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Beginning to Pray

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Beginning to PrayBeginning to Pray by Anthony Bloom

What we must start with, if we wish to pray, is the certainty that we are sinners in need of salvation, that we are cut off from God and that we cannot live without Him and that all we can offer God is our desperate longing to be made such that God will receive us, receive us in repentance, receive us with mercy and with love. And so from the outset prayer is really our humble ascent towards God, a moment when we turn Godwards, shy of coming near, knowing that if we meet Him too soon, before His grace has had time to help us to be capable of meeting Him, it will be judgment. And all we can do is to turn to Him with all the reverence, all the veneration, the worshipful adoration, the fear of God of which we are capable, with all the attention and earnestness which we may possess, and ask Him to do something with us that will make us capable of meeting Him face to face, not for judgement, not for condemnation, but for eternal life.

Beginning to Pray is a slender book, but it’s slender in the same way a blade is slender: it can still get into the cracks of your heart and pry them open. The book is conversational, a short treatise on prayer written by the Orthodox archbishop Father Anthony Bloom. It does not have a central thesis except perhaps this, which is carried in much of the ascetic tradition of Orthodoxy: that prayer is difficult and that it must be directed inward at one’s own heart. That it is a dangerous labor that cannot be entered into lightly. That there is a cost.

Perhaps the most innovative point of the book (from the perspective of a former protestant) is that Bloom says prayer must be aimed into one’s own heart, that the door to the kingdom at which we must knock is within us and that we have to aim our prayers into our own hearts like an arrow. Prayers are not launched into the sky, hoping to hit God. He is closer than we know. So Bloom says we aim them into ourselves, hoping He meets us at the doorway of our heart. With that in mind, prayers must be words that are true and that can cut deeply. They need to be sound and strong, to get past the deadness of spirit and our own internal deafness. They have to pierce. Where does one find such prayers? They can, on occasion, be written, and (according to Bloom) they can very rarely be extemporaneous. But mostly they need to be mined from the scripture and the traditions of the Church.

The other aspect of prayer that Bloom emphasizes is the practice of silence. To truly be able to pray, one first must learn to be silent. I had a privilege this past summer of a three day retreat, alone with a lot of spare time, and among other things I read this book and savored (and attempted to practice) the invitation to silence that it extended. I immediately began a re-read upon returning back home into the hectic, busy world, but I found the words that before had been an invitation now seemed almost a rebuke. Prayer must be hemmed with silence, Bloom says, and the silence that is not simply the lack of noise. It’s built up through time and practice. Yet such a thing seemed, upon returning home, pretty distant and unattainable.

You need time with this book. I don’t feel I can do it justice in a summary, and I don’t really need to, as the book itself is brief and accessible. Instead I’ll just pull out a few of Bloom’s most relevant quotes:

On humility in prayer:

Humility [from the Latin ‘humus,’ fertile soil] is the situation of the earth. The earth is always there, always taken for granted, never remembered, always trodden on by everyone, somewhere we cast and pour out all the refuse, all we don’t need. It’s there, silent and accepting everything and in a miraculous way making out of all the refuse new richness in spite of corruption, transforming corruption itself into a power of life and new possibility of creativeness, open to the sunshine, open to the rain, ready to receive any seed we sow and capable of bringing thirty-fold, sixty-fold, a hundred-fold out of every seed.

On letting go of expectation and desire:

Outside the realm of “right,” only in the realm of mercy, can we meet God . . . Everything we taken into our hands to possess is taken out of the realm of love. Certainly it becomes ours, but love is lost . . . [A]s long as we have nothing in our hands, we can take, leave, do whatever we want.

On prayer and action:

We must each take up our own cross, and when we ask something in our prayers, we undertake by implication to do it with all our strength, all our intelligence and all the enthusiasm we can put into our actions, and with all the courage and energy we have. In addition, we do it with all the power which God will give us . . . Therefore prayer and action should become two expressions of the same situation vis-a-vis God and ourselves and everything around us.

On praying continually:

If we could be aware . . . that every human meeting is judgment, is crisis, is a situation in which we are called either to receive Christ or to be Christ’s messenger to the person whom we are meeting, if we realized that the whole of life has this intensity of meaning, then we would be able to cry and to pray continuously, and turmoil would be not a hindrance but the very condition which teaches us to pray.

With: Reimagining the Way You Relate to God

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With: Reimagining the Way You Relate to GodWith: Reimagining the Way You Relate to God by Skye Jethani

I don’t often read contemporary devotional books. The market seems a roar of shallow, consumerist noise, and I don’t know enough about contemporary Protestant popular theology to know who is speaking well. But occasionally a book will fall into my hands, and I would like to believe that sometimes the books you get by happenstance are the books you are meant to read. Skye Jethani has spoken on my university campus in the past, and copies of his book were given to some of the faculty. Which is how (after it sat on my shelf for about six months) I found myself reading With: Reimagining the Way You Relate to God.

In this book, Skye takes an important look at a set of four contemporary heresies regarding how we understand our relationship with God in Christian practice today, and he packages them in a very clever (and effective) metaphor built around the prepositions over, under, from, and for. He never uses the term heresy, but that’s what he’s discussing: four postures that we take regarding God and that twist, undermine, or corrupt what our relationship with God really should look like. I found the analysis and critiques of these four postures to be the most helpful and insightful portion of the book, as we all live into different aspects of these in our own lives to some extent. In this respect, the book was good for some sharp self-reflection.

