Cloud of Witnesses

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 prayers

Pastoral 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.

Word pierce

Von Balthasar discusses primarily contemplative prayer, since it is the meat-in-the-nut of all prayer. Dialogic participation in the inner nature of God is the foundation of every form of prayer, personal and corporate. It is what Jesus means when he bids us pray, “Our Father.” It is what Paul means when he informs us that “because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father'” (Gal. 4:6, NRSV).

“For we have been permitted to glimpse his inner nature,” von Balthasar writes, “to enter into it, into the inner core of eternal truth; bathed in this light which radiates upon us from God, we ourselves become light and transparent before him.”

Von Balthasar tells us over and over that prayer begins with, is filled with, and ends with the Word of God: “Man was created to be a hearer of the Word, and it is in responding to the Word that he attains his true dignity. His innermost constitution has been designed for dialogue.”

Christian prayer is always Trinitarian: “[T]he Christian has an absolute duty to cultivate Trinitarian contemplation.” Throughout the book von Balthasar offers sharp critiques of Eastern and non-Trinitarian forms of contemplation, the best I’ve read.

Von Balthasar understands our dry times compassionately. In comparing himself and us to the Samaritan woman, he confesses, “I am this dried-up soul, running after the earthly water every day because it has lost its grasp of the heavenly water it is really seeking. Like her I give the same obtuse, groping response to the offer of the eternal wellspring; in the end, like her, I have to be pierced by the Word as it wrings from me the confession of sin.”

Worship curriculum

Ironically, von Balthasar has affected most my pastoral prayers. The pastoral prayer in Sunday morning worship has always been difficult for me. My nature suits me to praying alone. But the kind of personal contemplation von Balthasar teaches-Word-centered, Trinitarian dialogue from the center of the whole person, body and soul-is well suited to public prayer. After reading Prayer I began praying through Scripture in my pastoral prayers in a fashion similar to that in my personal devotions. People tell me they look forward to the pastoral prayer as much as anything in the service and that they are learning how to pray by praying with me. Thus, the Sunday morning pastoral prayer is developing a priesthood of all believers in our church.

As pastors, prayer is our life, and it is our life’s work. It is our tool and our cure. We need to know the biology of prayer: our living, breathing dialogue with God. We need to know the chemistry of prayer: our interaction with the Word of God. We need to know the calculus of prayer: God’s very nature, the Holy Trinity.

Prayer is a curriculum for a lifetime. It teaches us prayer that meets God, that heals, and that is, above all, worship.

Dave Hansen is pastor of Belgrade Community Church in Belgrade, Montana. In this column, he explores how church leaders from earlier generations can mentor us today.