.” And he was right. We are using the liturgy of the Church and of our forebears to go home again.

One of Phyllis' Divine Hours manuals. DH also has a pocket edition.

JWH: Yes, we’re on the move. The practice of faith is in flux for so many people. But in the midst of that, how do you explain the current attraction to fixed hour prayer?

Christendom is dead, and may it evermore remain that way. But with the demise of Christendom has come the necessary distinction between being a cultural Christian and being an observant one. That is, the Christian who would be more than just a citizen of a christianized culture must now find his or her practices and postures, understandings and professions, in something deeper and grander than the surrounding status quo. He or she must, out of necessity as well as hunger, turn to those observances and modes of worship that grew the early Church and that still form the grounding roots of her today. And of those ancient disciplines and ways of being, none is more accessible, more easily learned or more demanding, more efficacious or more intimately formative than is the discipline of fixed-hour prayer.

The late Robert Webber was as astute an observer of American Christianity as ever there was. In the early 1970’s he wrote a seminal book entitled EVANGELICALS ON THE CANTERBURY TRAIL in which he argued that late 20th century western Christians, especially evangelical protestant ones, were passionately in love with what he called “the ancient future” and were already finding their way toward it by re-visiting the liturgies, customs, symbols, and implements of the early Church. We were doing this, Webber observed, with an eye toward borrowing and adapting those ancient treasures to contemporary use and in such a fashion as to satisfy contemporary needs. He was right, of course; for that is exactly what has happened and is still happening and, from all appearances, will continue to happen for many a year to come.

What Webber also undoubtedly saw but didn’t say was that the prayer book and the daily offices would prove to be the easiest of the ancient ways for post-moderns to move into. There is—and always has been—a certain romanticized cachet about prayer books and chanting monks. One did not– and does not– have to be Christian to understand the art of the prayer book as an object or the mysterious appeal of the chanting monk as a symbol of interlocutor with the Divine. We see the books in art history texts and influential museums. We hear the monks in bad movies and also in some very fine ones. Their very ubiquity makes them, for the neophyte and/or the hesitant, less threatening and more palatable as ways into deeper Christian practice.

With prayer manuals and the observance of the offices, that is, there are fewer barriers along the road of moving from being a secular Christian to being an observant one….or, and this is perhaps more often the case in this country… from being an already persuaded Christian to being a more incarnational and disciplined one. There are, of course and ironically, no more powerful, gripping, and efficacious ways to do that either; and in a sense, that is the great joke of the thing: what seems at first blush to be the most harmless becomes, with practice, the most persuasive and formative of all the traditional practices and…let us confess it…the most defining.

JWH: As a student of American religious history, how do you see prayer movements connected to social movements in our society? Is liturgical prayer shaping more than people’s devotional schedules?

What we have never seen before in American religious history is the ubiquity of lay monasticism among folk of all classes and personality types. The whole thing is so remarkable, in fact, that we’ve had to invent the term “neo-monasticism” to name it. Deeply communal, egalitarian before God and humanity, disciplined by tradition, and marked and instructed above all else by the rhythms of the daily offices, neo-monasticism is one to the two fastest-growing expressions or presentations of Emergence Christianity today.

The inevitable result of neo-monasticism’s defining practice of returning to the keeping of the daily prayers is the increasing presence of the kingdom of God in daily life. Jurgen Moltman, perhaps the most influential of our living theologians in Western Christianity, has observed…many times, in fact…that the future of Christianity is the Church, and the future of the Church is the Kingdom of God. He’s absolutely right; and the move toward the resumption of the ancient disciplines, and especially toward that of fixed-hour prayer, is a movement beyond Church and toward both the Kingdom and Kingdom living. That shift will effect every part of everything for Christians and, by extension, for the world around us and for whose translation we live and pray.

JWH: You’ve written and spoken a great deal in recent years about “emergence Christianity.” What role is prayer playing in the transformation that you describe? What are your hopes for the next ten years?

