I HATE TO FLY. But since I fly a lot, I have developed several techniques to steel myself against the cramped seating, the stale air, and the terrors of turbulence. Escapist reading material and a tape player with a headset do nicely. The overall desired effect is to implode into myself until I get off the plane. For this reason I rarely engage in conversation in flight. Besides, the effort involved in looking at a seatmate gives me a crick in my neck. If I want to ward off a gregarious fellow traveler, I open my Bible in my lap.
Such was my mood as I sat awaiting a flight in the John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California. So I was dimly aware of the well-dressed couple standing in front of me. Each was shouldering a large leather attache bag, fumbling with papers and tickets inside and chattering to the other. I guessed them to be attorneys. Maybe it was the tasseled loafers the man was wearing.
In the middle of the conversation, a strange thing happened. The woman puckered her lips and moved to kiss the man. She came within mere inches of his face, only to realize that he wasn’t aware of her intentions. He just kept on fumbling with the contents of his bag, talking to her but not looking at her as he did. She unpuckered and withdrew to her bag and chatter.
They had my attention. I laid my book aside and took off my headset to watch this little drama. Then something even stranger happened. The man stopped fumbling in his bag, puckered up his lips and moved to kiss her, came to within inches of her face, only to discover chat she didn’t notice what he was attempting. He chickened out. It was now his turn to go back to his bag and chatter.
I was on the edge of my seat mentally as the dance became stranger still. She again puckered, moved to kiss him, came within a breath of his face, saw that he was oblivious to her intentions, and withdrew again. Then he did the same thing, again! I was on the verge of getting up and offering my services as a pastoral counselor, when one of the flights was called and they parted.
It occurred to me then, and still does, that whatever else they may have accomplished that day, they had already missed the most important thing they could have done. They may have negotiated multimillion dollar deals, but no matter—they hadn’t kissed. The day had already been wasted.
I take this story as a parable of the gift of prayer—and our struggle with that gift.
How personal is God?
Hold that picture in mind, and hear the desire of Christ. He says, “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me” (Rev. 3:20). Almighty God, the Lord of Eternity, wants to be intimate with us, to draw near and spend time with us. He holds out a tender, wonderful, incredible offering. But we, like the couple at the airport, are so blind, so preoccupied, that we miss the invitation. Not only does God command us to pray, he permits us to pray. Prayer is both a must and a may, an obligation and a gift. Why would any of us ignore the God of the universe, bending low to offer us the pleasure of his company?
One reason may be simple ignorance—we do not really understand just how personal this God is. We have the intellectuals, among others, to thank for this. These are the folks who gave us god as the “Principle of Concretion” (Alfred North Whitehead); or the “Integrating Factor in Experience” (Henry Nelson Wieman); or “The Ground of All Being” (Paul Tillich). Entertainers, too, have served up this vapid deity, as in George Lucas’s “the force” in the Star Wars films. The God they describe is an elitist deity; so distant he cannot be approached unless you think you’re smart enough to understand whatever a principle of concretion is.
That may be the point of these false gods—to keep them distant. Have you heard the one about the theologian who, given the choice between going to heaven or hearing a lecture about heaven, chose the lecture? Confine God to the cerebral cortex and he won’t be able to mess up your plans. The more abstract and impersonal you can make him, the less demanding he will be. Thus intellectual profundity becomes a spiritual avoidance tactic.
Safe, boring, and shrunken
But the God Jesus tells us to pray to is not the God of the philosophers and pantheists. In a brilliant section in his book Miracles, C. S. Lewis exposed the bogus appeal of the impersonal God:
Men are reluctant to pass over from the notion of an abstract and negative deity to the living God. I do not wonder. Here lies the deepest tap-root of Pantheism and of the objection to traditional imagery. It was hated not, at bottom, because it pictured him as man but because it pictured him as king, or even as warrior. The Pantheist’s God does nothing, demands nothing. He is there if you wish for him, like a book on a shelf. He will not pursue you. There is no danger that at any time heaven and earth should flee away at his glance. If he were the truth, then we could really say that all the Christian images of kingship were a historical accident of which our religion ought to be cleansed.
