patrick jane forums
Theology, Anthropology & Archaeology => BIBLE STUDY - From The Late Lori Bolinger => Topic started by: guest24 on May 16, 2020, 08:18:03 am
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There is a lot more about effective prayers we can talk about beyond where this OP starts but we will start here anyway.
John 14:13-14 King James Version (KJV)
13 And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.
14 If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it.
I see lots of people praying things that are 1. gross generalizations, 2. covetous, 3. contrary to scripture, etc. and yes, I have even caught myself doing it a few times. God promises that if our prayers are in line with His name (His will) it will be done. Yet many people wonder why we should pray anyway...if everything we pray for in His name (His will) is a yes, why are so many people questioning the need for prayer if our prayers are consistent with His will? If our prayers are prayers that will result in Him being glorified?
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRhDfznWyJ0
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGyeU8o_q-0&list=WL&index=38&t=0s
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fec3fksOJfA
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1VYqkD3c_I
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSfmbgY4fMI&list=WL&index=26&t=0s
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qd0v6Kmj8z0
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXBrmUfEhys
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gESPMyt1Yqw
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(https://www-images.christianitytoday.com/images/118312.png?w=700)
https://www.christianitytoday.com/edstetzer/2020/july/one-on-one-with-john-starke-on-having-deeper-prayer-life.html
One on One with John Starke on Having a Deeper Prayer Life
We need a deep, hidden life for a fruitful, public life.
Ed: Why a book on prayer? Have you noticed deficiencies in how we are doing in the church in regards to prayer life?
John: We live in a performative age. “Performative individualism” is how Sophie Gilbert describes our society, where the performance of the self is more important than the reality of it. The most obvious place this shows up is in social media, where we curate our image to give the impression that we are okay and that we’re successful.
But there are also forms of performative individualism in our vocations, relationships, and even our families. Jesus warns against this in “performing your righteousness before others” in a kind of performative spirituality. The fruit of that is a culture of hyper-insecurity, a lack of self-awareness, and deep status anxiety.
We are likely all shaped by this culture in more subconscious ways than we think.
The answer to this performative life is to have a regular, hidden life with God. For many people, that’s intimidating. Oftentimes, when we hear of a “deep prayer life,” they imagine the one or two people in their church who are mature, or pastors, or folks made of different spiritual stuff.
I wrote this book because the Bible imagines prayer to be a very ordinary thing for very ordinary people. The whole first half of the book is aimed at showing that a satisfying and vibrant prayer life is for all who are in Christ.
Ed: What are some of the regular pathways and rhythms of a life of prayer?
John: After we grasp that prayer is possible for us, we learn the pathways. That’s the concern of the second half of the book, where I look at six main disciplines: communion, mediation, solitude, feasting and fasting, and corporate worship. These aren’t complex, but ordinary things.
It’s not an overstatement to say that the most transformative thing you can do is to begin to spend unhurried time with God on a regular basis for the rest of your life. What I try to show in the book is that it’s possible.
Ed: Who have you found to be key people in scripture who have modeled what our prayer life should look like? How can we model these patterns?
John: Jesus gives us a pattern of prayer in the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6. That’s a good place to begin. But Jesus talks quite a bit on prayer. He teaches us we ought to come to God like a father who likes to give good gifts (Matt. 7:7-11); that we ought to pray with faith (Mark 11:23-26); we ought to pray in private (Mark 12:38-40); we ought to plead to God like a persistent widow coming to a reluctant judge for justice or like a tax collector longing for mercy (Luke 18).
But the prayer book of the church is the book of Psalms. Eugene Peterson says somewhere that since the church’s beginning, Christians have learned to pray by praying the Psalms each day. The Psalms contain every human emotion.
They teach us how to pray when we are angry, desperate, joyful, depressed, afflicted, and hopeful. They teach us how to feel or what to say when our lives are falling apart or when we’ve just been delivered.
The easiest way to allow the Psalms to shape your prayer life is to read a psalm a day and ask how this psalm teaches me to talk to God.
Ed: Let’s talk about prayer during these times of Covid-19 and racial injustice. How do we press into prayer now?
John: Covid-19 has taken away a lot of the public and therefore performative elements of our lives, leaving much of it hidden, which can be strategic for our spiritual growth. It might be helpful to imagine ourselves like a seed, buried in the ground.
