The Goal of the Christian Life

Luke 4:14-21 and 2 Corinthians 3:17-18

Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

I was recently asked by a church member, "What is the goal of the Christian life?"  This is an enormous question, of course. I could have tried to summarize the teaching of the Church over the ages and talk in generalities. Instead, I decided to speak from the heart.  This is my answer, offered in the hope that it might resonate with the stirrings of your heart, and be helpful in your journey.

Around the time of my freshman year in college I found myself in an existential crisis.  I was depressed, confused, anxious, troubled.  I found myself having a lot of questions: about myself, my family, my community, my church, my faith, my life, my place in the wider world.  I was in a season of discernment as I tried to figure out the meaning and purpose of my life.  I wasn’t conscious of it then, but I was essentially trying to answer the question the poet Mary Oliver asks in her poem “The Summer Day. “Tell me,” she asks, “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

While all of this was happening, I taught the senior high Sunday School class at my home church, the First Presbyterian Church in North Arlington, NJ.  It was up to me to choose the curriculum.  Around that time, I stumbled upon a book sitting on the shelves in the Christian educator’s office with a curious title, The Worry and Wonder of Being Human.[1] It was written by pastor-theologian Albert Curry Winn, former president of Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminar.  The discovery of this book was a gift to me.  I devoured the opening chapters of the text.  Winn quoted the most fascinating thinkers, writers, poets who led me deeper into the question of what it means to be human and what it means to live the Christian life.  It was built around Psalm 8 (one of my favorite psalms): “O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens…. When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor” (Ps. 8:1, 3-5).  The worry and the wonder of being human is experienced in the tension of this paradox.

Before the immensity of the heavens, the philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) encountered a similar kind of existential shock.  “When I consider the short duration of my life,” he said, “swallowed up in an eternity before and after, the little space I fill engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.”[2]

Winn introduced me to the Christian existentialism of Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)—I came to love the word existential (still do).  It gave expression to my own struggle and questions around what does it mean to exist: what is the meaning of my existence? Who am I? What is this world?  Why am I here?  Who lured me into this life? Why was I not consulted? Now that I’m here, what do I do?  What is this world?  What does it mean to be human, alive, now, at this time, to be given this life?  As my mentor James Loder (1931-2001) would often ask, “What is a life and what is it for?”[3] These soulful questions, together, are like a strong, steady current flowing through the river of my life from an early age. They shaped my studies at Rutgers College, and later at Princeton Seminary, as I delved into the connection between psychology and theology.  As I look back now, they informed my doctoral work, and are the motivations behind my current interest in Jungian psychology.  These questions have shaped my understanding of what it means to be a Christian, what is the goal of the Christian life.  They have informed my ministry and my preaching.  To put it a different way, I am a Christian—and remain a Christian—because the gospel addresses, speaks to, and helps me to answer these ultimate questions. 

The goal of the Christian life is, for me, directly related to the goal of human life. The goal of human life is that we live out a meaningful, fulfilling, generous life.  As I’ve shared many times over the years, there are two Greek words that translate into the English word “life.”  There’s bios, as in biology.  This is ordinary life, life functioning at the lowest level.  And there’s zoe, which is fulfilled life, meaningful life, intense life.  When Jesus said he came that we might have life and have it in all its fullness (John 10:10), he’s talking about zoe.  When Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, the life,” the Greek is zoe (John 14:6).  The goal of the Christian life is that we enter more deeply and profoundly into the zoe-giving life of Christ.  In other words, the goal of the Christian life is that we come alive, fully alive, that we share in Christ’s life who calls us to life—to resurrection. 

Based upon my experience and my reading of scripture, and in light of the transforming power that the gospel has had on my life, this is how I would respond to the question.  The Bible doesn’t speak to this question with one voice.  Theologians across the ages have offered a variety of responses to this question.  There are many ways to answer it.  One other succinct answer might be: grace and gratitude.  In response to God’s grace, we willingly, joyfully offer gratitude through praise and service, through worship and work in the world. When the Westminster Divines met in 1648 to write the Westminster Shorter Catechism, they came up with a good summary statement.  “What is the chief end of man?" the Catechism asks us.  And the answer, “To glorify God and enjoy God forever.”[4] 

In this light, there are some understandings of the Christian life that I don’t espouse.  First, Christian life is about more than being nice or good in the eyes of society.  Jesus was more than a teacher of morality.  Being a Christian is not merely a synonym for being a good person. I grow impatient when I see Christianity reduced to ethics, when the Christian life is reduced to a moral code, moralisms, do-gooderism engaging in works of charity.  There is a moral, ethical dimension to the Christian life, to be sure.  But you don’t have to be Christian to do good things.  I know plenty of atheists who are quite good at doing good work, I would even say, doing God’s work. The Christian life should be ethical—we live out a biblical ethnic, which often means being at odds with the prevailing moral views of society.

