Answering God by Eugene Peterson: I have read this book several times because it has been so meaningful for my journey. It is not a long book; it is only 128 pages, but the content provides the distance in understanding. I agree with the review given this book by Ted W. Engstrom, president emeritus, World Vision: "Peterson again proves his consummate skill as a wordsmith, drawing the reader into his mind and heart...This book is a gem. Don't fail to explore its beauty."
If we wish to develop in the life of faith, to mature in our humanity and glorify God with our entire heart, mind, soul and strength, the Psalms are necessary. We cannot bypass the Psalms. They are God's gift to train us in prayer that is comprehensive (not patched together from emotional fragments) and honest. The Psalms are our prayer masters and we apprentice ourselves to them. Prayers articulate our seeking after the best. Te Psalms train us in the conversation with God that is prayer. Apprentice ourselves to a master (Psalms) we are forced to leave the ruts of mediocrity, and climb. The practice of millions of Christians through the centuries of use is adequate proof that we don't have to acquire expertise in the Psalms before we use them; they themselves - prayers that train us in prayer -- are the means to proficiency. The practice of Christians in praying the Psalms is straightforward: simply pray through the Psalms, psalm by psalm, regularly.
Words woven into a fabric of meaning, have a characteristic feel to them. When our eyes go over the words of a text and our tongues and lips reproduce the sound of the words, we get a feel for how they are being used and how to take them. Getting the feel of the text is prerequisite to getting its meaning, for if we don;t know how to take the words, we will probably take them incorrectly. When we hear words spoken, we pick this up easily through tone and rhythm. We we read words that are written we compensate for the loss of voice by observing how the words are arranged in the loom of the text. As we discern the texture we know how to take the text. Psalms are poetry and prayers: this is the texture of the text. Poetry brings into recognition what is latent, forgotten over looked or suppressed. Know this: the psalms text is almost entirely this kind of language.
Psalms are not prayed by people trying to understand themselves, but by people who understand that God has everything to do with them, God, not their feelings was the center. God, not their souls, was the issue. God, not the the meaning of life, was critical. The psalmists are passionate about God: the obedience-shaping, will-transforming, sin-revoking, praise-releasing God. The Psalms come from a people who hear God speak to them and realize it is the most important word they will ever hear spoken. They decide to respond. They answer. These people made their mark in history not by understanding themselves or studying what they found around them in earth and sky, but in praying to the God who revealed himself to them in Word.
Languages II and III are the ascendant languages of our cultures. Language that describes (II) and language that motivates (III) dominate.We are well schooled in language that describes the world in which we live. We are well trained in the language that moves people to buy and join and vote. Meanwhile Language I, the language of intimacy, the language that develops relationships of trust, hope, and understanding, languishes. When we enter into courtship and marriage we use this language yet again, finding that it is the only language adequate to the reality of our passions and commitments. Romantic love extends and deepens it for as long as we have the will to pursue it. But our will commonly falters, and in the traffic of the everyday and press of making a living, we content ourselves with the required and easier languages of information and motivation. In the early months of parenting, the basic language is relearned and used for awhile. At death, if we know we are dying, we will us nothing else.A few people never quit using it -- a few lovers, some poets, the saints -- but most let it drift into disuse; Walter Wangerin, Jr. calls this a "vast massacre of neglect." Language I is the language of the Psalms and the language of prayer. Not exclusively, of course, for all the languages blend together in actual use, but mostly. But because it is the language that requires the most of us and hardly anyone (often no one) requires it of us, it is the language in which we are least proficient. It is necessary to acquire Language II if we are to pass from one school grade to the next, and it is gratifying to use Language III to get our own way, but, except for our children, our parents, our lovers, and our God (altogether they do not add up to very many, and we can easily avoid them if we wish), no once cares overmuch whether we use Language I and yet this is the language most necessary to our humanity, to finding out who we are and who we are with, for love and for care. And for God. Because we are more at home in the languages that describe where we are and get us what we want, and because these languages are more honored in our culture, our habit is to pray in these more easily handled languages. This is fatal to prayer. Informational language is not prayer language. Motivational language is not prayer language. To pray in these languages is, in effect, not to pray. We must let the Psalms train us in prayer language -- the language of intimacy, or relationship, of "I and Thou," of personal love.
God works with words. He uses them to make a story of salvation. He pulls us into the story. When we believe, we become willing participant in this plot. We can do this reluctantly and minimally, going through the motions; or we can do it recklessly and robustly, throwing ourselves into the relationships and actions. When we do this, we pray. We practice the words and phrases that make us fluent in the conversation that is at the center of the story.We develop the free responses that answer to the creating word of God in and around us that is making a salvation story.
We both live and speak rhythmically. Rhythm is embedded in our bodies and in our world. The rhythms are contrapuntal, pulse counterpointed to seasons, breathing to moon phases. We live and speak in a fugue. Poetry takes the natural rhythms of language and deepens them, fitting sounds and meanings into the interior rhythms of our breathing and pulse, and then extends them to the environmental rhythms of days, months, and years. "Rhythm," John Ciardi once said, "shakes language down into the nervous system." All the psalms are given to us in the form of poetry. Prayer is rhythmic, using language to integrate our blessings to our breathing, adjusting the internal rhythms of our lives to the external rhythms of creation and covenant. Our core being is expressed in language that follows the rhythms of our life, inhalation and exhalation We cannot breathe out what we have not first breathed in. The breath that God breathes into us in daily pentecosts, is breathed out in our prayers, "telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God" (Acts 2:11). We can, of course, pray in a frenzy, thrashing about. Much prayer necessarily begins that way, but we pray better, and best, when we let the rhythms of the creating word of God work themselves into the rhythms of our living, and then find expression in the psalmic rhythms of prayer. Poetry requires equal time be given to sounds and silences. In all language silence is as important as sound. But more often than not we are merely impatient with the silence. Mobs of words run out of our moths, nonstop, trampling the grassy and sacred silence. We stop only when breathless. Why do we talk so much? Why do we talk so fast? hurry is a from of violence practiced on times. But time is sacred. The purpose of language is not to murder the silence but to enter it, cautiously and reverently. The poet carefully arranges words in settings of silence. letting the sounds resonate, the meanings vibrate. Silence is not what is left over when there is nothing more to say but the aspect of time that gives meaning to sound. The poem restores silence to language so that words, organized and living, once again are given time to pulse and breathe.
What rhythms of language are to time, the metaphors of language are to place. God speaks to us in time and place. We must, therefore, answer, that is, pray, in time and in place. The rhythms of language are used by the psalmists to develop the cadences of the Genesis day in us; the metaphors of language are used by the psalmists to ground our prayers in the Genesis earth. Dissociated from creation, prayer drifts into silly sentimentalism, or snobbish mysticism, or pious elitism.
These psalms that teach us to pray are, all of them, prayers of people gathered as a community before God in worship. Some of them most certainly originated in solitude, and all of them have been continued in solitude. But in the form in which they come to us, the only form in which they come to us, and therefore in the way they serve as our school of prayer, they are the prayers of the community before God in worship. Prayer is fundamentally liturgical. Selah, untranslated and untranslatable, strewn through the Psalms, will not let us forget it. If its meaning is an enigma, its use is clear: Selah directed people who were together in prayer to do something or other together. Individuals don't "make up" the community, they are produced by it. The Psalms return us to this beginning, this original matrix of humanity and spirituality.
And these are just a few of the gems you'll find in this book.
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