So much happens to a seed, when buried. It dies, as Jesus says, in John 12. But in doing so, it opens itself up to all the resources of the soil and becomes something greater than it was.
But it had to be hidden to do so. I think there’s a lot to that imagery that we haven’t been able to see and grasp until now.
With racial injustice, there’s a danger of performative justice. In other words, right now, Christians are tempted to say the right things on social media to ensure we are on the “right side” or we don’t have any work to do on ourselves.
Then, once our culture is done being concerned about it, so are we. Having right conclusions about racial injustice is one thing, but to be working against it for only as long as the culture is paying attention is worldliness. We will need something deeper than “cultural support” to be people of justice.
Justice, especially racial justice, is a long road that often takes many hidden acts of sacrifice and suffering. So much is needed that is unseen. That means we will need to know how to work and pray in hidden ways. For many of us, it’s hard to even imagine what that kind of life and work looks like. We need a deep, hidden life for a fruitful, public life.
Ed Stetzer is executive director of the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center, serves as a dean at Wheaton College, and publishes church leadership resources through Mission Group. The Exchange Team contributed to this article.
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(https://www-images.christianitytoday.com/images/118312.png?w=700)
https://www.christianitytoday.com/edstetzer/2020/july/one-on-one-with-john-starke-on-having-deeper-prayer-life.html
One on One with John Starke on Having a Deeper Prayer Life
We need a deep, hidden life for a fruitful, public life.
Ed: Why a book on prayer? Have you noticed deficiencies in how we are doing in the church in regards to prayer life?
John: We live in a performative age. “Performative individualism” is how Sophie Gilbert describes our society, where the performance of the self is more important than the reality of it. The most obvious place this shows up is in social media, where we curate our image to give the impression that we are okay and that we’re successful.
But there are also forms of performative individualism in our vocations, relationships, and even our families. Jesus warns against this in “performing your righteousness before others” in a kind of performative spirituality. The fruit of that is a culture of hyper-insecurity, a lack of self-awareness, and deep status anxiety.
We are likely all shaped by this culture in more subconscious ways than we think.
The answer to this performative life is to have a regular, hidden life with God. For many people, that’s intimidating. Oftentimes, when we hear of a “deep prayer life,” they imagine the one or two people in their church who are mature, or pastors, or folks made of different spiritual stuff.
I wrote this book because the Bible imagines prayer to be a very ordinary thing for very ordinary people. The whole first half of the book is aimed at showing that a satisfying and vibrant prayer life is for all who are in Christ.
Ed: What are some of the regular pathways and rhythms of a life of prayer?
John: After we grasp that prayer is possible for us, we learn the pathways. That’s the concern of the second half of the book, where I look at six main disciplines: communion, mediation, solitude, feasting and fasting, and corporate worship. These aren’t complex, but ordinary things.
It’s not an overstatement to say that the most transformative thing you can do is to begin to spend unhurried time with God on a regular basis for the rest of your life. What I try to show in the book is that it’s possible.
Ed: Who have you found to be key people in scripture who have modeled what our prayer life should look like? How can we model these patterns?
John: Jesus gives us a pattern of prayer in the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6. That’s a good place to begin. But Jesus talks quite a bit on prayer. He teaches us we ought to come to God like a father who likes to give good gifts (Matt. 7:7-11); that we ought to pray with faith (Mark 11:23-26); we ought to pray in private (Mark 12:38-40); we ought to plead to God like a persistent widow coming to a reluctant judge for justice or like a tax collector longing for mercy (Luke 18).
But the prayer book of the church is the book of Psalms. Eugene Peterson says somewhere that since the church’s beginning, Christians have learned to pray by praying the Psalms each day. The Psalms contain every human emotion.
They teach us how to pray when we are angry, desperate, joyful, depressed, afflicted, and hopeful. They teach us how to feel or what to say when our lives are falling apart or when we’ve just been delivered.
The easiest way to allow the Psalms to shape your prayer life is to read a psalm a day and ask how this psalm teaches me to talk to God.
Ed: Let’s talk about prayer during these times of Covid-19 and racial injustice. How do we press into prayer now?