Second, I don’t think the Christian life is about saving souls for heaven.  It’s not our job to save anyone.  That’s God’s job.  We are called to bear witness to the truth of the gospel with our lives.  We are called to tell people about Jesus.  To follow where Jesus leads us.  And while I believe in life everlasting, the Christian life shouldn’t obsess about whether or not one is going to heaven.  Until we get there, it’s this life that matters. That it might be “on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10).

And, third, I don’t think the Christian life should be spent fighting over theological ideas or being anxious about getting our beliefs right or worrying about doubt.  Yes, theology matters.  Good theology is a healing balm for the church and for our lives and the world. But the call to follow Jesus is more than ideas or defending ideas or beliefs against heresy.  Theology should help us participate more fully in the zoe-giving life of Christ.

Let’s return to zoe, to life.  The early theologian Irenaeus (130-202) wrote, “The glory of God is each and every one of us fully alive.”  This sentence, this theological claim has meant a lot to me for many years now.  It’s one of the best summaries, I think, of the Christian life.  In Christ, God’s glory is revealed through a fully human life. This means for the one in Christ, the more we come alive—in all its dimensions, mind, body, soul—when a human life is living abundantly, generatively with meaning, purpose, with grace, the glory of God shines through us.  This is the mystery of the Incarnation. Through Jesus’ humanity we see God’s glory.  And if we are “in Christ,” if we share in Christ’s humanity, if we are participating in his life, then, it could be said, we are on the way to becoming more human.  Theologically-speaking, Jesus was fully human.  By God’s grace, we’re on the way to becoming fully human.[5]  The Christian life is essentially humanization. And evil, therefore, can be understood as everything that hampers or hinders human flourishing, everything that dehumanizes.  Humanization is the work of the Holy Spirit, whose task it is to make sure nothing hinders and or hampers the full flourishing of God’s children. Theologians also call this sanctification.

For me, this is beautifully illustrated with Jesus reading from the Isaiah scroll in the synagogue in Nazareth.  This scene marks the beginning of Jesus’ ministry in Luke’s Gospel.  This is extremely significant and sets the tone for the rest of the Gospel.  The Spirit of the Lord, Jesus tells us, is now at work upon him, upon Jesus, “because he has anointed me to bring news to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free,” to proclaim the year of God’s Jubilee.  Release.  Recovery.  Liberty or redemption.   Release, recovery, redemption of human beings who are held captive and oppressed.  That’s what the Spirit is doing through Jesus. That’s what Jesus came to do.  That’s what the Spirit is still doing through us.  This is what the Christian life should be about and is about when the Spirit is at work in us.  It’s about coming alive and helping others come alive.  Releasing the captives, entering into human suffering, sharing in it, and working to alleviate suffering, offering compassion, offering a new future, offering hope, offering Jubilee. This means we engage the powers that be, speak truth in love to the powers, the powers that oppress God’s children, that separate God’s children from their parents, the powers that dehumanize God’s children, keeping them stuck in grinding poverty.  The Spirit seeks the transformation of the world, the redemption, the healing of the powers that oppress and harm and sicken God’s children.

This vision was beautifully captured and embodied by Fred Rogers.  He was all about the saving of children.  In caring for the child, he was also caring for the inner-child who always remains a part of us. As a Presbyterian minister, this was his ministry.  The recent release of the movie Won’t You Be My Neighbor? gives witness to the power of Rogers’ ministry. Writing in The New York Times this past week, David Brooks commented on the number of adults coming out of the theatre in tears.  People are being moved to tears by the power of goodness.  Hearts are being touched and transformed.