It is with a shock that we discover them to be indispensable. You have had a shock like that before, in connection with smaller matters—when the line pulls at your hand, when something breathes beside you in the darkness. So here; the shock comes at the precise moment when the thrill of life is communicated to us along the clue we have been following. It is always shocking to meet life where we thought we were alone. “Look out!” we cry, “it’s alive.” And therefore this is the very point at which so many draw back—I would have done so myself if I could—and proceed no further with Christianity. An “impersonal God”—well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own heads—better still. A formless life-force surging through us, a vase power which we can tap—best of all. But God himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an infinite speed, the hunter, King, husband—that is quite another matter. Here comes a moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hush suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall? There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion (“man’s search for God”) suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found him? We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing he had found us?1
The less demanding and personal God is, the more boring he will be. One doesn’t pray to a God like that, one meditates; except for an elite few, one loses interest and falls asleep. An abstract, boring God is finally a shrunken God, too big and therefore too busy, we think, to get involved with people. But the God Jesus told us to pray to can both run the cosmos and knit a baby together in his mother’s womb. He can number both subatomic particles and the hairs on your head. Anything less, and he is shrunk to the size of the senator Julia Ward Howe invited to her home. She wanted him to meet the up-and-coming actor Edwin Booth, but he declined, explaining loftily, “The truth is, I have got beyond taking an interest in individuals.” She later commented sarcastically on his remark in her diary: “God Almighty has not got so far.”
Indeed, George Buttrick was right when he said, “The field of second-rate religion is strewn with the corpses of abstract nouns.” A second-rate God will elicit a second-rate, boring prayer life.
Fire!
Blaise Pascal had a kind of born again experience the night of November 23, 1654. A brilliant scientist and intellectual, Pascal met God, as it were, face to face, and wrote what he saw and felt, as it was happening to him. He recorded on a piece of parchment, “From about half past ten in the evening until half past midnight.”
A scientist would want to remember the exact time. The piece of parchment was sewn in his coat and found after his death. It seems that he carried it with him continually. The first word he used to describe the experience was simply “fire.” That alone set the personal God he met apart from the impersonal god of mere intellect and ideas. The next sentence is more celling: “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of philosophers and scholars” (italics mine). His experience is a model of what it means to pray to the personal God of the Bible. His prayer is not Scripture, but it is scriptural in its stream-of-consciousness fervor.
Certainty, certainty,
heartfelt, joy, peace.
of Jesus Christ.
God of Jesus Christ.
My God and your God.
“Thy God shall be my God.”
The world forgotten,
and everything except God.
He can only be found by ways
taught in the Gospels.
Greatness of the human soul.
“O righteous Father,
the world has not known thee,
but I have known thee.”
Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.
I have cut myself off from him.
They have forsaken me,
the fountain of living waters.
My God, wilt thou forsake me?
Let me not be cut off from him forever!
“And this is life eternal,
that they may know thee,
the only true God,
and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.”
Jesus Christ
Jesus Christ
I have cut myself off from him,
shunned him, denied him, crucified him.
Let me never be cut off from him!
He can only be kept
by the ways taught in the Gospel.
Sweet and total renunciation.
Total submission to Jesus Christ
and my director.
Everlasting joy
in return for one day’s effort
on earth.
I will not forget thy word.
Amen.
2
We all long to meet an awesome and personal God like that in prayer.
In fear of Abba
Jesus said to address this awesome God as Abba, Aramaic for “dear Father,” or “Daddy.” He said if you can understand how a good human father operates, then you will understand a little of what God is like. “Which of you [fathers], if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!” (Matt. 7:9-11).
Call God Abba. Pray to him as Daddy. That alone can make your prayers burst into significance. The Heidelberg Catechism asks, “Why has Christ commanded us to address God as ‘Our Father’?” It answers, “That immediately, at the beginning of our prayer, he might excite in us a childlike reverence for, and confidence in, God, which are the foundations of prayer” (italics mine).3 St. Teresa of Avila confessed that she found it hard to get beyond the first words in the Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father.” For her they were like a lovely land she never wanted to leave.
But my experience has often been that the very words that should excite such reverence and delight in prayer can produce the opposite effect. “Father” can become a household word in the sense of pots and pans and dull, unconscious routines. We can begin to speak it as we would at the dinner table: “Hey, Dad, pass the salt.” Or use it as punctuation, not much more than a comma, on our prayers: “Father, we just want you to bless us, Father, because, Father, you know our needs, Father.”
Before that word “Father” can ignite in us all the wonder and adoration Jesus meant it to, we must first appreciate something else about God, something many of us think to be at odds with addressing him as Father. It is that our Father God is awesome and holy, terrible in power, breathtaking in wisdom. He is one to be feared. The Bible is full of this fear language, commanding it, even celebrating it.