John: Covid-19 has taken away a lot of the public and therefore performative elements of our lives, leaving much of it hidden, which can be strategic for our spiritual growth. It might be helpful to imagine ourselves like a seed, buried in the ground.
So much happens to a seed, when buried. It dies, as Jesus says, in John 12. But in doing so, it opens itself up to all the resources of the soil and becomes something greater than it was.
But it had to be hidden to do so. I think there’s a lot to that imagery that we haven’t been able to see and grasp until now.
With racial injustice, there’s a danger of performative justice. In other words, right now, Christians are tempted to say the right things on social media to ensure we are on the “right side” or we don’t have any work to do on ourselves.
Then, once our culture is done being concerned about it, so are we. Having right conclusions about racial injustice is one thing, but to be working against it for only as long as the culture is paying attention is worldliness. We will need something deeper than “cultural support” to be people of justice.
Justice, especially racial justice, is a long road that often takes many hidden acts of sacrifice and suffering. So much is needed that is unseen. That means we will need to know how to work and pray in hidden ways. For many of us, it’s hard to even imagine what that kind of life and work looks like. We need a deep, hidden life for a fruitful, public life.
Ed Stetzer is executive director of the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center, serves as a dean at Wheaton College, and publishes church leadership resources through Mission Group. The Exchange Team contributed to this article.
Powerful ; Yes....in the sense that you as a true Christian can communicate with a true Extraterrestrial. Someone beyond the boundaries of TIME, someone so grand, so loving that he gave His only begotten son the sins of the world. Talk to Him, speak to Him often and always make it from your heart.
Blade
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dPnDxzjAy8
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Yes
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esxpEOH7zJQ
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REClYm9WBjM
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJ65lMvJJ0Q
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5ZUwBr8GOg
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(https://www-images.christianitytoday.com/images/123420.jpg?w=940)
https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2021/may-web-only/prayer-science-psychology-research-methodology.html
How Much Does Prayer Weigh?
Why scientists struggle to put this spiritual practice under the microscope.
Praying can be easy. A prayer can be a thought, a word, a heavenward plea from someone in need, a few lines said spontaneously or recited from a book, or even just a groan. Understanding what a prayer does after it leaves your lips is a little more difficult. Christian theologians have long debated how prayer works, and what it means to say it “works.” So have scientists.
Psychologist Kevin L. Ladd, a professor at Indiana University South Bend, recently examined some of the extensive recent research on prayer for the John Templeton Foundation. Looking at more than 40 psychological studies finished in the past few years on the impact of prayer on intimate relationships, Ladd found there is some evidence of positive correlations between prayer and improved relationships. “It may,” he writes, “be useful to encourage people to engage some forms of prayer as coping tools.”
But in study after study, Ladd, author of The Psychology of Prayer: A Scientific Approach, also found that researches hadn’t thought very carefully about what prayer is. In a sense, they kept pointing their telescopes in the wrong direction.
Ladd spoke to CT about the limits of prayer research.
Why is it hard to study prayer scientifically?
If you’re not familiar with the practice of prayer and why people pray, it’s very easy to look at it as though somebody is making a definitive statement or doing something over which they would claim to have full control. The twist with prayer is that you can be saying things that sound very active and assertive about what you want to happen in the world and also at the same moment you are relinquishing control. You’re saying, “I am surrendering this concern.”
The metaphysical core of prayer—what God does—is not accessible to science. That’s out of the ballpark. But what we can study effectively as scientists is how people act as a result of prayer. What drives them to prayer? What do they do when they pray? And after, how do they behave?
If I pray for my neighbor, are you saying you could study the effects of that prayer on me but not on my neighbor?
Yes. This goes right into the idea of “thoughts and prayers,” which has been attacked so much. If I direct thoughts and prayers to my neighbor, I can’t see what the prayer itself is doing, but I can see what I do.
If I’m praying for my neighbor, does that change my behavior toward that neighbor? Maybe, as the old saying goes, “My heart is to God and my hand is to work.” We can see if those two things go together. One person prays for the neighbor. Another doesn’t. Who actually goes and does something for the neighbor? Who’s contributing their time, their talents, their resources? Yeah, we can study that, and we find it does have an effect.
Not everyone prays in the same way. Not everyone means the same thing by prayer. So how do researchers define prayer?