And the Spirit seeks the ongoing transformation of the human heart.  This, too, is how we become fully human.  Paul’s letter to the Corinthians beautifully captures this when he says, “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord, there is freedom.  And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:17-18).  This is a sublime text.  It shows us that the follower of Christ essentially participates in the mystery of God.  When we encounter the Spirit, most profoundly through the intimacy of prayer, we participate in the liberty of God, the God who offers freedom and liberty, who wants us to thrive and come to life.  In the intimacy of that relationship we are free to look into the eyes of Christ, in whose eyes we see reflected back to us a clearer image of who we really are.  Our false faces and personas—the masks we hide behind, the false self we would rather preserve than live from an authentic, true self, the self-images distorted by sin and shame—are unveiled in the presence of the One who is freedom. They are slowly, bit by bit over time, pulled away by his graceful gaze. “The Spirit…peel[s] off the layers of illusion and defensiveness, so we can see things as they really are.”[6]  Face-to-face with the Lord the Spirit, the Spirit of freedom, the masks and false personas melt away, and we are changed—our faces, our self-images are transfigured. We discover our true face and are finally prepared to receive the gaze of the One who will never turn away from us, the face that won’t go away, who loves us through and through, who has loved us from the beginning of time.  From one degree of glory to another, over time. It’s through this face-to-face encounter we become human.  As we become more human, more authentically ourselves, as Jesus was authentically himself, our lives glorify God, we share in God’s glory, and people may even see reflected in us something of God’s glory.  The Spirit seeks our transformation.

The Spirit is at work in us.  The Spirit is at work in the world.  What is the goal of the Christian life?  Transformation.  The Spirit seeks transformation.  The healing of the human heart, our own personal growth and development as Christians has a direct bearing upon the reformation and transformation of the world. When we are changed, the world is changed. Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) said, “To be a Christian does not mean to be religious in a particular way…but to be a human being—not a type of human, but the human Christ creates in us. It is not the religious act that makes the Christian, but participation in the sufferings of God in the secular world.” [7] As Christians, we get to join in the work of the Spirit, the same Spirit at work in Jesus, when we, like Jesus, share in the suffering of God in the world, and then work to bring release to the captives, when we offer liberty, when we help people come alive and thrive as human beings.

I pulled out my copy of The Worry and Wonder of Being Human this week.  I haven’t looked at it in a long time.  I was struck by my notes and comments and markings.  These sentences, which I had underlined, leapt off the page at me: “The Christian is meant to be lived, not just discussed.”  Winn says, “The Christian life man or woman is a pilgrim…en route, in transit, on the road.”  We are “on the way from what [we] have been to what [we] will be.”  “For the Christian, the worry of being human is very small compared with the wonder of it….  The wonder of our destiny beckons us on. What shall we be when God finishes what [God] has begun in us?  It exceeds all our dreaming and imagining.”[8]  What shall we be when God finished what God has begun in us?  What shall we be?

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[1] Albert Curry Winn, The Worry and Wonder of Being Human (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1966).

[2] Blaise Pascal, Pensées (“Thoughts”) from 1669. Cited in William Barrett, Death of the Soul:  From Descartes to the Computer (New York:  Anchor/Doubleday, 1986), 8. 

[3] The core theological question posed by James E. Loder, The Logic of the Spirit:  Human Development in Theological Perspective (San Francisco:  Jossey-Bass, 1998).

[4] Question 1 and Answer, Westminster Shorter Catechism (1648), Book of Confessions, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

[5] This insight was inspired by Colin E. Gunton in Christ and Creation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992).

[6] Rowan Williams, Being Disciples: Essentials of the Christian Life (Eerdmans, 2016), 56.

[7] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971), 361.

[8] Winn, 5, 26, 31.

Prayer in the Silence of God

Matthew 26:36-46

Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

My mother’s father died the day after Christmas, 1963, three months before I was born.  He had surgery for a brain tumor and never woke up.  He was 57.  I entered the world in a family overwhelmed by grief, a grief that devastated my mother.  My earliest memory of prayer is from around age three or four.  I am on the hard-wood floor of my parents’ bedroom, beside the bed, flat on my stomach, hands-folded, eyes closed, fervently praying, “Please God, please God, please God, bring PopPop back to life.”  I knew my mother missed him terribly.  I knew how sad she was, and I thought I could do something about it by praying.  Nothing happened, of course.  God was silent.  And I felt terrible.

