Finding God in the Verbs E-Book

Jennie Isbell

• Herausgeber: IVP Formatio
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 243

Beschreibung

Do you long for deeper communion with God? Spiritual director Jennie Isbell and Quaker minister Brent Bill know how easy it is to lapse into repetitious refrains of prayer:"Our hearts told us that we had lapsed into easy God speak. We weren't reaching deep into our spirits and drawing out living words of praise, confession, concern, intercession and longing. We were tired of speaking in clipped shorthand to God. We wanted to pray in such a way that we showed up with our whole selves."If you have experienced a similar longing, come join the authors on this prayer journey into the deep waters of the Spirit. This book offers companionship and guidance as you begin to notice, consider and deepen your prayer experiences, with refreshing exercises sprinkled through every chapter to offer you a fresh language for prayer. Find God here—in the nouns and the verbs of your conversation.

Leseprobe

     FINDING GOD              IN THE VERBS  

InterVarsity Press P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL [email protected]

©2015 by Jennie Isbell and J. Brent Bill

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from InterVarsity Press.

InterVarsity Press®is the book-publishing division of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA®, a movement of students and faculty active on campus at hundreds of universities, colleges and schools of nursing in the United States of America, and a member movement of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. For information about local and regional activities, visit intervarsity.org.

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

While any stories in this book are true, some names and identifying information may have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

“Church Register” copyright “The Sacred Sandwich” http://sacredsandwich.com/archives/9273. Used with permission.

“Thank You, Good Night” by Carrie Newcomer, copyright 2013 Windchime Productions. Used with permission.

Cover design: Cindy Kiple Images:© ru3apr/iStockphoto

ISBN 978-0-8308-9718-6 (digital) ISBN 978-0-8308-3596-6 (print)

To my mother, Kay, who taught me why to pray.

—Jennie

To my wife, Nancy, whose life is prayer and prayer is life.

—Brent

Contents

1 A New Way to Pray

Exercise 1—The Usual Prayer Suspects

Exercise 2—The Source of Prayer

2 What Lies Beneath the Words

Exercise 3—Prayer Words

Exercise 4—My Belief Lenses

3 God in Action: Finding Our Verbs

Exercise 5—Current Verbs

Exercise 6—My Verb Sources

Exercise 7—Where I Have Perceived God

Exercise 8—My Verbs for Today

4 Images of an Active-Tense God: Nouns That Fit the Verbs

Exercise 9—My Names for God

Exercise 10—Greetings and Salutations

Exercise 11—Unpacking Images from Life and Tradition

Exercise 12—A Singular Salutation

Exercise 13—Playing a Little More Boldly

Exercise 14—Scary Words

5 Hope, Beauty and Depth: Adjectives and Adverbs

Exercise 15—My Modifiers

Exercise 16—Subtraction

Exercise 17—Avoiding Earnestly and All the Other Lees

Exercise 18—Implications

Exercise 19—Growing Our Prayers

Exercise 20—Praying Metaphorically

6 Unpacking Meaning: Shared Language and Authentic Prayer

Exercise 21—Learning from Jesus

Exercise 22—Unpacking

Exercise 23—The (Insert Your Name)’s Prayer

Exercise 24—A “Bad” Words Prayer

7 Jesus, the Word of God, and Our Words

Exercise 25—Discipleship as Listening

Exercise 26—An Incarnational Prayer

Exercise 27—Life Prayer

Exercise 28—Word of God and Our Words

8 Beyond Words: Other Ways of Communicating—Or Not

Exercise 29—My Resistance

Exercise 30—Resisting the Call

Exercise 31—Growing Pains

Exercise 32—Get into Your Body

9 Gospel Means Good News: And News Is New, by Definition

Exercise 33—The Reality of God

Exercise 34—New Images of Prayer

Exercise 35—Growing Up Your Prayers

Appendix 1: Exercises for Building Prayer as a Spiritual Practice

Appendix 2: Prayer Exercises

Appendix 3: Resources

Notes

Acknowledgments

Seeking and Finding God in the Verbs—the Workshop

About Jennie

About Brent

Praise for Finding God in the Verbs

About the Authors

Formatio

More Titles from InterVarsity Press

1

A New Way to Pray

May these words of my mouth and this meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, LORD, my Rock and my Redeemer.

Psalm 19:14

What’s that you say?” That’s what a hard-of-hearing grandparent used to demand of Brent and his slang-wielding, fast-talking cousins. A few well-chosen words were what was wanted—not a bunch of idle chatter.