Our return to the observance of the daily offices is also, of course and more or less by default, a return to the observance of the liturgical year. The appointed readings and prayers for every office every single day reflect and rotate with the cycling emphases and holy seasons of the Church’s year itself. What that means, in effect, is that a return to the practice of fixed-hour prayer is a return to daily, lived, intimate contact with the Christian story…with the narrative more than with the propositions that have derived from it…with the poetry of faith not just merely with its doctrine and factuality…with the bonding of the heart and mind of one believer to the heart and mind of the whole.

What I think…perhaps, what I hope and certainly what I pray for….is that before Emergence Christianity is done with us, it will take that translating effect of the daily offices and their narrative flow back into the everyday flow and shape of our homes. What I hope, in other words…what, indeed, I think is already happening…is that the resurgence of fixed-hour prayer in lay practice is, and will go on, returning us to that other, most ancient and most central of practices, namely to the domestic transmission of our faith on a daily, natural, and yet very intentional basis.

Posted in Testimonies | Leave a comment

Dear Brother in Chains

Posted on February 7, 2012 by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

One of the great gifts of Common Prayer is that I know friends all around the world are praying with me everyday. Whatever we’re up against in our struggle to become the answer to our prayers here in Walltown, we’re not alone. I get notes of encouragement from some friends, prayer requests from others. We are a family knit together by the Holy Spirit, sustained by grace in the struggle for justice.

Some of my most faithful corespondents in this world-wide conspiracy of faith are sisters and brothers in prison. One brother from the neighborhood here makes a point to pray with us at 8am every morning in the cell where he’s been held in solitary confinement for over a year. His letters, which began with desperate pleas for help, have more and more become gifts of wisdom from a contemporary desert. Abba Moses said, “Go into your cell and your cell will teach you everything.” I wrote today to thank my brother in solitary for what he’s teaching me–and to thank God for uniting us in prayer.

… I know your daily circumstances are extremely isolating, but you’re not alone. Besides our Lord, who is always everywhere, there is a great cloud of witnesses joining you in prayer, morning, noon, and midday. It’s a great gift to be part of that family together.

Several years ago, when we were engaged in nonviolent direct action to stop executions at Central Prison, I ended up spending a night in the Wake Co. Jail. The thing I remember most was how disorienting it was to be under those florescent lights 24 hrs a day. I can’t imagine what it does to you to be there day after day, week after week. I know it’s nothing but God who’s keeping your mind and breathing hope into your soul.

What an incredible testimony to the Lord’s power that there, in the worst of human conditions, you are experiencing healing. We have stories from the early church of people going out into the desert, like Jesus did, to wrestle with the demons and learn to trust God. These hermits, called “desert fathers and mothers,” would pray for people back in the world that they had left behind. When I think about them and their prayers, I think about you and yours—how you’re wrestling with the demons of today and lifting up prayers for all of us there in the desert of our prison industrial complex. Of course, you didn’t choose the deprivation you are experiencing, and it is a great injustice. But the cross was also a great injustice. Still, Jesus turned it into the symbol of God’s triumph over the enemy. God is taking what others meant for evil and turning it to good.

But I can only imagine that some days are excruciating. You are not only facing the difficulties of the present in the SHU [Special Housing Unit], but also the demons of your past. The loss and the abuse that you describe are heavy burdens, and their memory is often whispered by the devil with the hope of driving us to despair. What is more, none of us are simply victims. We are not only harmed by the evil done to us, but also by the evil that we ourselves do in response. So anger tempts us to hate those who hurt us. But it also conspires to make us hate ourselves.

You know as well as I do how many people have been consumed by this self-hatred—driven to violence that gets them killed or to drug abuse that masks the pain while slowly destroying their mind. It’s no wonder that some people go insane. And yet, God in his mercy meets us at the place where we stand frozen stiff before the power of these demons and says, “Your sins are forgiven.” God says, “I love you. You are mine. You are more than the worst things that have happened to you—more than the worst things you’ve done. I love you because I made you. I love you, and I won’t let go.”

