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Usually, there's no finer book recommendation than that sweet phrase "I couldn't put it down." But let me recommend Philip Yancey's new book on prayer with the opposite, yet equally enthusiastic, encomium: one of the many small evidences of this book's forcefulness is the number of times I did put it down—the number of times I interrupted my reading because I was inspired to pray.
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I own and have read dozens, possibly hundreds, of books on prayer. A whole bookcase, right next to my desk, is filled with them: Dom Gregory Dix's The Shape of the Liturgy, Roberta Bondi's To Pray and to Love, F. D. Maurice's sermons on the Lord's Prayer… . Once upon a time I thought that my devotion to reading about prayer was a mark of my spiritual advancement. Eventually I came to realize my mistake: in fact, I love books on prayer not because I am uniquely prayerful, but because it is far, far easier to read about prayer than to actually pray. It is the rare book about prayer that, rather than inadvertently distracting me from the pursuit of a praying life, actually prompts me to pray. Yancey's Prayer is one such book, and I am grateful for it.
Yancey freely airs his own struggles with praying. He marvels at friends who sit in meditative prayer for an hour a day, and admits that he can labor to pray for fifteen minutes. Characteristically, he tackles the hard questions, starting with the toughest: does prayer make any difference? Yancey's answer is a resounding yes. He notes both that prayer can change the person praying, making her more compassionate or more attentive or more humane, and that prayer can affect the course of human events. In particular, Yancey singles out the downfall of Communism and the end of apartheid as political transformations in which he believes "prayer played a crucial role."
Yet some of Yancey's most important observations are about the times when God does not answer prayer. Rejecting the familiar, awful platitudes that well-meaning Christians so often dispense (such as "God did answer your prayer—the answer was no!"), Yancey directs our attention to the many biblical instances of unanswered prayer: David's pleas that his and Bathsheba's son live, the requests of Moses, Job, Jonah, and Elijah to die, Israel's sometimes-unanswered prayers for military victory, Jeremiah's prayers that Jerusalem be spared destruction. Paul "had his share of unanswered prayers: you need only read his luminous prayers for churches and then read the sad record of those churches to realize how far short they fell of the ideal for which he prayed." And of course Jesus' cry of dereliction on the cross—Eli, eli, lama sabachtani—is the quintessential unanswered prayer.
While insisting that there is no formula for right living that will ensure an answer to one's prayers, Yancey does offer a prophetic reminder, which is as disturbing today as when Isaiah and Malachi first made the point: a lack of concern for orphans and widows, and complicity in social injustice, are directly related to God's hearing, or not hearing, our prayers. As the book of Proverbs puts it, "If a man shuts his ears to the cry of the poor, he too will cry out and not be answered."
Yancey muses compellingly on God's desire for human freedom. Yes, we want our prayers answered, but what kind of world would this be if, whenever we asked for something, poof: it appeared. Returning again to Scripture, Yancey notes that God does occasionally intervene directly in the natural order – causing a plague, or reversing a disabling illness. But "apart from these rare events called miracles," the Bible does not emphasize God's dramatic, unexpected intervention in human affairs. Scripture is much more interested in capturing God's "ongoing providence… . God's will being done through the course of nature and ordinary human activity: rain falling and seeds sprouting, farmers planting and harvesting, the strong caring for the weak, the haves giving to the have-nots, the healthy ministering to the sick. We tend to place God's activity in a different category from natural or human activity; the Bible tends to draw them together," and it is in that context that we must think about prayer. Prayer is not only about our asking God to intervene in our lives; it is also, and perhaps more essentially, about our entering into and aligning ourselves with the work that God is already doing in his creation.
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