“What’s that you say?” While God is not some elderly grandparent in the sky, we wonder if God might be longing to say that to us sometimes. That’s probably because, at times, we’ve begun to mumble. We’ve forgotten to pray from our hearts. We’ve stopped listening for the Spirit working within us. We’ve lost our connection to God. We’ve found that we no longer draw out our own words from deep within our souls. So, we have hungered for a new way of praying—a way that reconnects us to the most important conversation of our lives.

A few summers ago, Jennie offered a workshop called Seeking and Finding God in the Verbs for a meeting of Quakers in Plainfield, Indiana. The title intrigued Brent and he signed up for it. As Jennie led the overflow workshop group, participants delightedly called out verbs and worked their way toward new nouns to use in addressing God in prayer. The room was full of energy.

We had lunch after the workshop. As we chatted and ate, Jennie mentioned that she came up with this workshop because she wanted to help people connect more authentically to God in their prayer life. Brent replied that workshop certainly worked for him.

I told Jennie that what I learned in her workshop that morning was going to change the way I prayed. Using what she had taught in that little more than an hour brought a fresh desire to pray deeper and more authentically. I said that I wanted to write a book with her based on her workshop. Her ideas about language and how words matter—informing both what we are saying in prayer and what we want to pray—was something people would resonate with and find really helpful.

A few years have passed since that lunch conversation. We’ve had a number of chats since then—a large number! The book you have in your hands is the result of those conversations about prayer—the conversation of prime importance in our lives. This book is about a new way of praying that we want to share with you.

The Most Important Conversation

We both recognized the importance of prayer early in our lives. We had good teachers. Brent remembers nighttime prayers at home, grace at meals at his and neighbors’ homes, prayer meetings at church, and his grandmother having other old women (probably in their sixties!) kneel in her living room for prayer. And Jennie says:

I learned to pray from the women in my life, particularly my mother. It was not the words for prayer that I got from her, but the heart for it. I cannot count the number of times she said to me, “Jennie, the good Lord doesn’t give you anything you can’t handle.” That’s just not the way it works—everything about her ceaseless optimism was undergirded by this belief. And, I believed her. I remember as a little girl watching her mouth shape soundless words while driving, while cleaning house, while cooking dinner. I knew this was the ongoing conversation at the center of my mother’s life.

As a girl, I strained to hear the words—my mother’s to God, God’s back to my mother, and God’s back to me as I began my own conversation. Truthfully, I can’t remember much of what I prayed about back then. The quality of the conversation was enough to keep me going.

We learn from hearing or reading the prayers of others. That is why this book is peppered with the prayers of our friends and colleagues. You will find them in the sidebars. They are authentic, deep prayers and we hope you will find them inspiring you to the same.

All of these experiences showed us the significance of a rich prayer life. We felt the quality of the conversation. It kept us going. For a while. And then we found ourselves slipping into patterns of oft-repeated prayers that weren’t up to the task of spiritually nourishing communication with God. These were snack-bar, microwave-meal and TV-dinner equivalents of prayer instead of homegrown, home-cooked, made-in-love sort of prayers that we had been fed by in innumerable ways. Or we stopped praying at all, expecting God the all-knowing to read our minds and hearts and be satisfied.

When we sat down one afternoon over coffee to chat, we admitted to each other that we had prayer concerns. They weren’t the kind that are often mentioned in worship on Sunday mornings. For Brent, it was finding himself saying the same words over and over. He did this because growing up as a nonliturgical Quaker, he relied on unstructured, informal prayers.

I was taught those were the only authentic prayers. Liturgical, written prayers, like my Catholic playmates prayed, were not truly prayer because they were the vain repetitions that Jesus preached against. The only real prayer had to spring spontaneously from the soul—a movement of the Spirit in my childhood heart.

Of course, such teaching didn’t exactly square with “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep,” “God Is Great,” and other prayers I’d been encouraged to memorize. Still, that thought—that true prayer has to arise unplanned from the heart—influences how I pray today.

Jennie, on the other hand, learned in college the love of praying the Psalms and prayers from ancient Christians. She loved the feeling of companionship that she sensed in repeating their words, and she experienced gratitude for their transparency in their struggles. That transparency was apparent in their words of pleading and their words of celebration. However, she also found that relying too much on another’s prayers of intimacy with God inhibited the ripening of her own relationship with the Holy One.

At another meeting, while our coffee cooled and the shared scone disappeared, we admitted that, spontaneously or via a prayer book, we often heard the same words coming out of our mouths time and again. We found ourselves longing for something more; something richer. We imagined God bored with our seemingly desultory, superficial stanzas. We knew we were.