There was another time, in seventh grade, when my Uncle Manny (short for Mandeville), was very sick in Clara Maas Hospital in Belleville, New Jersey, the same hospital where I was born.  I loved my Uncle Manny and I didn’t want to lose him.  I remember going to sleep that night in February 1977, praying and praying with all my strength that God would make him better, that he would come home from the hospital. In the morning I learned that during the night, he died. Again, my prayer was ineffective.  I felt like I let my uncle down (and everyone else) because I hadn’t prayed hard enough.  God was silent and distant, indifferent to my sorrow and sadness.

You could say these stories illustrate a childish notion of prayer, and you’d be correct. But there are plenty of people in the church and outside it who think prayer is simply make-a-wish. That God is like a genie hanging around with nothing to do but attend to our wishes, our requests, and petitions (even petty petitions).  Some use prayer as a tool or technique to get whatever we want from the universe—what we want, not what we really need.  The comedian Flip Wilson pierced the shallowness of this utilitarian attitude when he said, “I’m gonna pray now; anyone want anything?”

Still, this childish attitude toward prayer resides in most of us, no matter our age or spiritual maturity.  When we’re scared or anxious or tired or feel insecure we turn to God to calm our fears, to rescue us, comfort us, protect us.  We might even find ourselves bargaining with God, saying, “Just answer this one prayer, this one request, and I promise to do more good in the world or be a kinder person or go to church every week or read my Bible every day or tithe my income, before taxes.”

Yes, I know we are invited to make our desires known to God (Philippians 4:6).  I’m still not convinced, though, we should be asking God for a parking space near the entrance of the mall two days before Christmas.  Some of God’s children will have to walk, far, to get to Macy’s and most of God’s children could probably use the exercise.

That said, years ago, I was in Washington, DC, driving around the busy neighborhood of Adams Morgan looking for a parking space.  It was a Friday night, traffic was horrible, and I was tired.  Now, I don’t usually do this, but I prayed, thoughtlessly, “Please God, let me find a parking space.”  And then to my utter amazement, several feet in front of me was a parking space!  No, I thought, that was too easy.  So I drove past it and then drove around the block, and it was gone.  Serves me right.  So, I said, “I’m sorry.”  Then another space opened further down the block, which I took.

Does prayer help?  Does it work?  How does it work?  Is it effective?  Is it little more than make-a-wish?  There are plenty of people who have turned on God, rejected God, stopped praying, and left the church altogether because of unanswered prayer.  I certainly understand this. I’ve found, though, that God’s love is sometimes evident in unanswered prayer; not getting what we want or thought we needed for ourselves or others or the world could be an expression of grace. And there are plenty of people I know whose lives, churches, families, and communities were changed or healed or transformed through the power of prayer—prayer in the moment and sustained prayer over a lifetime. I have experienced the power of people praying for me during challenging moments in my life; I felt as if I was being carried along. You might have experienced that feeling too.  I felt it after my mother died; when I came out to the congregation several years ago; and when I walked on the Camino two years ago.  I don’t claim to understand it.  I just know it’s true.

After all these years as a Christian and as a minister, I’m still learning how to pray, and discovering the kind of prayer that resonates most with my personality and outlook and experience.  Paul charged the church in Thessalonika, “Pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17).  But he never told them—or us—how to pray.  All we know is that he believed in it.  He knows its power.  And perhaps that’s all we need to know.  Jesus told us how to pray.  He said go away to a secret or deserted place and pray, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be your name…” (Matt. 6:1-13). 

We pray, because Jesus prayed—because he wanted to pray and because he needed to pray to be fully human. And his humanity was on full display in his prayer of anguish in the Garden of Gethsemane, when he prayed for hours asking God to remove the cup of suffering from him, only to encounter the silence of God.  In Luke’s account we learn that, “In his anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like drops of blood falling down on the ground” (Luke 22:4). Then, eventually in and before the silence of God, Jesus yields: “your will be done” (Matt. 26:42). 

The desire to pray sits deep in the human psyche.  We are made to be in relationship with the Divine.  Roberta Bondi is a scholar of the desert mothers and fathers, eremites who lived and wrote and prayed in the deserts of Egypt, in the third century.   Bondi reminds us that, “We are so made that we cannot live fully without it. Prayer is central to the Christian life.” And as the desert mothers and fathers knew, “God’s love is the foundation of prayer.”[1] Love calls us into prayer.  In prayer, we deepen our capacity to love God, our neighbor, ourselves, the enemy and the stranger. It’s grounded in love.