Skye summarizes the four positions as these:

Life under God: seeing God as an arbitrator of certain moral guidelines that we must follow to be rewarded with salvation. We are sinners, and our relationship with God is about satisfying these rules and obligations.

Life over God: related to our approach to scripture or the natural world from a perceived position of power or knowledge. In either case, there are certain God-ordained principles (for obtaining wealth, happiness, influence, or security), and we must find and apply to life.

Life from God: seeing God as there to supply my needs and desires as a consumer. My relationship with God is a posture of approaching God for what the divine can provide me with.

Life for God: the mission that God gave me is central, and I evaluate myself and my relationship with God in terms of how well I am fulfilling or accomplishing that mission.

As Skye points out, there are aspects of truth in each of these postures, which is what makes them dangerous. When taken too far, they subvert a proper understanding, a right orientation, with God. All of them put the emphasis on things beside God; they all use God as a means to address what Skye calls the basic aim of religion, trying to address our fears and insecurities with a source of power. Against these four, Skye argues for an orientation that is centered on life with God.

And here’s where the book begins to get fuzzier. It’s easier to explain what things like God and our relationship with God are not (as Skye does in the insightful first portion of the book) than it is to say what they are. It’s easier to diagnose heterodoxy than define orthodoxy. This is the apophatic tradition: the ability to say what God is not but the inability to define God’s essence. The portions of the book where Skye tries to really examine what life with God looks like, taking a chapter each on the qualities of life with God—faith, hope, and love—fell a bit flat to me. They were gesturing toward something beyond a system of information that could be passed along in a text. They were pointing beyond the text itself.

But Skye got there in the end, in the very end. In the appendix, actually. I think maybe the paradox of any book about spirituality is that the truths it is trying to communicate can only be experienced beyond the book, in the context of practice and community. For Skye, the centerpiece of life lived with God, in communion and relationship, is a life with regular periods of quiet contemplation. He hit on this tangentially in examining the motivation for lives of love in some examples of contemporary saints, but he spelled it out more explicitly in the appendix, where he outlined three types of contemplative prayer.

The paradox of the book I think can be summed up in this: in the first half I can understand intellectually what’s wrong with the four heterodox postures Skye so convincingly discusses, but in the second half I can only experience the rightness of life with God through practices and prayers that the book itself (or really any book) cannot contain.

St. Seraphim of Sarov

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Little Russian Philokalia: St. Seraphim of SarovLittle Russian Philokalia: St. Seraphim of Sarov by Seraphim Rose

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’m still enough of an evangelical that hagiography strikes me as foreign. I don’t know what to make of it, this idea that holiness can come out from the introspective realm of spiritual instruction to impinge on historical figures and alleged historical events. Which is perhaps why this first volume of the Little Russian Philokalia, the writings of St. Seraphim, seemed progressively stranger as I read through it.

St. Seraphim lived from the middle of the eighteenth century to the early nineteenth, during which time he became one of the best-known mystics of the Russian Orthodox Church. He lived as a monk and ascetic in the Sarov Monastery in eastern Russia (a city known today as being the center of the Russian nuclear industry). This volume collects the saint’s “Spiritual Instructions” and “Acquisition of the Holy Spirit” as well as an account of the rediscovery and return of his relics.

I found the first portion of the book, the “Spiritual Instructions,” the most accessible. They provided, as I had hoped, some challenging and focusing readings for Lent. Similar to The Practice of the Presence of God, The Imitation of Christ, or other classic works of Christian instruction, these are the sorts of words it seems necessary to always have on tap as a Christian reader. The concise, clear, sharp challenges that, if maybe I let them wash against me constantly like a stream against stone, might actually do some good. How to be silent. How to be generous. How to cultivate a true love of God and others. St. Seraphim’s instructions were also useful because they could provide an avenue into the writings of other Orthodox fathers, as he intersperses them with the words of older saints as well as scripture.

In the second portion of the book I was on less familiar ground, taking the first steps into the thick, alien forest of Russian hagiography. This portion, the “Acquisition of the Holy Spirit,” is a conversation purported to have taken place between the saint and one of his disciples, recorded and only found years later in the days leading up to St. Seraphim’s canonization. Here my cynicism begins to raise its head a bit as the author of the spiritual instructions becomes move into the historical narrative. Because historical figures are always notoriously human, and when they’re not, when they’re portrayed as somehow otherworldly beings, I don’t quite know what to make of it. Several hundred years ago is one thing; the 1830s is something else.

Finally, the volume concludes with (again, to my post-evangelical, Western sensibilities) the strangest and yet most compelling portion of the story. Strange in the sense that here we’re fully in the realm of hagiography, with a dash of apocalyptic prophecy thrown in for good measure. Compelling in the glimpse it provides into the sudden and tragic destruction of the religious heritage of Orthodox Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution and its slow and fitful rebirth in the closing decades of the twentieth century. St. Seraphim’s relics are recovered and returned to Sarov, where a church is rebuilt to receive him. Pilgrims flock to the procession. Miracles ensue. What to make of it all?

The paradox is that sanctity, the idea that holiness can truly intrude into the world in very real and tangible circumstances, remains for me one of the most viable arguments for the pursuit of the Christian life. And the first portion of this book illustrates to me the appeal: that a life pursued in humility, love, and devotion is possible. Yet if there are people who truly embody this, as St. Seraphim was reported to, why is it so hard to accept that the results that follow might be the sort of miracles and happenings outlined in the third part? We want our saints at a safe distance, their words coming down to us through the filter of the centuries. It’s harder to deal with them otherwise.