We don’t think we’re the only Christians who feel this way. People are hungry to pray authentically. Just look at the overwhelming response to Anne Lamott’s bestselling book Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers. These are genuine, from-the-heart prayers. Judging by the book’s sales, they resonated with readers. Perhaps that’s because many of us have prayed those words. They have sprung directly from our souls and made their way out through our mouths. People of faith through the years have prayed them. As Meister Eckhart says, “If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.” Help, thanks and wow are essential. And they’re enough if prayed with a real sense of need, gratitude and inspiration that feeds our souls and connects us with God.

Please dear God, thank you for the amazing opportunities you have given me to answer to that of God in other people. ­

Elaine Emmi

But we admit that it was easy for us to lapse into repetitious refrains, refrains that felt less than sufficient to carry us into the deep waters of the Spirit we longed to dive into. Our hearts told us that we had lapsed into easy God-speak. We weren’t reaching deep into our spirits and drawing out living words of praise, confession, concern, intercession and longing. We were tired of speaking in clipped shorthand to God. We wanted to pray in such a way that we showed up with our whole selves.

The first action in changing the way we pray is to bring to light and to mind our individual habits of prayer. This book offers companionship and guidance as you begin to notice, consider, and deepen your prayer experiences. We include exercises in every chapter to bring the content to life, to your life. Reflection and reflectively writing your way through this book will make reading it a richer experience.

Exercise 1—The Usual Prayer Suspects

Take out your journal and a pen or pencil. Take a few moments and make a list of the prayers you use regularly. Write them out as fully as you can. We will revisit this list later.

your daily prayers

your special-occasion prayers

your go-to prayers

written prayers that you enjoy

Practicing Prayers of Inspired Imperfection

Part of the holy experiment we propose with prayer language involves practicing inspired and imperfect prayers.

Inspired sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? Imperfect, less so. After all, doesn’t Scripture urge us to “be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48)? How can we bring imperfect prayers before the perfect God?

We can’t if we think our imperfection is a surprise to God. We believe that thinking our imperfections might startle God is one reason we held back from using words and images that were the truest expressions of our reaching to God—especially when our imperfections are not huge ones. As Brent says,

It would be easier for me to confess something big to God. Then, in the face of such holiness, a deep failing would come as no surprise. As if God is ever surprised. But it’s the pettiness of my imperfections that makes it hard to pray authentically and imperfectly in some ways. Shouldn’t I be a better person now after all these years of following the way of Jesus? Has God been keeping close enough tabs on me to know that I can often be hateful, mean-spirited, impatient and riddled with imperfection? In my head I say, “Yes, God knows,” but my heart says, “Keep it hidden just in case.”

As we talked about this in another coffee shop (we drank a lot of coffee while working on this book!), we decided that when we bring our whole hearts and our willingness to be changed by praying in a new way, God delights in our efforts. After all, we reasoned, we weren’t the first imperfect pray-ers. “Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks” (Psalm 137:9) hardly sounds like a prayer that would please the God who is love. Nope, not even our imperfections set us apart from the great remembered prayers and pray-ers of preceding generations. What we learned from them as we looked at their prayers is that their relationship with God was so consuming, so inspiring, so fearless, that they used their own words.

God, please guide me, let faith fill my heart instead of fear. ­

Jana Llewellyn

Stories of people being called to God permeate Scripture. We see this as inspiration to consider what ways God calls us to live and pray more authentically.

Throughout this book we’re going to invite you into new ways of using your own words! There will be times that the language may feel awkward or out of sync with your faith life. However, we have found that being stretched beyond the familiar helped us move beyond fearing that, in the most intimate relationship of our lives, our words would be insufficient. The exercises we offer to you opened us in a fresh way to the great lover of our souls. Risking using our own words in an original approach helped us to know God (and ourselves) a bit more as we were known by God.

We continue to discover our habits of prayer even as we change them. In fact, upon closer examination, it may be that this process of discovery of our prayer habits, and of where our language and understandings rise from, is the key to changing them. We rarely intentionally seek to change things that fly under the radar of our self-awareness. The hunger for something deeper, more authentic, however, awakens new eyes to see ourselves with. The next exercise will help you begin to see your prayers and prayer habits from a few steps back, which will enable you to see them woven into your larger prayer life and relationship with God.

Exercise 2—The Source of Prayer

Take out your journal and a pen or pencil. Now take a moment and say a prayer aloud. Where did you go for your prayer? Did it spring spontaneously from your soul? From your memory? From a prayer book?

The source does not matter so much as does an awareness of the source. If you read the entire exercise before saying a prayer, notice what thoughts informed your prayer choice.

Write your reflections about the words you used. You might find it helpful to write the “important” words down.