Serve the Lord with fear
and rejoice with trembling.
(Ps. 2:11)
Let all the earth fear the Lord;
let all the people of the world
revere him.
(Ps. 33:8)
The fear of the Lord is the beginning
of knowledge.
(Prov. 1:7)
Now all has been heard;
here is the conclusion of the matter:
Fear God and keep his
commandments,
for this is the whole duty of man.
(Eccles. 12:13, italics mine)
Since, then, we know what it is to fear the Lord,
we try to persuade men. (2 Cor. 5:11)
Work out your salvation with fear and trembling.
(Phil. 2:12)
What does it mean to fear God? Does it mean to fear him as we would a poisonous snake or a blood transfusion tainted with the HIV virus? We know it doesn’t, but we’re not sure why.
The words the Bible uses mean literally “to fear.” Translators try alternatives, words like awe, respect, reverence, but none quite captures the raw strength of the word fear. The key to what the Bible means lies, I think, in what happens to our consciousness when we fear something. As I said earlier, someone once said that standing before a firing squad marvelously focuses one’s mind. The idea is that the experience of being brought right up to the point of death, and then given a reprieve, brings focus. That’s the key: What we fear marvelously focuses us. The fear of God is respect and awe and reverence. But it is these things, to a degree, that are like terror in their intensity.
Therefore, the Bible sees no conflict between fearing God and loving and trusting him. Amazingly, when Jesus wants to calm our fears, he tells us to first fear God!
” ‘I tell you, my friends, do not. be afraid of those who kill the body and after that can do no more. But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear him who, after the killing of the body, has power to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him’ ” (Luke 12:4-5).
That’s God he’s talking about, the one who can throw us into hell, and the one we are to address in prayer as Abba, Daddy. Then, without even a break or segue in thought, he says we should relax: ” ‘Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows’ ” (v. 7). His message: You are worth everything to the One who is to be feared. Fear God and you’ll fear nothing else!
Later, in the same chapter, Jesus utters some of my favorite words: ” ‘Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom’ ” (Luke 12:32).
Jabba the Butt
What one most deeply loves, one most deeply fears. My wife, Lauretta, is the dearest person I know, and apart from Jesus, the clearest, most incontrovertible evidence of God’s grace to me. At its best, my love for her is like terror in its intensity. Oh, the fear I have of hurting her! Her worth is staggering in its weight.
Then there are my children. On the night our first child was born, I remember washing up to go into the delivery room to accompany Lauretta in his birth. I say “accompany,” the Lamaze teacher said it was to “assist.” But after watching the holy ordeal of childbirth, I decided I could be of no real assistance. As I washed, a terror came over me. This was it. Things were going to change for me for the rest of my life. The fear and joy of who was about to arrive nearly bowled me over. Could I care for him adequately? Could I really be a father? Somehow I had a fear of holding him and dropping him. And then, minutes later, there I stood in the gleaming room holding him, trembling with love and fear. Though less than eight pounds, his worth was staggering in its weight.
Later, when more children came, and they got old enough to wrestle with me, we would play a game we called “Jabba the Butt.” The name came from a large, disgusting evil character in the Star Wars trilogy called Jabba the Hutt. We changed the surname for the sake of humor. I would play Jabba and roar around the room as the kids would shoot their laser guns at me and cry co wrestle me to the floor. Sometimes I would get into the role too much and their little imaginations would slip into stark terror. They would feel my great strength and hear my booming voice, and Daddy would be transformed into Jabba. The game would stop, and I would hold them tenderly and remind them that I was their daddy. The juxtaposition of great, overwhelming strength and power with tender love is as hard for a child to hold together as it is for an adult. My love for them was staggering when they coupled it with my power.
Addressing God as Father can become electrifying, if we can put these two together in our minds: combining infinite love and tenderness with infinite holiness and power. It can become the source of our greatest seriousness and our deepest joy, that one of such might can be called Father, and that our Father can be one with such might! He is not like Jabba in evil, but he is in strength. Fear and love go together. To paraphrase Peter Kreeft, the wonder of praying to God as Father can come only when we have learned what seems to be its opposite, that he is the totally Other, the transcendent Creator of time and space, fierce in holiness, awesome in power. If the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, then filial intimacy is its fulfillment.