I’ve been reading the story in Mark 2 where four friends bring a man to Jesus who’s been so crushed by life’s circumstances that he can’t get out of bed. They pick up his bed, one at each corner, and bring him to Jesus. And what does Jesus say? “Your sins are forgiven.” Jesus begins by addressing the man’s deepest wound. This, I think, is the gospel—that Jesus meets us where we are and says, “Your sins are forgiven.” Jesus says, “You’re OK. I love you. You’re not alone anymore. I’m here with you. And these friends are with you too.”

Mark says that Jesus healed the man later. But only to show the religious folk that he had the authority to forgive sins. The miracle is only a sign. The man gets up and walks to prove that he is God’s beloved, invited into beloved community.

Your healing is a miracle to me—a sign that points to the good news of God’s love for each and every one of us. I know we could all wish for more miracles—that all of our broken relationships could be restored, that the guards against whom you’ve filed grievances would be transformed from enemies to friends, that the prison walls would come tumbling down and the lion could lay down with the lamb in God’s eternal kingdom. We pray together, “Come, Lord Jesus.” But, in the mean time, I give thanks that Jesus has said to us, “Your sins are forgiven.” I give thanks that God has given us each other, and that we have a little bit of heaven even now whenever we join our whole selves with God in the eternal song of thanksgiving that is our common prayer.

It’s a gift to be praying with you, brother,

Jonathan

It is, likewise, a great gift to be praying and acting with each of you.

Posted in Front Porch | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Glimmers of Holy

Posted on February 4, 2012 by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

A big part of joining the everyday awakening that’s happening all around us is training our eyes to see it. But this isn’t easy work. It takes time. And help from others. There’s a level of skill to it, too–what the writer Flannery O’Connor called “the ability to stare.”

Lauren demonstrates her "ability to stare."

For the past few years, I’ve had the chance to watch women in our Project TURN prison courses learn the craft of paying attention from Lauren Winner. Watching these women study with Lauren, I can say this: she’s good. Her quirky taste in eye glasses aside, she knows how to see deep-down things. What’s more, she knows how to help others find the truth in their own lives through writing.

The 4th century church father Gregory of Nyssa wrote that “if you wash away the mud that has been put on your heart, the Godlike beauty will again shine out in you.” One of the ways our souls get washed is through learning to tell the truth about who we are and who we want to be. There’s nothing like watching words begin to heal a soul.

I see that healing power in the classes that Lauren helps to teach at our local prison. And I feel it on the pages of her new memoir, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis. When I read the manuscript a few months ago, I wanted to send it right away to two friends who were struggling to hold onto faith and find God in the midst of the mess they were living through. I sent in this endorsement:

“Halfway through Still I realized that a lot of spiritual books–most, maybe–are written during a mid-faith crisis. Too few admit it. But Winner grabs God’s hiddeness by the shoulders and will not let go. She knows the grace that can only be learned when we stand with Moses, staring into the raging waters, and hear a voice say, ‘The LORD will fight for you; you need only to stand still.’”

So, here’s to standing still and staring long enough to see what’s already in front of us–the true and living God who loves us and wants us and will not let us go. I’m grateful to the folks at HarperCollins for letting me share this excerpt from Still with you.

From Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis

By Lauren Winner

Jane Smiley’s novel Horse Heaven was published in 2000, about three years after I left the Judaism in which I had grown up and was baptized in the Anglican church. Smiley is quite possibly my favorite living American novelist—I read her novella “The Age of Grief ” at least once annually—and I snatched up Horse Heaven as soon as it hit the stands. It’s a sprawling comic novel about horse racing, a subculture I have little interest in, and it is not my favorite of the Smiley oeuvre: I prefer her quiet, finely grained family stories—Ordinary Love and Good Will, Barn Blind, At Paradise Gate. But one small section of Horse Heaven spoke to me with a force I had mostly felt only when reading liturgy or poetry or epitaphs. Here, Smiley is writing about a horse trainer named Buddy Crawford. He gets born again and he’s all fired up and then one night he is praying and he sits down on the bed and he looks “up to the full moon, in whose region he imagines Jesus to be,” and then he begins to talk to his Lord and Savior. “Okay. Here’s the deal,” Buddy Crawford says. “I thought I was saved. That was what was advertised. I would accept you as my personal savior, and there you were. And, you know, I felt it, too. I felt saved and everything. . . But I find out all the time that I’ve got to keep getting saved. Am I saved? Am I not saved? What do I do now? . . . Are you talking to me? Are you not talking to me? Am I good? Am I a sinner? Still a sinner?” And then he bursts into tears.

