Some Thoughts on Philip Yancy's Prayer, Chapter 20

During Sunday School in one of Richmond's parishes, six of us have been meeting since early February to read and discuss a chapter each week from Philip Yancy's Prayer. On Sunday, July 6, five of the group (I will be in Georgia) will spend the better of an hour working in Part Five: The Practice of Prayer, especially Chapter 20, Prayer and Me.

In this chapter, after admitting that "by nature” he tends to resist “techniques, especially those relating to spiritual disciplines," Yancey tells us that "if prayer is [his] response to God's presence," it’s quite apparent that he must first somehow “tune in to that presence"(286). Yancey’s “tuning-in” metaphor at first suggested to me what some of us do when we fiddle with a radio dial to catch perhaps NPR’s All Things Considered in the afternoon. But as I mused on the “tuning-in” metaphor a bit more, I find myself more inclined to understand Yancey’s tuning-in metaphor as something more akin to what a musician (perhaps a violinist) does when she or he gets ready to play in an orchestra. In what sounds to some like a pre-symphony bit of cacophony, the musician "fiddles" with her instrument's pegs, tightening and loosening strings, making sure that each string is in tune, ready to be played, ready to go into the actual presentation of whatever is to be played.

Several years ago a friend, Jon Kessler, one of my mentors in prayer (who has since died and is fully with Christ), suggested one evening that I might try to do something quite similar to a musician’s tuning-in before I enter Morning or Evening Prayer. He told me that I might find it helpful before prayer to get things tuned up quite like a violinist. My instrument, he said, is not of course a violin but a prayer book most likely containing a Psalter, readings from Scripture, perhaps even songs and hymns set to musical melodies.

Tuning in, he said, might help if I “warm up” my instruments by quietly giving myself a chance to look ahead to what I and others will be reading, singing, and doing. He suggested that I might like to make sure my prayer book has its pages “book-marked” and ready to be read. That perhaps I might quietly hum the psalm tone or the hymn’s melody so that I have it well in mind when the times come to do those psalms and/or a song. Perhaps, he recommended, I might find it good to know exactly what Scriptures or readings I’ll be reading quietly. Getting ready for the Gospel of St. John, he said, requires a different preparation than moving into St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans. Jon, who liked to prayer out-of-doors suggested that I might also want to just sit and listen, doing almost nothing but paying attention to the way of the wind, bird sounds, the movement of the clouds. But, most of all, Jon said that I would do well to be “pre-prayerfully” quiet and give myself some time to pre- and review the day, think about whom it is that I want to include in intercessions, what I want to give God thanks for, what I need to confess, and, in short, know somewhat in advance how I am to present myself before God. Then, Jon said, “Enter your prayers.”

Yancey, describing how Anthony Bloom learned to pray, tells us that in Beginning to Pray, this Russian Orthodox Christian describes how he came to begin "each day in quiet and stillness, acknowledging that the day itself was a gift from God, something that had never existed before, a chance for a new start. It stretched before him like a vast expanse of unspoiled snowin his native Russia. “This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.” He prayed to enter that day as God’s own messenger, carrying God’s presence to everyone he met. Then at night he would review all that had happened, committing both the progress and the failures to a gracious god. The day is now spent; it rests in God’s hands” (299).