“My God, How Wonderful Thou Art”
In hymnody, one of the best treatments of this glorious and holy tension is Frederick Paber’s “My God, How Wonderful Thou Art.” The hymn begins with a series of exclamations on the fearful worth of God, the brightness of his majesty, the fire of his light, his unbearable beauty. Even the best and brightest of all creation can do no more than fall down before him.
My God, how wonderful Thou art,
Thy majesty how bright!
How beautiful Thy mercy seat,
In depths of burning light!
How dread are Thine eternal years,
O everlasting Lord,
By prostrate spirits day and night
Incessantly adored!
What can one do when confronted with such a God, but become marvelously focused? It is the most inexorable of spiritual reflexes. There is really no choice but to be afraid, to experience an awe that is like terror in its intensity.
O how I fear Thee, living God,
With deepest, tenderest fears.
And worship Thee with trembling hope
And penitential tears!
But then wonder piles upon wonder when a God such as this offers us the pleasure of his company. He wants communion with us. He calls us to prayer! Can it be? Can it really be?
Yet I may love Thee, too,
O Lord, Almighty as Thou art,
For Thou hast stooped to ask of me
The love of my poor heart.
4
Pastors can never be too smitten by this. Sometimes I think our hands are cauterized by too much handling of holy things. Our hearts get calluses. Liturgical traditions are susceptible to the liturgist who declares the burning realities in a singsong voice. I’ve heard the Te Deum read like a recipe for chocolate cake. So-called nonliturgical traditions fall prey to the trite and the garrulous. I think it must have been something like that that led humorist Roy Blount to wonder if anyone is concerned that they may be boring God. No character in the Bible found anything approaching a face-to-face encounter with God anything less than shattering. We clergy must learn to act and think as people who are amazed that our proximity to holy things has not left us vaporized. We must pray that God will cultivate in our spirits fresh awareness of his majesty and goodness, and that we not confuse his goodness with his being safe. Like the lion Asian in C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, “He isn’t safe. But he’s good.” God being God, Annie Dillard playfully suggested that along with our Bibles and vestments we should wear crash helmets when we worship.
I have taken to reading these lines from Ecclesiastes before I preach:
Guard your steps when you go to the house of God.
Go near to listen rather than to offer the sacrifice of fools, who do not know that they do wrong.
Do not be quick with your mouth,
do not be hasty in your heart
to utter anything before God.
God is in heaven
and you are on earth,
so let your words be few.
As a dream comes when there are
many cares,
so the speech of a fool when there are
many words.…
Therefore stand in awe of God.
(Eccles. 5:1-3, 7)
Yada, yada, yada
We may pray because God is personal; he wants to be known. There is another, equally transforming side to this breathtaking reality: we may pray because he knows us. His knowledge is not the knowledge of an immense, passive intellect, but of intimate, transforming contact, as in when “Adam knew his wife Eve, and she conceived” (Gen. 4:1 NRSV). The Hebrew word for this knowledge, yada, can mean the knowledge of transformation or of understanding, depending on its context. But it is commonly used of the kind of intimate, sexual knowledge that Adam clearly had of Eve when she became pregnant.
Yada, to know—it’s surprising the Bible uses a word like this to speak of something that we typically describe more clinically as “having sex,” or perhaps more euphemistically as “having relations.” Modern translations render this verse with such words as “lay” (New International Version), “had relations” (New American Standard), “slept” (New Living Translation), “had intercourse” (Jerusalem Bible). But the Hebrew text says Adam knew Eve, and she conceived a child, a new life.
God’s knowledge of us is like that. That is not to say that his knowledge of us is sexual, but sexual knowledge is something like his knowledge of us. It is deeply intimate, life-creating, in-fleshed, and therefore transforming. Thomas Howard calls this a “piquant irony”:
[Here] we are, with all of our high notions of ourselves as intellectual and spiritual beings, and the most profound form of knowledge for us is a plain business of skin on skin. It is humiliating. When two members of this godlike, cerebral species approach the heights of communion between themselves, what do they do? Think? Speculate? Meditate? No, they take off their clothes. Do they want to get their brains together? No. It is the most appalling of ironies: their search for union takes them quite literally in a direction away from where their brains are. 5
Howard asks, what is the meaning of all this? It has to do with the fact that true knowledge of the other is much more than amassing data about that person. It must be increasingly synonymous with Love, that is, with self-giving, mutuality, and union, as we press further and further in cowards the center.
Naturally King David is amazed and impregnated, as it were, with hope and delight, when he realizes that he is known by God:
O Lord, you have searched me
and you know me.
You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
You discern my going out and my
lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.