His wife comes into the room, gets undressed, and asks Buddy what has made him cry. “When the Lord came into me,” Buddy tells her, “it was such a good feeling, I thought, Well, I can do anything because of this feeling, but then here was all this stuff to do and to think about, and I don’t remember the feeling all that well.”

It seemed to me that I was reading my own tea leaves when I read those Jane Smiley words. I had not yet had any such experience, any shaking failure of memory, any overpowering uncertainty about whether anything I thought I believed about God was actually true. I was still secure in the grip of certainties, many of them: that Jesus was real, that he was God, that he had come to me in a dream; that God was intimately involved with the particulars of my life; that my days would and should revolve around the institution where people went to meet and get to know and worship this Jesus, that is, the church; that God had saved me; that God was saving me still.

But lying there reading Jane Smiley’s fiction on the hand-me-down futon in my small grad-school garret in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights—I recall that I was drinking cherry-flavored sparkling water as I read, that the water was room temperature but the bubbles felt cold on my throat—I knew that one day, I would sit by Buddy Crawford’s side.

This is a book about what happens when you come to your Buddy Crawford moment, and then what happens after that.

I have never used Crawford’s language of the Lord coming into me. If you asked me how I came to Christianity, I would tell you about my childhood—about growing up with a Jewish father and a lapsed Baptist mother who had agreed to raise my sister and me as Jews; about how I loved Judaism, the synagogue, the Jewish meditation group I attended every month. I would tell you about baking challah and singing songs by Debbie Friedman and how I loved each letter of the Hebrew alphabet. And then I would tell you that when I was in college, unexpected things happened: I had this dream about Jesus rescuing me from a kidnapping; and I obsessively read Jan Karon’s Mitford novels, whose protagonist is an Episcopal priest and whose many characters are always quoting the Bible, sensing Jesus’ nearness, trusting him; and I bought a Book of Common Prayer and started using it to guide my conversations with God; and then finally, I graduated from college and moved to England, and there I was baptized. I would tell you how unexpected this was, how I never expected Christianity—but also how absorbed I became in this new faith, how wholehearted my embrace of it. I was just about the most enthusiastic new Christian you had ever met—in church all the time, reading about church things when I was not at church, wanting nothing more than prayer, Communion, hymns.

The kidnapping dream and the prayer book and the baptism made a path; they were my glory road, and I thought that road would carry me forever. I didn’t anticipate that, some years in, it would carry me to a blank wall, and at that wall a series of questions: do I just stand here staring at this wall? Do I go over? Under? Do I turn around and retrace my steps?

The enthusiasms of my conversion have worn off. For whole stretches since the dream, since the baptism, my belief has faltered, my sense of God’s closeness has grown strained, my efforts at living in accord with what I take to be the call of the gospel have come undone.

And yet in those same moments of strained belief, of not knowing where or if God is, it has also seemed that the Christian story keeps explaining who and where I am, better than any other story I know. On the days when I think I have a fighting chance at redemption, at change, I understand it to be these words and these rituals and these people who will change me. Some days I am not sure if my faith is riddled with doubt or whether, graciously, my doubt is riddled with faith. And yet I continue to live in a world the way a religious person lives in the world; I keep living in a world that I know to be enchanted, and not left alone. I doubt; I am uncertain; I am restless, prone to wander. And yet glimmers of holy keep interrupting my gaze.

Adapted from STILL: NOTES ON A MID-FAITH CRISIS by Lauren F. Winner. Copyright © 2012 by Lauren F. Winner.  Used with permission of HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers.

