Through our imaginative play we enter into the details of a story to capture the emotion and the intensity of an event. If we only stood back from the story to analyze it in a cool, disinterested way, we could not come to the rich meanings in the story nor be touched by its transforming power. Not until we participate in the concrete details of the story can we grasp its meaning for us. We will not be able to discover the meaning of being a disciple of Jesus for today until we live inside the stories of Jesus and bring our contemporary experiences to them. By imaginatively entering into the stories of Jesus, we can "hear" what Jesus has to say to us in our own situations, or we can "see" what he wants to accomplish through us in today's world. Through this kind of paying attention to Jesus we are fashioned into his disciples.
Our aim in praying with scripture is to live the biblical story as our own. This means we let the story become the environment we live in for that moment of prayer. When we recognize ourselves within its world, it opens for us new understandings of ourselves and new possibilities for our discipleship. We will only understand the meaning of being a disciple of Jesus from inside the stories of Jesus and his disciples.
The biblical story stands before us, then, not only as a source of new information about God and the Lord Jesus, but as an invitation calling us to participate in a living relationship with God. Just as we bring our questions and concerns to the biblical stories, so we let the questions and concerns of the stories address us. "Who do you say I am?" and "Whom do you seek?" are questions not addressed just to disciples of the past, but they are questions addressed right now to us singly. "Do not let your heart be troubled" is spoken not just to the disciples then, but to us now. We get inside these stories with their questions, concerns, challenges, and affirmations through our imaginative play with the text and our own experience.
Three Temptations
Three temptations stand before us as we approach prayer with scripture. The first is fundamentalism. By this I mean being insensitive to symbolic language. The temptation of fundamentalism is to regard the language of the stories as mere descriptive reporting. If we do this, we will take the story literally and flatten its poetic, metaphorical nature, thus rendering the story powerless.
Fundamentalism of this sort is a great temptation in this computer age. In a computer world, language means only one thing. There is a one-to-one correspondence between language and reality. This works well in computers because it is so precise and unambiguous. But such language has no passion. While it may work wonders in computers, it throws cold water on a story. But the language of a story is more evocative than descriptive. It opens to creative possibilities. Flat, one-dimensional language describes what is and prevents anything new from coming into being. This kind of language cannot "imagine" what is not already present. The language of story, however, wants to form something new. So when we pray with scripture stories, we must be ready to change. If we don't want to change, we don't pray!
A second temptation is familiarity. We have heard these stories so often that we think we already know what they mean. We cannot "imagine" them meaning anything else. Not until we trust the poetic, metaphorical nature of the language of story will we be able to enter into these stories and meet the living God in a new, fresh, transforming way.
The third temptation is complexity. The vast amount of critical scholarship that has gone into interpreting the Bible can be very intimidating. We fear we do not know enough to understand the story, so we spend all our time studying a text rather than praying with it. We take the stance of an observer and keep a safe academic distance from the text.
Not becoming a participant in the story prevents us from ever hearing the story as a call for a personal response. We expect commentaries to give us the meaning of the story, so we never find out what the story means for us. Yet, finding personal meaning is what we are about when praying with scripture. This reminds me of a novice who complained to her director about always telling stories but never revealing their meaning. To this the director responded, "How would you like me to offer you an apple, but chew it first before giving it to you?" And so it is in praying with scripture. We seek personal meaning from these stories. No one can find that meaning for us.
We can overcome these temptations when we realize that the biblical stories are filled with metaphors and not flat descriptive words. While always being concrete and rooted in reality, these metaphors are enormously elastic to touch all kinds of experiences. For example, the dead daughter of Jairus can be the child within ourselves that has died; the adultery forgiven by Jesus can be our own forms of infidelity being forgiven; the road to Emmaus becomes our own journey from despair to hope; Jesus' saying not to worry about food and clothes can speak to us about all that disturbs our lives.
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