Before a word is on my tongue
you know it completely, O Lord.…
For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my
mother’s womb.
(Ps. 139:1-4, 13)
To know something is good, even great. To be known is transforming.
I was in college the first time I truly felt known and loved by God. I was walking back to my dorm, and suddenly it came to me that God knew me intimately. It was a shattering, wonderful feeling. God knows me, I thought. He really loves me. At the time I had a great roommate, and he and a bunch of other guys and I would sit around until all hours of the night calking. It would get late, and we would get just tired enough to let our guard come down. Then one of us would lee slip some revelation about his innermost self. He would feel embarrassed, until someone looked at him and said, “You coo?” He knew—and he was known. Somehow, being in that position of vulnerability and sympathetic intimacy opened me up to the sense of God’s deep and close knowing of me. In those late night conversations I was impregnated with a new life chat has grown in me ever since. It’s wonderful to know. It is more wonderful to be known.
In April 1995, we experienced a student revival on our campus chat dramatically illustrated the power of feeling known by God. In a chapel service, students began to spontaneously confess their sins in public! Students streamed up to the microphone, openly speaking of their sins and struggles. Short of murder, I can’t think of a sin that wasn’t confessed or a struggle that wasn’t shared. Rape, incest, drug abuse, eating disorders—all were aired in front of hundreds of people. Each student would speak, walk away from the microphone, and be surrounded by friends. Hugs, tears, and prayers of encouragement and healing would follow. This went on for several nights.
These young people had been cold a lie their whole lives, a lie that said, “You’re alone in your struggles. No one knows you.” That’s a terrible feeling with which to live. They longed to be known—don’t we all?—but at the same time, it’s terrifying to lay oneself bare before others. The Spirit moved among those students to give them the gift of being known. He empowered them to discover, finally, that to be completely transparent and to feel completely loved is to come closer to the heart of God. So it is for all of us. The gift of prayer is that we can lay all that we are before God, who won’t be surprised or shocked at anything we say.
A week after these experiences at Hope College, I went to Chicago to attend a National Day of Prayer event. Different pastors spoke on what God was doing in their communities. One of them, a pastor from Texas, had a ministry with street gangs, which in itself was amazing, because he didn’t look like the kind of man one would think would have that kind of outreach. But he had led the leaders of rival gangs to Christ, and told us a story about baptizing one of the boys. The pastor was going to sprinkle him in church, but the kid wanted to be baptized in the river. He had probably committed murder, and he wanted to do it all the way.
The pastor said that when he looked at the kid’s face under the water, he could see his broken nose. When he lifted the boy out of the water, the kid clung to him and wept and wept and wept. After he finally regained his composure, he said to the pastor, “This is only the second time in my life I’ve ever cried. The first time was the night my dad broke my nose.”
Then the pastor said to us, “I baptized him in water, and he baptized me in his tears. And they washed away all that church stuff.”
Jump in the river
God invites us to jump into that river and let him cleanse all that “stuff” from our souls, whether it’s church stuff or the numbness of isolation and loneliness. The river is the pleasure of his company, the knowledge of God, his of us and ours of him. It is God’s “river of delights” (Ps. 36:8). It is the place where we can stand in his presence and know the joy of his presence, the “eternal pleasures” that are at his right hand (Ps. 16:11).
Go back with me to chat scene at the airport. See the couple run off to something, empty inside, not knowing why. Now contrast that with the words of Bernard of Clairvaux:
Jesus, Thou joy of loving hearts,
Thou fount of life, Thou light of men,
From the best bliss that life imparts
We turn unfilled to thee again.
6
What no bliss in life can impart is what is given in prayer. It is the pleasure of his company.
C. S. Lewis, Miracles (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 124-25.
Blaise Pascal, Pensees, A. J. Krailsheimer, trans. (New York: Penguin Books, 1983).
Heidelberg Catechism, Question 120 (Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, reproduction of the Second American Edition, printed in Columbus, Ohio, 1852), 626
Frederick Faber, “My God, How Wonderful Thou Art,” Hymns of the Christian Life (Harrisburg, Pa.: Christian Publications, Inc., 1962), No. 17.
Thomas Howard, Hallowed by This House (San Francisco: Ignarius Press, 1979), 115-17.
Bernard of Clairvaux, “Jesus, Thou Joy of Loving Hearts,” trans. Ray Palmer (Chicago: InterVarsity Press, 1965), 163.
Copyright © 1998 Ben Patterson