Posted in Features | 2 Comments

Dorothy Day: “Don’t Call Me a Saint”

Posted on February 2, 2012 by Guest Contributor

By Shane Claiborne

This morning, at the National Prayer Breakfast, Barack Obama named Dorothy Day as a “great reformer in American history”.  Who woulda thunk it?

I think J. Edgar Hoover called her a threat to national security.

Here’s the exact quote from the President’s speech:

We can’t leave our values at the door.  If we leave our values at the door, we abandon much of the moral glue that has held our nation together for centuries, and allowed us to become somewhat more perfect a union.  Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Jane Addams, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, Abraham Heschel — the majority of great reformers in American history did their work not just because it was sound policy, or they had done good analysis, or understood how to exercise good politics, but because their faith and their values dictated it, and called for bold action — sometimes in the face of indifference, sometimes in the face of resistance.

And here’s a quote from our sister, Dorothy Day:  “Our problems arise from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.”

While we are at it, a few more quotes from Dorothy:

  • The only way to live in any true security is to live so close to the bottom that when you fall you do not have far to drop, you do not have much to lose.
  • The true atheist is the one who denies God’s image in the ‘least of these’.
  • The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?
  • We are not expecting Utopia here on this earth. But God meant things to be much easier than we have made them. A man has a natural right to food, clothing, and shelter… A family needs work as well as bread… We must keep repeating these things…  Eternal life begins now.
  • We are the nation of the most powerful, the most armed and we are supplying arms and money to the rest of the world where we are not ourselves fighting. We are eating while there is famine in the world.
  • Most of our life is unimportant, filled with trivial things from morning 
till night. But when it is transformed by love it is of interest even to 
the angels.
  • I have long since come to believe that people never mean half of what they say, and that it is best to disregard their talk and judge only their actions.
  • Spend your life working on something that outlasts it.

And of course her classic line:  “Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed so easily.”

So she didn’t want to be a saint, but she was named a national hero today by the President of the US of A.  Fascinating.

Dorothy Day was the mother of the Catholic Worker movement, and indeed a great reformer and revolutionary.  To read more about her, check out Dorothy Day: Selected Writings (edited by Robert Ellsberg).  And last year marked 30 years since her death, so her diaries were released in a book titled, The Duty of Delight.

Posted in Testimonies | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Testimony from the Circle of Prayer: Steve Harper

Posted on February 1, 2012 by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

At the Rutba House, we’ve learned from experience about our need for prayer. Thankfully, God has sent friends to help us open up the storehouse of the church’s liturgical prayer tradition. A little over a year ago, we teamed up with friends from The Simple Way to release Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals as an invitation to fellow-travelers around the world: “Let’s pray and act together.” The response has been incredible. We’ve found ourselves caught up in a new prayer movement that spans the breadth of Christian traditions and the depth of human suffering around the world. This prayer movement is an anchor for our hope, the invisible power behind the everyday awakening we see happening.

In this special “testimony” section, I want to highlight some of the wise teachers and elders we’ve met in this great circle of prayer. I recently had a chance to interview Steve Harper, professor of spiritual formation at Asbury Seminary. He’s the author of several books on prayer, the most recent being A Pocket Guide to Prayer. I was tickled to get a copy of his pocket guide this week, right alongside the first box of our pocket edition of Common Prayer. Indeed, we’re in good company in this circle of prayer.

JHW: You teach prayer in the seminary and in the church.  What role do you see liturgical prayer playing in the formation of Christians today?

SH: For at least a decade, I have been observing and learning from a clear prayer renewal. As I have explored it further, I find that liturgical prayer is one of the main elements. I have deepened my own life of prayer in the liturgical tradition, and I am teaching others to do so. I believe that liturgical prayer connects us to “the great cloud of witnesses” (some call it The Great Tradition), and I believe that this biblical/historical witness is necessary to keep our faith rooted and alive.