Still, we want to know: How does it work?  Does it really help?  Libby Wolf told me this week she was really looking forward to this sermon because, as she said, “I believe in prayer.” It’s powerful, transforming.  Sometimes prayer is even effective in changing God’s mind (there are examples of this in the Bible), but for the most part prayer doesn’t work that way.  Yes, praying helps.  Prayer is effective. But probably not in ways we suspect.

My friend, Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), was a prayer warrior and wrote stunningly beautiful, psychologically profound prayers.  He once said, “Prayer does not change God, it changes the one who prays.”[2]  It’s here within us, in the human heart, that prayer is truly most effective, in the way that it shapes us and changes us, and makes a difference in our lives and through us in the world.

So, how are we changed in prayer?  I suggest that we are changed when we embrace silence, then speak from the heart, and then enter into communion with God and our neighbor.  Silence.  Heart.  Communion.

Kierkegaard tells the story that one day “A man prayed, and at first he thought that prayer was talking.  But he become more and more quiet until in the end he realized that prayer was listening.”[3]  No words. No talking to God.  Only listening.  Listening in silence, listening to the silence.  This is the basis of contemplative prayer: no words, just silence.  Some people are afraid of silence and do everything they can to avoid it.  More and more in my journey I’ve come to welcome the silence.  I find that prayer is being attentive to the silence and listening to what the silence says, to what it points to.  Scripture says, “Yahweh is in his holy temple, let all the earth keep silence before him (Habbakuk 2:20). When Elijah met God on Mount Horeb, God was not to be found in earthquake, wind, or fire, but in a “still small voice,” as the King James Version says—or, a better translation of the Hebrew is “sheer silence” (1 Kings 19:12, NRSV). Sheer silence!

What if God hides in the silence, and the silence pulls us in? Silence, then, would not suggest the absence of God, but God's presence.  The silence is not really silent, and it’s not empty.  It’s full of the silence of God!  You have to train your ear to hear it.  It requires stillness and attention.  Douglas Christie calls it “a fierce commitment to paying attention.”[4]

My mentor, James Loder (1931-2001), who taught at Princeton Theological Seminary, told the story of Willa, a young adult who was hospitalized for schizophrenia.  She was bright, but many people took advantage of her over the years, and she finally broke down.  In the hospital, she sat for hours in a chair, rocking her doll, “Bill,” and staring into space. Then she would get up, act in a bizarre manner, dance around, talk to herself, hassle the nursing staff for information about her medical record, and then go back and sit in her chair and rock her little doll. The head nurse told Jim that they didn’t expect Willa ever to leave the hospital.  One day, while she was sitting in the chair, someone came up behind her, put arms around her, and said, “The silence is not empty; there is purpose for your life.” She turned around, but there was no one there.  The power of the experience slowly began to build sanity for her.  She did leave the hospital, started therapy with Jim, and was eventually baptized.[5]  The silence is not empty. 

Everything emerges from silence.  Creation, language, music.  Silence is generative.  And, as Jim Loder often said to me, all wisdom flows from silence and returns us to silence.  Silence comes first.  Silence is the ground. Instead of indicating the absence of God, silence might actually hide the presence of God.

Look at Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.  Here we find him wrestling with God, looking for a way out of what Jesus sensed was approaching, yet desiring to do God’s will.  Jesus pursues the hidden God and encounter’s God’s silence.  And in this prayer of anguish, within the silence of God, we witness the intensification of Jesus’ personality.  It’s in and through his struggle in prayer that he remembers what is most important to him, that he discerns the purpose of his life, and then ultimately yields to the goodness of God’s will.  Jesus here offers the pattern for how prayer can work in our lives.  Out of God’s silence or after we sit with God in silence, eventually a word, an insight, a choice emerges.

More than thirty years ago, James Carse, professor of religious studies at New York University, wrote an excellent book on prayer, called The Silence of God.  He says, “The essential insight [regarding prayer] is that in an encounter with divine reality we do not hear a voice but acquire a voice; and the voice we acquire is our own.”  This is, I think, an extremely important insight.  “It is an experience in which we find we say what we never thought it was possible to say.”[6] Not my will, but your will be done, O Lord.  Our true voice emerges after embracing the silence, listening for the voice behind the silence.

