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 Cloud of WitnessesPastoral prayer is a scalpel, not a massage.
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Yesterday Debbie and I registered our son Evan for his first semester of college. Per his instructions. Evan is in Germany as a foreign exchange student, finishing his senior year of high school. He requested a pre-med biology major. When we mentioned "pre-med" to the director of admissions, she said, "That's easy." Out came a single sheet of paper with four years worth of courses laid out; few slots remained open for electives. His first semester looks like this: biology, chemistry, calculus, and writing. With labs, his weekly schedule looks like a country road sign shot up by bored gopher hunters. Overwhelmed, my fogged-up brain entertained a profound thought: "Boy, you sure have to know a lot to be a doctor." I can remove a splinter without a course in dermatology and prescribe aspirin for a headache without biochemistry, but I don't want a doctor to listen to my clogged lungs and prescribe antibiotics without a knowledge of bacteriology. I want someone with a detailed knowledge of the human body and its immune systems. Good doctoring is the fine art of integrating theory and practice. People deserve a similar depth of knowledge and integration from pastorswith regard to prayer. No middle-management prayersPastoral prayer is a scalpel, not a massage. Our prayers change the whole being of those we pray for. This calls for excellence in our integration of theology and prayer. We teach-quite correctly-that everyone can pray, that even children can pray, and that prayer need not be theo-poetic or theo-logical to be heard and answered. But that is no excuse for pastoral prayer sliding to the lowest common denominator. The priesthood of all believers means that any lay person can pray like a pastor, not that pastors ought to pray like lay people. There are lots of good books on theology and lots of good books on how to pray. Unfortunately, too often theology is written by people who know no more about prayers than we do, and prayer books are written by people who know no more about theology than we do. So when a great theologian writes a great book on prayer, integrating theology and experience, it is something to cherish. Prayer, by Hans Urs von Balthasar, a Swiss Roman Catholic theologian, is just such a book. Von Balthasar writes seamlessly; you can't tell when he's writing theology and when he's writing about how to pray. "It is not enough for the believer," he writes, "to let the Holy Spirit pray in the ground of his soul: he the whole human being, must pray. God expects from him the act of vocal prayer as well as that of contemplative prayer; the transition from possibility to here-and-now reality is something he must perform." For those of us schooled in the prejudice that speciality equals excellence, that functioning in our little slot is a form of humility, reading someone bold enough in Christ to crash the categories is a bit of a shock. I warn you: once you acquire a taste for this kind of writing, it is hard to go back to "middle-management" books on prayer and theology. |             | |||||||||||||||||||
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