Benjamin Vineyard

Roles vs. the Personal and the Language of Prayer

June 25, 2010 by Benjamin Vineyard

Here are a few more words I’d like to share from Practicing Resurrection by Eugene Peterson. The words are about depersonalizing people into roles, and only roles they live out. …as if life were nothing more than some kind of pseudo-scientific expression of these roles and that if/when you figured out your role (as the culture expects you to play them out, of course) you’re considered “excellent.”

Roles, I believe, can drain the life and expression of life from a person. They reduce the adventure and journey that life is into a mathematical connecting of dots. …a reduction of people into what they can do, produce or what their culture expects them to be.

Prayer, can be similar.

Here are the words from Practicing Resurrection:

As we become increasingly proficient in the language of naming and defining and describing, the personal, relational aspects of language recede as we learn to talk our way competently though a world made up [by human objectives] mostly of things to arrange and work to do. In the process, sadly, we “thingify” persons. More often than not, the words we use and listen to are in the context of the roles that we are given to play: students, customers, employers, workers, competitors, all of whom could just as well be, and often are, nameless…

…as language becomes impersonal, the world becomes depersonalized.

…prayer is personal language or it is nothing.

…When we use impersonal language in this most personal of all relations [prayer], the language doesn’t work. And when we listen to Scripture and in silence to what the personal God has to say to us in our unique personhood, anticipating information or answers and not hearing anything remotely like that, we don’t know what to make of it.

…The language we are really fluent in, the language we are most used to, deals with impersonal data and functionalized roles. The practice of prayer, if it is going to amount to anything more than wish lists and complaints, requires a recovery of personal, relational, revelational language in both our listening and our speaking.

<><

Posted in Book Reviews, Prayer, Spiritual Renovation, Theology | Leave a Comment »

Praying and the Words of Prayer

June 24, 2010 by Benjamin Vineyard

I read something today in Practice Resurrection, (Eugene Peterson) that helped me see another element in prayer. It was about the struggle we feel with prayer sometimes in our culture. It’s the struggle or uncomfortable feeling when it comes to praying out loud or just praying at all – when the mind flashes in and out of “praying” in a volley of thinking, “This is dumb; I feel dumb; I feel like I’m talking to myself…”

Peterson brought something to my table: essentially, we struggle with prayer because the language we’re mostly accustomed to in our culture is an impersonal language: a language that describes, analyzes, dissects, and then reports.

Praying, we know, is a posture of relationship, expression in conversation. I wondered, as I read, that our struggle in prayer is that we’re so used to a typically impersonal language and that just doesn’t work in a posture of prayer. Prayer and praying go together (obviously) and both are deeply personal: personal action (praying) and personal words (prayer). Perhaps we’ve felt so strange in prayer because we started prayer off with a recitation of facts, like we’re reading a small town newspaper of our day to God, telling the details. (Sure, God loves the details.) But what about the deeper side of those details – the way you reacted, how you saw a glimpse of God in action, how you felt, what you thought?

I imagine that pairing relational language with praying (which is relational in nature, like talking to your mother over coffee) might just make it seem more natural, more put together in it’s expression.

<><

Posted in Prayer, Spiritual Renovation, Theology | Tagged prayer, Spiritual Renovation, Theology | Leave a Comment »