Liturgical prayer “leads” me into prayer in ways that my own stream-of-consciousness never can. I pray the faith in liturgical prayer, and I pray about things my “personal prayer list” does not contain. Liturgical prayer does not inhibit spontaneity, because I can use any of the words as “windows” at which to pause and through which to look for an expansion of my prayer in any given moment. Then, I can continue on with the prayer form as my guide. And perhaps most importantly, liturgical prayer takes me out of any kind of privatized praying and invites me to always pray in community. I believe liturgical prayer is a great unifier in the Body of Christ, and when we are “one in the Lord,” exciting and important things will happen!

JWH: You mention in the intro to your pocket guide that you were influenced by Robert Cushman’s A Pocket Prayer Book. How did you come across Cushman’s book?  What role has it played in your life?

Cushman’s little prayer book first appeared in 1941 and over the years sold more than 2,000,000 copies.  I came across it in the 1960′s when it was advertised in The Upper Room Daily Devotional Guide. I bought a copy and it became an instant guide and friend. I’ve worn my copy out. I think what it did was to introduce a non-liturgical, West-Texas Methodist, to morning and evening prayer–complete with prayers and poems to guide those stated occasions.

The little book was not “liturgical” in the strict sense of the term, but it enabled me to understand that the Christian church has observed fixed times of prayer within the context of an ongoing life of prayer. So, it was both an enrichment to my own praying and also like opening a door for me into further discoveries about the place of fixed prayer times, prayer books, etc. in the development of our spiritual life.  And, it eventually inspired me to write and compile a successor to Cushman’s book, which Upper Room Books published in 2010 under the title, A Pocket Guide to Prayer.

JWH: Your pocket guide has five “offices” or structured times for prayer each day. The Islamic community is known for praying publicly five times a day. But most Christians don’t have a practice of praying that often. Still, you write that this is a longstanding tradition in Christianity. Why is it not so well known or widely practiced?

I’m sure there are many more reasons than I can think of. But I believe the main reason is that we have limited our understanding of the practice of prayer largely to post-Reformation, Protestant sources. Or to say it another way, a lot of us have not become acquainted with the 2,000 year history of prayer in Roman Catholicism and the accompanying Orthodox tradition after 1054 A.D.

Moreover, we have also not paid sufficient attention to what we might call “the prayer-book tradition” within the Anglican and Lutheran traditions. So, it means that from the get go, we have severely limited our exposure to the resources which would have potentially guided us into vital liturgical praying.

In my own Wesleyan tradition, for example, we moved (especially in North America) into a more subjective, free-style kind of praying. I don’t know exactly how this happened, but to the extent that other denominations in The United States can say the same thing is yet another indication of why a lot of us have “come late to the dance” that liturgical prayer invites us into. Happily, this is changing as the ancient-future renewal is bringing us back to a type of prayer that millions of Christians have never ceased to practice.

JWH: How do you understand the connection between prayer and action? Praying five times a day would certainly change a person’s schedule. Does it change other parts of their lives?

Prayer brings our heart and God’s heart together, and when this happens, we can know that the foundational result will be enacting the two great commandments:  love of God and love of neighbor. These are the twin “actions” of any authentic Christianity, and prayer brings both to life. Any prayer life that does not result in these two actions is spurious.

Does this kind of prayer change more than our schedules? Well, I can say “yes” because of my own experience, and what I believe is the experience of a growing number of people. My friend, John Michael Talbot, who began his journey as a Methodist writes that his entry into liturgical prayer came slowly, and my journey into it has come slowly too. I think it’s important to make that clear–especially in an instant-gratification culture. The “change” doesn’t happen overnight, and often it does not occur without some feelings that it’s never going to happen. No form of prayer is exempt from times of dryness. But I believe that liturgical prayer with its stated times is like sowing seeds day after day.

In time, these seeds sprout and produce a variety of fruit. For one thing, they create more of a “disposition” (heart) for continuous praying: praying without ceasing–a life of prayer. For another thing, we discover that we don’t read the printed words–we pray them. And, liturgical prayer is one of the best ways I’ve found to deal with wandering thoughts during prayer. All these things, and more, are important changes that combine to help develop “the mind of Christ” in us.

