I have been re-reading Under the Unpredictable Plant by Eugene Peterson. This book, along with others by Peterson written specifically to pastors has proven to be great grounding for me. He is within a Christian tradition that is slightly different from the one I occupy or have been raised in. But, he writes of the pastoral vocation with a beauty and honesty that is rare among contemporary authors.
Here is a good quote:
"The Psalms are the school for people learning to pray. Fundamentally, prayer is our response to the God who speaks to us. God's word is always first. He gets the first word in, always. We answer. We come to consciousness in a world addressed by God. We need to learn how to answer, really answer - not merely Yesser, Nosir - our whole being in response. How do we do this? We don't know the language. We are so under-developed in this God-addressed world. We learn well enough how to speak to our parents and pass examinations in our schools and count out the right change at the drugstore, but answering God? Are we going to make do by trial and error? Are we going to get by on what we overhear in the streets? Israel and Church put the Psalms into our hands and say, "Here, this is our text. Practice these prayers so that you learn the full range and the vast depth of your lives in response to God.
For eighteen hundred years virtually every church used this text. Only in the last couple of hundred years has it been discarded [as our prayer guide]...
For there is no lack of the impulse to pray. And there is no scarcity of requests to pray. Desire and demand keep the matter of prayer before us constantly. So why are so many lives prayerless? Simply because "the well is deep and you have nothing to draw with." We need a bucket. We need a container that holds water. Desire and demands are a sieve. We need a vessel suited to lowering desires and demands into the deep Jacob's Well of God's presence and word and bringing them to the surface again. The Psalms are such a bucket. They are not the prayer itself but the most adequate container for prayer that has ever been devised. Refusal to use this psalms-bucket, once we comprehend its function, is willfully wrong-headed. It is not impossible, perhaps, to construct a container of a different shape and material that will serve makeshift. It has certainly been done often enough. But why settle for such as that when we have this magnificently designed and spaciously proportioned container given to us and at hand?"
Here is a good quote:
"The Psalms are the school for people learning to pray. Fundamentally, prayer is our response to the God who speaks to us. God's word is always first. He gets the first word in, always. We answer. We come to consciousness in a world addressed by God. We need to learn how to answer, really answer - not merely Yesser, Nosir - our whole being in response. How do we do this? We don't know the language. We are so under-developed in this God-addressed world. We learn well enough how to speak to our parents and pass examinations in our schools and count out the right change at the drugstore, but answering God? Are we going to make do by trial and error? Are we going to get by on what we overhear in the streets? Israel and Church put the Psalms into our hands and say, "Here, this is our text. Practice these prayers so that you learn the full range and the vast depth of your lives in response to God.
For eighteen hundred years virtually every church used this text. Only in the last couple of hundred years has it been discarded [as our prayer guide]...
For there is no lack of the impulse to pray. And there is no scarcity of requests to pray. Desire and demand keep the matter of prayer before us constantly. So why are so many lives prayerless? Simply because "the well is deep and you have nothing to draw with." We need a bucket. We need a container that holds water. Desire and demands are a sieve. We need a vessel suited to lowering desires and demands into the deep Jacob's Well of God's presence and word and bringing them to the surface again. The Psalms are such a bucket. They are not the prayer itself but the most adequate container for prayer that has ever been devised. Refusal to use this psalms-bucket, once we comprehend its function, is willfully wrong-headed. It is not impossible, perhaps, to construct a container of a different shape and material that will serve makeshift. It has certainly been done often enough. But why settle for such as that when we have this magnificently designed and spaciously proportioned container given to us and at hand?"
I am not sure why these paragraphs impact me as hard as they do. I was not raised in a Christian environment that values the past. My Christian tradition proudly proclaims that it has abandoned old Christian traditions. We no longer recite prayers or creeds. Even though nearly two millennia of Christians have used memorized creeds and prayers to develop the spiritual life, we don't do such things anymore. We've moved on. And, granted, I think there is a lot to be said about seeing a relationship with God as individual and unique, free from (empty) ritual and recitations. Ritual and recitations often end up producing empty religion and legalism.
But in our protection of individuality and our drive for personal religious experience, I think we have lost something. We no longer give people the Psalms and say, "study these and learn how to pray." We value individuality too much for that. We tell people to "speak your heart". Which is certainly true to say – God hears our heart – we don’t need fancy language. But, I think it is also true that the Psalms reveal aspects of the heart that we didn't know were there. The Psalms take us deeper.
I guess I am writing all this because I have been feeling pretty "shallow" lately. And I am coming to believe that generations of Christ's followers were probably on to something by seeing the Psalms as their prayer guide.
Without meaning to, I think I have neglected God's tool to take me deeper in my prayer life. God gave me this book in my Bible - for a reason.