Were the words

bold?

safe?

edgy?

perfect or imperfect?

accurate reflections of how you feel and believe?

And so we begin. As we thought of an image for what we’re proposing, we came up with tidying a sock drawer. It is often best to take all the socks out, match up lost pairings in sensible ways, and then re-roll and make a perfect display that is easy to access.

Of course, deep and authentic prayer isn’t anything like a tidy drawer. But the metaphor, with some limits, does work. This book is a process. It’s staged in chapters with guided exercises to move you through the process of inventorying and clarifying what is tucked away in your “prayer drawer” and how it got there.

Sometimes we get into a rut. We only wear the first five pairs of socks. Our favorites that are always at the front of the drawer. Other socks get shoved to the back. This can be true in prayer as well. In the next chapter, we examine our go-to prayer words and what we can learn by following the thread of them to their origin as our favorites.

2

What Lies Beneath the Words

They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.” “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?”

Mark 8:28-29

Who do you say I am?” That’s a question we often prefer to leave to theologians. The fact is, though, that we are theologians. Yes, we mean Jennie and Brent are. But we also mean that you are. All of us people of faith are. We have been our entire spiritual journeys. Our theological training begins early and is pervasive. In Jennie’s childhood congregation, there were many women tending to the education and care of the children. Singing was a primary means of training children to be little theologians, skilled to talk about the nature of God. Songs like “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” and “Jesus Loves Me” formed the basis of the children’s theology. They certainly set the stage for their conversations with God.

Theology is translated as God talk. Another definition of theology is “faith seeking understanding.” We have found that the journey toward an authentic prayer life, in which prayer is a never-ending conversation with God, begins with what St. Anselm called “faith seeking evidence.” Our faith doesn’t seek such evidence to prove God’s existence. Rather, we seek evidence so that we can step closer to the intimacy we desire in our relationship with God.

Jennie experienced seeking evidence—in a difficult way—when she was in high school.

I hit a wall in prayer, and in my faith life in general, when my father was hospitalized with what seemed to be a life-threatening illness. I remember having my first argument with God, a big one. I threatened to stop speaking to God because of what had happened to my dad. Perhaps this is a typical hurdle for teens grasping for a more mature faith that also addresses the new questions that come with puberty and new social expectations as they prepare for college or life after school. What strikes me now as I think back on these angry prayers I sent out to God is that I was blaming God. I wasn’t bargaining for a better outcome. I was blaming God because God had let me down. God did not, as far as I could see, have the world and my father, in hand. And if they were in hand, how careless. My dad recovered and lived to be eighty-four, but this break-up with God was deeply uncomfortable for me. The worldview I had built from my mother’s example and the words of teaching songs from the Sunday school ladies was insufficient and in dire need of reconstruction. But I had no idea where to begin. My basic understandings were shattered and I stood among the rubble, preparing to go to college. With my words-of-Jesus-in-red Bible in one arm and a short stack of Christian biographies in the other, I set out to learn about my tradition.

The exercises in this book largely grow out of Jennie’s sense that asking better questions produces better answers. To know what worldview we carry and where it comes from begins to move us beyond the possibility of hitting a wall such as the one Jennie hit as a young woman. When considering questions about our long-held beliefs, we discover gaps or weak spots in our worldview. Eventually we end up with a stronger faith foundation.

Within the limits of a human lifetime, we grow and learn in the life of faith. The communal nature of the Christian tradition, growing out of its Jewish roots, allows ways for group and cross-generational understandings of our Creator and Sustainer. We learn from others to see God and the faith in new ways. As we direct our attention to the language of God, we come closer to lively and inspiring understandings of our glimpses of our Sustainer. One piece of evidence is the language others use to talk about God. By examining the actions, names and adjectives attributed to God by generations of “God watchers” who have preceded us, we come to know more of the story of human interaction with the divine Mystery. Yes, God is outside of time and beyond complete human comprehension. Still, we come to know God through experience (personal and learning as a part of our faith communities). Words are a part of that experience.

Though in this book we are literally talking about parts of speech—verbs, nouns and so on—what we are really addressing are narrative and story. Narrative and story are how verbs, nouns and other parts of language come together to create a radically different way of praying.

By opening ourselves to fresh images of God through looking for evidence in our lives and the lives of our spiritual ancestors, reading Scripture, and taking hold of new words, we receive new glimpses of God. All of these invite us deeper into relationship with God.

The idea of seeking and finding God in the verbs is geared toward helping us see how God moves in the world and in our lives. God-spotting is an art, not a science. It is part of a new way of praying that takes us deeper while at the same time keeping our focus on the holy relationship between God and us.