The standard approach is to leave it open to the participant and say, “You do what you do when you say that you’re praying, and then we’ll talk about it.” You leave it wide open.
There’s so much individual variation. Having talked to thousands of people in religious communities, in churches, people who are dedicated to prayer, I’ve found there are so many—almost half—who say they’ve never been asked about prayer and what they do and why.
This line of research opens up so many conversations about the nature of spirituality. One of their biggest fears is that they’re not doing in right.
How did you get into studying prayer?
It has always been a part of my own life as a Christian. My father is a pastor in the United Methodist Church. I went to seminary and as part of my seminary training, I spent time working at an education testing service, which is a sort of atypical path in seminary. My friends were studying Greek and Hebrew and I’m talking about statistics and research design.
My first study during my PhD work was a group of breast cancer survivors, and it was focused on exercise and the things they do to take of themselves after surviving cancer, and many of them spontaneously talked about how important prayer was to them. And we thought, well, we should look at that. At the time—30 years ago now—that was pretty novel.
How long have people been studying prayer scientifically? When did that project start?
I don’t know if you remember the story of Gideon and the fleece, how he put out the fleece and said to God, “Make it wet!” and “Make it dry!” That has the hallmarks of a study.
If we look for a more modern scientific approach, we come up to the 1800s and Francis Galton. He’s in Victorian Britain thinking, if prayer is doing something, then you do a lot of it, it must be doing more things. Well, who gets the most prayer? The Church of England is praying for the health of the monarch all the time. So the king ought to be in really good health! It turns out it doesn’t really work like that, but that idea launches t he prayer-gauge debate, which rages for a long time.
The way they’re thinking about it at the time, people are praying, prayer goes from their lips or their hearts, and then a metaphysical thing happens, and it influences the monarch. People get stumped with that middle section, though. With the metaphysical question.
Eventually that approach falls out of favor. I think when it falls out it’s because you’re trying to measure a metaphysical thing, and you can’t get at that. Eventually you hit a wall. There’s a missing component.
Is part of the problem also a problem with measuring? It seems like prayer can’t be measured in the way science approaches measurement.
Yes. It’s interesting if you think about it, one of the things Galton was assuming was that more prayer is better. But if you go into any religious tradition, you dig into the text, there’s never a guarantee that more is better. It’s not like a dose of aspirin. The Bible says lots of things about excessive prayer having no effect, whether it’s the prophets of Baal trying to call down fire in a competition with Elijah, or Jonah, who wants to see Nineveh destroyed and God doesn’t do it. More prayer doesn’t necessarily have greater effect.
There’s also so many people sitting in every congregation who worry about not praying right that we should be careful. If we say that “Scientifically, prayer does these things,” and then it doesn’t work, we’re saying you didn’t do it right. That’s the insidious underbelly of a lot of science research on prayer. We’re blaming the victim.
You go back to the religious texts, and that’s not what they say about prayer. They’re much more nuanced and complicated in articulating what makes a prayer good, and that may or may not connect in any direct way to an effect that we can see.
Does studying prayer have the side effect of helping people see prayer differently?
I hope that part of what the research shows is there’s not one way that people pray. Not one way in terms of language. Not one way in how it is you use your body. Not one time that people pray. There is a plethora of ways that people pray. I hope that’s one thing that people take away.
What if your prayer is just a single fleeting thought reaching out to God? Does that count? Well, I think some theologians would say yes.
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Franklin Graham reacts to Biden omitting 'God' from National Day of Prayer
Biden is the first president to omit the word God from proclamation; Reverend and Samaritan's Purse President weighs in
5 minutes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zsz0NBaA0lk
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD8pP---l-Y
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I often hear people talk about the power of prayer and such and I suppose there is some truth to all of that, but that's not how I look at it. The way I see it is that my prayers are weak, as I myself am weak and unable to do much of anything on my own, but the one I'm praying to? That Father?
HE, can do anything. So in this way- when I am weak, then I am strong because in my weakness is when I am most willing and most inclined to reach out to Him who is strong. The prayers of a righteous man availeth much.... but alas, I am not a righteous man. I am a weak man, but HE is able. And HE is righteous and anything I ask that aligns with His good and perfect will, shall be done. With all this in mind, I knock and I seek and I keep knocking and keep seeking and even when circumstances don't change, He changes me. So yes-- that's powerful.
