Sunday, January 19, 2014
Congruent Intercession
I am struck by clarion chords of delight that accompany Paul's praying. The Apostle's vertical climb was joyfully congruent with his horizontal connections. I am increasingly convinced that persistent intercession proceeds from meaningful relationship. In other words, I will never wrestle with endurance over that with which I am only distantly acquainted. I am not arguing for what Thomas Merton argued against: "To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence." What does seem clear to me from scriptural observation and personal experience is that disinterested prayer may be the most decisive descent into violence.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
This reminds me of TW Hunt's, The Mind of Christ. Prayer is much more an overflow of being in tune with His will than expressing our needs and wants. For what do we really need, except what He wants for us? All other prayer is is idle chat, or worse, babble.
Well written, Dane! Disinterested prayer only strengthens the division between me and the one(s) for whom I pray and between my hesitance and my obedience to love and live out Christian community. This also reminds me of Bonhoeffer in LIFE TOGETHER as he says, "A Christian community either lives by the intercessory prayers of its members for one another, or the community will be destroyed. I can no longer condemn or hate other Christians for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble they cause me. In intercessory prayer the face that may have been strange and intolerable to me is transformed into the face of one for whom Christ died, the face of a pardoned sinner. That is a blessed discovery for the Christian who is beginning to offer intercessory prayer for others. As far as we are concerned, there is no dislike, no personal tension, no disunity or strife that cannot be overcome by intercessory prayer. Intercessory prayer is the purifying bath into which the individual and the community must enter every day."
Post a Comment