The Prayer Before the Crucifix at San Damiano

Most High, glorious God, enlighten the darkness of my heart and give me true faith, certain hope and perfect charity, sense and knowledge, Lord, that I may carry out Your holy and true command. 

St. Francis of Assisi (1181–1226)

The Words We Choose

Scripture tells us that God knows our thoughts. This can be either comforting or scary, depending on what our thoughts are! As we talked about the implications of this, we had to consider the logical conclusion. If God knows our thoughts as they form, then God knows our words as we choose them too. If that’s true, then are words relatively unimportant in the holy relationship? Who needs words if God, in effect, has a pre-show, pre-edit viewing of our prayers? And who needs a book on words and prayer? We could quit talking and writing (and drinking so much coffee).

But words do matter. At least to us.

We knew they mattered to us because as we sat and chatted we saw how we formed our emotions and thoughts into words that communicated our ideas with each other. Our words mattered to us, individually and as two people having a conversation. As we discussed, argued and agreed about prayer, we concluded that forming our mind’s and heart’s intentions into words to communicate with God is one of the most important processes in our spiritual lives. After all, if the act of putting words to thought so that the thoughts could be expressed mattered that much in a coffee shop conversation, how much more important was doing that in prayer? Forming words of prayer rallies all that we are and all that we hope to be into clear intention. When we write or speak our prayers, we release these intentions like an arrow from a bow, with the single-focused aim of being seen and heard as we truly are.

Yes, if we approach God with honesty and transparency, we acknowledge that God already knows our hearts, souls, dreams, failings, aspirations, minds and intentions. But by putting words to our prayers, we acknowledge to ourselves what we know of hope, fear and challenge. Our words help us reach toward God with the truth of who we are and what we long for. They also encourage, enhance and confirm our willingness to be changed—when we use authentic, truthful words, that is. We admitted to each other that there were times we weren’t always willing to be changed. Change is not always comfortable or easy. Change is, as spiritual writer Emilie Griffin says, “very dangerous business.”

For all the benefits it offers of growing closer to God, it carries with it one great element of risk: the possibility of change. In prayer we open ourselves to the chance that God will do something with us that we had not intended. We yield to possibilities of intense perception, of seeing through human masks and the density of “things” to the very center of reality. This possibility is exciting, but at the same time there is a fluttering in the stomach that goes with any dangerous adventure.

Don’t we know for a fact that people who begin by “just praying”—with no particular aim in mind—wind up trudging off to missionary lands, entering monasteries, taking part in demonstrations, dedicating themselves to the poor and sick? To avoid this, sometimes we excuse ourselves from prayer by doing good works on a carefully controlled schedule.

That’s why learning and listening to the language we use in prayer is vital. The words we use reveal what we believe about God, ourselves and the divine-human relationship. Finding God in the verbs leads us to deeper insight into ourselves and our faith. It also moves us toward the God who knows us and wishes to be known by us. That’s why we believe that our words are important to God too. The next exercise will help you to begin to create a catalog of your prayer words. This exercise is about taking a few steps back from your prayer habits in order to see the threads that are woven into the bigger picture.

Exercise 3—Prayer Words

Take out your journal and a pen or pencil. Make a list of the words you use when you pray.

What names for God do you use?

What verbs do you rely on in each of the different kinds of prayer you make—intercessory prayers (“please”), praise prayers (“wow”) and gratitude prayers (“thanks”)?

What adjectives do you use?

The Lenses

We both have imperfect vision, as many people do. If you’ve been for an eye exam, you are familiar with the soundtrack “Which is better, one or two? Two or three? Three or one?” This opportunity to consider which lens is a better fit is an important aspect of self-care. It helps us check the accuracy of what we think we see.

While not all of us wear glasses or contact lenses, we all wear unique lenses through which we see friends, family, faith, the world and God. Sometimes we’ve been wearing these lenses so long that we forget that we have them on. That’s why we may not see how they affect our prayers. Until, that is, we take them off or have them checked.

So how did we come to believe many of the things we consider bedrock? We chose them. Brent’s continual references to the Bible come largely from the primacy his Evangelical Friends church placed on Scripture. His belief that peace-making means not participating in war comes from the Bible, his pacifist Quaker roots and his own coming of age during the Vietnam War when he had to deal with that issue head-on. Jennie’s deep sense of the importance of extending hospitality and help comes from her father. He lived from this orientation because his mother was raised in a Baptist orphanage and taught these values at home. Jennie gets her conviction that Jesus’ teaching stories are important from growing up with a Bible that emphasized his words in red ink.