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I often hear people talk about the power of prayer and such and I suppose there is some truth to all of that, but that's not how I look at it. The way I see it is that my prayers are weak, as I myself am weak and unable to do much of anything on my own, but the one I'm praying to? That Father?
HE, can do anything. So in this way- when I am weak, then I am strong because in my weakness is when I am most willing and most inclined to reach out to Him who is strong. The prayers of a righteous man availeth much.... but alas, I am not a righteous man. I am a weak man, but HE is able. And HE is righteous and anything I ask that aligns with His good and perfect will, shall be done. With all this in mind, I knock and I seek and I keep knocking and keep seeking and even when circumstances don't change, He changes me. So yes-- that's powerful.
My prayers are two fold. For those that need help and comfort and giving thanks for all the blessings he has bestowed upon my family, etc.. It should be as simple as thanking Jesus first thing in the morning for another day to see, feel, hear and smell His beautiful creation that is all around me. Prayer is the only way we have of acknowledging that He is our LORD and Savior.
Blade
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I often hear people talk about the power of prayer and such and I suppose there is some truth to all of that, but that's not how I look at it. The way I see it is that my prayers are weak, as I myself am weak and unable to do much of anything on my own, but the one I'm praying to? That Father?
HE, can do anything. So in this way- when I am weak, then I am strong because in my weakness is when I am most willing and most inclined to reach out to Him who is strong. The prayers of a righteous man availeth much.... but alas, I am not a righteous man. I am a weak man, but HE is able. And HE is righteous and anything I ask that aligns with His good and perfect will, shall be done. With all this in mind, I knock and I seek and I keep knocking and keep seeking and even when circumstances don't change, He changes me. So yes-- that's powerful.
My prayers are two fold. For those that need help and comfort and giving thanks for all the blessings he has bestowed upon my family, etc.. It should be as simple as thanking Jesus first thing in the morning for another day to see, feel, hear and smell His beautiful creation that is all around me. Prayer is the only way we have of acknowledging that He is our LORD and Savior.
Blade
You said....prayer is the only way we have of acknowledging that He is our LORD and Savior
What about how we live? What about Love? I would think there are other ways to acknowledge He is Lord and Savior.
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(https://www-images.christianitytoday.com/images/126327.jpg?h=528&w=940)
https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2021/november-web-only/stokes-romantic-poets-prayer.html
She Walks in Beauty Like a Prayer
Christopher Stokes on how the Romantic poets propelled a new view of personal devotion.
The language of prayer and the language of poetry share strong similarities. Prayer, like poetry, allows for, and even invites, the interplay between truth and beauty. A new book explores this connection between rational thought and aesthetic expression. Romantic Prayer: Reinventing the Poetics of Devotion, 1773–1832(Oxford University Press, 2021), by Christopher Stokes, senior lecturer in Romantic literature with the University of Exeter, is a scholarly examination of several key poets of the British Romantic period, from pre-Romantic William Cowper to second-generation Romantics Percy Shelley and Lord Byron and a range of poets in between.
The poets examined in this book reflect shifts in forms of religious devotion. Stokes argues that the theology of prayer reflected in this age and its poets parallels the growing importance of individual practices in religious life, when devotion became as much about doing as believing. Poetry, likewise, was increasingly becoming a personal practice, not merely an objective art.
Living in a time of ongoing and culminating secularization, these poets illustrate the ways Christianity helped birth secularity, as debates about the modes of Christianity evolved into debates about Christianity itself. Even so, as Stokes shows, poetry can be a way to preserve and practice religious faith amid growing skepticism.
You call prayer “an organ of faith” because of the way it “imprints” an understanding of God in the one who prays. Poetry, too, is a language that forms or imprints itself on us. The foundation of your analysis is that the language of prayer and the language of poetry are deeply connected. How are they connected?
There’s certainly a deep historical connection between poetry and prayer. As I note in the book, the very earliest surviving poem in English, Caedmon’s “Hymn,” is a kind of prayer. And across the centuries, poetry has been energized by its relationship with private prayers, with hymnody, with liturgies, and with great scriptural texts like the Psalms or the Song of Songs. There are certain eras—I’m thinking of the 17th century and the Victorian period, for instance—when devotional poetry really is as good as anything else being written in English literature, and you see poetry drawing this tremendous beauty and complexity from the great religious and theological shifts of its times.
