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From
Chapter One
When
I was in my early teens every day I saw a blue neon sign
on a nearby church, a sign
that flashed,“Prayer Changes Things.” I’d
like to go back to that church and adjust the sign to say, “Prayer
Changes People.” I would not be a woman writing this
book if I were not a woman who was changed by constant prayer.
Prayer made me who I am. I would like to think my prayer
also changed circumstances and conditions, but until I translated
prayer into doing—until, as my Pentecostal friend likes
to say—I “put legs on those prayers”—efficacy
was indeed out of reach. And is efficacy really all I’m
after? Is the measure of benefit whether I prayed and I got? I think
efficacious prayer isn’t about getting. What
you may want is an answer to a problem, or guidance about
a job, or even the right numbers for winning the lottery.
But really productive prayer is whatever makes you or me
more fit for the Kingdom. Norman Pittenger, the late theologian,
author, and seminary professor, said that praying makes you
want what God wants.1 So prayer, whether done or spoken,
whether chanted or handsprung or danced, makes people different.
A praying person is not like one who doesn’t even whisper “Amen.” Prayer,
if nothing else, is a blessing to the human personality. A
man close to me practices “slogan Christianity,” summing
up theology in short phrases, lists, and aphorisms. According
to this maxim-monger, all human petitions to God receive
one of three answers: Yes, No, or Wait. Nicely composed, but
his succinct analysis doesn’t work for most of
us, who are trying to penetrate the enigma of God and
to confront the riddle
of prayer. His glib statement doesn’t help someone
struggling to understand why a loved one dies or a job doesn’t
happen. And such a simplistic explanation of prayer’s
productivity suggests that the deck is stacked, that every
answer from God is already predetermined. I don’t buy it. Thomas Paine, of American pre-Revolution
fame, wrote,“The Predestinarians . . . appear to acknowledge
but one attribute in God, that of power. . . . ” Paine
wrote better than he knew. If God is both unmerciful and
unchangeable, why pray? If everything is predestined,
if God has already decided whom to favor and whom to reject,
marked us before birth for heaven or hell, then the church
and prayer are useless. If you reduce God to an angry, violent
elder waiting to yell “Gotcha!” then prayer would
be neither efficacious nor even reasonable, unless the prayer
was a constant “Keep me from sin.” And if God
is only a wild ball of formless energy, that fireball probably
wouldn’t have the ability to hear prayers, either,
much less grant them. The Practice of Prayer
Growing up Episcopalian, I didn’t question whether
prayer worked or not. I prayed out of obedience to God
and for love of the language in our Book of Common Prayer. I
murmured with pleasure “grant us such a lively sense
of thy mercies,” “we have erred from thy ways
like lost sheep,” and “O ye whales and all that
move in the waters, bless ye the Lord.” Eventually
I wanted something richer than words, so after I was grown,
when the
Episcopal day school where I taught began in 1967 to have
chapel services from new prayer book revisions, I detached
myself from tradition and embraced God’s continuing
revelation. And finally, I decided to do my prayers besides
just saying them. The truth
filters down to earth through many screens and sieves,
and I can’t know while I’m on earth how
valid the truth is about prayer. And that’s a good
thing. Prayer is—and should be—a mystery, the
greatest mystery of all because in it you try to engage the
God who is unknowable in ordinary conversation. In prayer
you call up the eternal and ask it to be revealed to the
finite. Perhaps you whisper the Our Father as you fall asleep,
and say grace over your food, and holler “Fix this!” at
God when you watch the day’s depressing news. But sometimes
you can’t find words, or you’re so mad at God
you can’t form a sentence. Or maybe you feel verbally
inadequate to express your love or anxiety or whatever. Or
maybe it’s just that the nonrational wins that day.
You’re not just a mouth attached to a brain: if God
made all of you, then all of you needs to learn how to communicate
with God, and doing prayer responds to that need. Copyright ©2004
Kristen Johnson Ingram. Excerpt from Beyond Words is
used with permission from Morehouse Publishing. To
Read all of Chapter One
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