JWH: Do you see a new prayer movement in the church today?  What signs of hope would you point to?

I see a “new Pentecost” in the church today, and prayer is at the heart of it.

Despite many, many challenges in the Body of Christ today (especially in North America), I believe we are living in a time when a fresh Wind of the Spirit is blowing, and God is inviting us to raise our sails and become filled and directed by that Wind. I can only briefly mention where I see that renewal from my vantage point, and I’m sure there are others.

But I see it in the revival of ancient practices and those who are writing about this. I see it in the New Monasticism. I see it in seminaries where a resurgence of interest in Prayer and Spiritual Formation is occurring. I see it in established denominations through things like the “prayer room movement” and the accompanying revival of praying that goes along with dedicated space. I see it in the Roman and Orthodox branches as leaders there are calling their people to a revival of prayer.

In the parachurch domain, the Navigators continue to “fuel the flame” through their Pray! website and related resources. And others like Renovare, InterVarsity, and Upper Room Books are contributing directly and indirectly by calling us back to classic principles and practices of the spiritual life. When you combine these things with what’s happening in Latin America, Africa, and Asia–the “final report” is nothing short of breath-taking.

Posted in Testimonies | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

A Place to Be Heard

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

When I tell stories about the signs of hope I see in small communities of people who’ve devoted themselves to living the way of Jesus, Christians often ask if I see any signs of hope in congregations. My answer is always, “Yes.” Then I often tell a story about Englewood Christian Church.

A roof-top garden at Englewood Christian Church

A “failed” mega-church in inner-city Indianapolis, Englewood has reorganized itself over the past two decades as a community of and for the neighborhood. It’s the sort of church that prays, worships and eats together, but also finds ways to work together, to live together, and to create good work for neighbors. I’ve been to potluck dinners in their basement and eaten the chilli and cornbread myself. This community is for real.

Here’s a description of some of the good news that’s happening around Englewood:

On Rural Street, the century-old Indianapolis Public School #3 building, which has not functioned as a school since 1979, is being converted into thirty-two units of gorgeous, mixed income housing. It will be the first development in the state of Indiana to integrate market rate and affordable housing with supportive housing for people coming directly out of homelessness or severe mental illness. And not only will its classrooms be transformed into fashionable apartments with high ceilings, wood floors, and lots of natural light; the new apartment complex will also feature a three-level gymnasium and recreational facility that will serve the residents as well as the neighborhood at large.

block east of the former school building is Oxford Street, which was almost completely vacant a decade ago. Over the last ten years, its empty houses have been occupied one by one until a majority of the homes are now filled. Another block in the neighborhood has seen its block club grow and thrive into one of the most active ones on our side of the city, with its neighbors working together on issues pertinent to the block and celebrating together with two large block parties each year.

On the south edge of the Englewood neighborhood, one of the most toxic abandoned industrial sites on the east side of Indianapolis has begun remediation, its land being
renewed and prepared for safe use again at a cost of over a million dollars. Right behind the school building, a lot that was once covered with asphalt is now home to a community
garden that has expanded yearly over the last decade.

Immediately to the south of the school building, a commercial building on Washington Street, a major East-West thoroughfare through Indianapolis, was once home to a seedy used appliance dealer and then vacated. This building is now being renovated and its exterior painted by a local artist with historical scenes from the amusement park that graced the Englewood neighborhood a century ago.

What’s made all of this possible? Chris Smith, a longtime member of Englewood, says it’s learning to listen to one another. He quotes the ancient church father Cyprian in an epilogue to his new e-book The Virtue of Dialog. “The Kingdom of God is not in the wisdom of the world, nor in eloquence, but in the faith of the cross and in the virtue of dialogue.” By creating a space for conversation about the neighborhood and what it meant to be the church there, Englewood became a center for transformation.

I love the vision that Chris is holding up of the church as a new kind of space for connection in a society where people are increasingly atomized and disconnected. This is a good read of an incredible sign of hope in our time.

Posted in Features | 3 Comments