So, it’s impossible to think about the development of English verse—and literature never sheds its histories—without thinking about prayer as well. The evangelical tradition often slighted set or memorized prayers and saw prayer as a much more visceral cry from the heart. Poetry also took inspiration from that notion.
More abstractly, there is also something interlinking the experience of prayer and the experience of lyric poetry (poetry spoken by an “I”), which has always captured the imagination of writers. Perhaps it has to do with the intimacy of voice, or the overtones of confession, or the idea of speaking in this strikingly unusual way (that prayer and poetry share) whereby there isn’t necessarily an addressee present in the conventional way but there is still a fundamental sense that this language will be heard. I’ve always been fascinated by those links.
The Romantic poets were, in many ways, reacting to seismic shifts in the 18th century, shifts brought about by the Enlightenment, by the factions within and outside the established church, and by the increased subjectivity that both enacted and reflected these changes. You call this “a time in which prayer was a language under pressure.” What do you mean by this?
Maybe prayer is always a language under pressure! The Enlightenment gets mischaracterized, I think, as a relentless critique of religion. Actually, the radical atheist or anti-Christian polemic we associate with, say, French thinkers, was a pretty extreme wing of a much broader sensibility across Europe, and most parts of it had no real desire to exit Christianity at all.
However, it is true that many Christian thinkers in the era were obsessed about the reasonableness of religion as a belief system—and prayer fit quite awkwardly into that rationalizing project. For example, the idea that God would intervene supernaturally in the carefully constructed natural universe he had elegantly and intelligently created just because someone prays—well, that just didn’t sit well.
As the century went on, I would summarize two opposite reactions to this “reasonableness.” On the one hand, some Christians wanted to rationalize further, and their versions of prayer became closer to contemplation or meditation. On the other, the Methodists and the evangelicals offered something much more unapologetically spiritual and otherworldly, addressing a devotional need but provoking a lot of suspicion and even mockery from the mainstream. So, it’s a fascinating time when multiple ideas of prayer are circulating.
You describe the “secular” as “a space opened up between theism and atheism.” Can you elaborate on this idea?
It’s a way of looking at history in a more complex way. It seems broadly clear that over a few hundred years in the West, we moved from a state of affairs where Christianity was this universally shared backdrop to a present moment where this isn’t the case. Traditionally, the secularization hypothesis has described this change as a one-way street whereby religion inexorably gives more and more ground to reason, humanism, science, or whatever. It’s a narrative of inevitable binary conflict between religion and modernity. The problem is that we generally find that black-and-white ways of looking at history nearly always fail the fine detail. Things such as science weren’t always the opposites of religion, and religion continued to generate profound ways of inhabiting the world across the 18th and 19th centuries and beyond.
I’m trying to note that what the secular involves is not atheism triumphing over theism and hence bringing in “the modern world” as an atheist world, but rather a range of theists, a range of skeptics, and a range of agnostics all developing their ideas in a culture which no longer has that common background of shared Christianity. Basically, it’s just an acknowledgment that Christianity (or any religion) doesn’t stop having intellectual vibrancy just because other forms of belief or nonbelief suddenly share its cultural space; there are modern expressions of the Christian tradition. Put that way, you have to question why scholars ever thought that wasn’t the case!
Within the Evangelical Revival, prayer becomes not just an act of reasonable devotion or duty but, as you write, “a struggle, a wrestling, a matter of life or death.” You further explain that “Evangelical prayer involves a transformation and transposition of self,” and that this is because evangelicalism’s sense of self involves “an experience of alterity and decentering.” How does prayer itself contribute to this kind of “intensified spiritual existence”?
I think all traditions recognized different forms and experiences of prayer, but they also privileged certain kinds as more prototypical. For the 18th-century mainstream, prayer tended to be something that composed and oriented the self. It’s all prayer as an action which places your thoughts and feelings into a structure that referred to God. For the evangelical tradition, prayer was not so much a “doing” as a state of “being”—and importantly, a state of new being.