Then from out of that silence we’re able to pray from the heart.  “The heart is a beggar. [So,] speak from your heart and you will speak to God.”[7]  We can pray honestly, authentically, without poetic language, without trying to put our Sunday-best-self forward in prayer.  “Speaking to God from your heart,” Carse says, “is the only real religious issue there is.  Learn to pray, and all else follows.  It is not the content of the heart that matters, only the ability to speak from it. We sometimes think that a heart full of hatred, or envy, [or sin, or shame] or a heart drained of passion, disqualifies itself for authentic prayer.  The task, however, is not preparing your heart for prayer, but speaking from your heart as it is.  We can easily get this backward in the religious life, assuming that our primary spiritual assignment is to make ourselves presentable to God instead of presenting ourselves to God as we are.”[8] 

When the heart speaks to God from out of the depths of silence, the result is communion, deep communion, intense intimacy of the human spirit with the Holy Spirit.  It’s in communion that we see the “results” or the “effects” of prayer, because it drives us deeper into God, deeper into the relationship, and through that relationship we are changed—again and again.  Oswald Chambers (1874-1917), author of the religious classic, My Utmost for His Highest (1924), said, “Prayer changes me and then I change things.”  Through the intimacy of prayer our attitudes and our outlooks change.  We see with new eyes.  We experience, we feel the world in a different way.  Our hearts are softened and transformed, and we find ourselves acting with greater compassion—we love, we forgive, we fight for justice, we bless, we extend grace, we work toward wholeness, we help transform the world.

Writing from St. Catherine’s Monastery, situated at the foot of Mt. Sinai, John Climacus (579-649) said, “Prayer is by nature a dialog and a union with God. Its effect is to hold the world together.”[9]  Through our union or communion with God the world is being held together.  Our communion with God in prayer deepens our communion with our neighbors, and, so, we hold one another together.  Praying for someone, praying with someone deepens the bond you have with them.  It forms a connection, a community.  This year, the Session randomly divided itself up in groups of two.  Each elder has a prayer partner.  They covenant to pray for each other. They regularly ask each other: how can I best be praying for you?  Praying this way deepens connection, community, and trust.  What if we tried this throughout the congregation?  What would happen?

Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), German mystic, Benedictine abbess, polymath, said, “Turn to God.  Be confident that [God] has touched you.  Continue to give [God] the burnt offerings of your heart’s openness.  Sigh, and know He hears you.”[10]  In being heard we come alive. You know what it’s like, you know how you feel when you are heard.  When we are heard, we are known, and in being known, we come to life.  Being heard in prayer calls us to life.  And it opens our hearts.  “Prayer awakens us to the intimate voice of the heart.  It is because our hearts find their voice that the present silence of God…become[s] the silent presence of God.”[11]

Prayer.  Does it help? What does it do?  Prayer changes us and helps us come to life. It evokes the voice of heart, it calls us to ourselves.  In prayer, we acquire our true voice.  Prayer fine-tunes our sensibilities—it deepens our capacity to love and to receive love, to listen, to feel, to see, to speak a healing word, to act. Prayer has a way of concentrating our desire or will by giving us greater clarity in discerning the deepest desires of our hearts, discerning what God desires for us.  Ultimately, it helps us to choose, choose to love. 

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[1] Roberta C. Bondi, “The Paradox of Prayer,” Weaving: A Journal of the Christian Spiritual Life, Vol IV, No. 2 (March/April 1989), 7.

[2] Søren Kierkegaard, Self-Examination/ Judge for Yourself (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).  See also Perry D. LeFevre, The Prayers of Kierkegaard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).

[3] Søren Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974).

[4] 3Douglas Christie, The Blue Sapphire of the Mind, cited in Fred Bahnson, “The Ecology of Prayer,” Orion Magazine (December 29, 2017).

[5] James E. Loder, The Logic of the Spirit: Human Development in Theological Perspective (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998), 264-265.

[6] James P. Carse, The Silence of God: Meditations on Prayer (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1985), 8.

[7] Carse, 4.

[8] Carse, 10.

[9] John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, c. 600.

[10] Carmen Acevedo Butcher, Hildegard of Bingen: A Spiritual Reader (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2007), from a letter written around 1146.

[11] Carse, 32.