So, prayer was a couple of things to the 18th-century evangelical. It was an invitation for a divine influx to make the self anew. It was also the language of authentic life breaking through from the depths of the soul, “an embryo of God, a spark of fire divine,” as Anna Letitia Barbauld puts it. And it’s also the record of the struggle of the sinner undergoing that transformation. It’s all much more dramatic than the mainstream account, because it’s about change in your whole existence.
In your chapter on the poetry of the evangelical William Cowper (most famous for his collaboration with John Newton on the Olney Hymns), you address the connection between the practice of prayer within the Evangelical Revival and “radical interiority,” or a sense of an authentic self. And you describe the decline of Cowper’s lifelong fragile mental health as, in part, “the failing of prayer.” Can you explain this connection? Do any of Cowper’s most popular hymns illustrate this connection?
William Cowper’s Calvinism has always been seen as a problem. The great emotional power of Wesley and the Methodists came from the controversial doctrines of sanctification, but what if sublime confidence in salvation was replaced with a potent assurance of your failure to be saved? Prayer comes in because a prayerful state was seen as one of the likely signs of election, and in finding prayer a tormenting struggle, Cowper feared he was encountering his own spiritual nullity. Yet the advice given to an evangelical struggling to pray was, in effect, to pray more—to pray for the power to pray. This became something of a tragic circle for Cowper.
It’s probably true, and perhaps understandable, that the most popular of Cowper’s hymns take more optimistic positions, but motifs of estrangement and inadequacy are still very much present: the melancholic nostalgia of “O for a closer walk with God,” or the “poor lisping / stamm’ring tongue” envisaged in the grave in “There is a fountain filled with blood.” The circular logic is also apparent in the rhetoric of love in “Hark, my soul, it is the Lord,” a poem whose beautifully tender images of care anticipate some of the quieter recesses of prayer in Cowper’s later long poem The Task.
For Anna Letitia Barbauld, a Dissenter whom you identify as “probably the most theologically literate writer” in your study, prayer is less interior, more social and physical (involving the act of kneeling, an act done in a physical and often communal space). How does that different understanding of prayer play out in her theology, practice, and poetry?
Barbauld is a fascinating figure, not least because she illustrates how poetry can not only express theology but contest it. This wing of 18th-century Dissent was increasingly embracing an ideal of prayer as solitary reflection: minimizing petition, suspicious of collective prayer, often privileging the wordless, and in some versions cautious about even addressing God. This trajectory just doesn’t make sense for Barbauld, and in her religious poetry she repeatedly evokes scenes of solo philosophical contemplation only to interrupt them with something much more intimate and direct. As her career progresses, I think she finds the most authentic religious passions are found not in a single mind reflecting on the infinite, but those generated through shared experiences within family or chapel. Elegantly, she writes in 1792: “We neither laugh alone, nor weep alone, why then should we pray alone?”
One of the most beautiful and memorable moments of prayer in all of Romantic poetry is the moment in Samuel T. Coleridge’s haunting Rime of the Ancient Mariner when a curse placed on the seafarer after wantonly killing an albatross is broken when he bursts forth in spontaneous prayer in response to seeing the beauty of sea creatures at play upon the water. What does this moment in the poem illuminate about the deep connections between prayer, poetry, beauty, and the limits and the power of language?
This is perhaps the most famous prayer in Romantic poetry. The first thing I would say is that in at least one sense I can’t tell you what this moment means. What Coleridge evokes is something uncanny and wondrous: It’s a narrative pivot around which the whole mysterious poem turns, but it is strangely depthless. Of course, critics have tried to interpret it: The mariner is having an ecological epiphany or facing up to the guilt of the slave trade or philosophically converted to the pantheistic doctrine of the “one life.” But, in effect, the point is its uninterpretability. It just falls, like grace.
As a young philosophical radical, Coleridge had been a full-blown rationalist Unitarian, but by the late 1790s he was beginning to feel the truth (his own words) of religious doctrines like original sin and the Trinity, although he couldn’t explain them and didn’t have a theology to account for their consequences. These poems attempted to fill the gap between what he could explain and what he was beginning to feel. In his late career, he would go on to attempt a “philosophy of prayer,” which tried to explain how prayer could be both absolutely valid but lie partly beyond the forms of human reason. The fact that some extraordinary lines in a poem of the 1790s could do what his theological labors of the 1820s couldn’t tells you a lot, I think, about the relation between prayer, poetry, theology, and language.
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