David and I have volunteered to organize the prayer time before each Sunday morning service. So far, for the most part, he and I have been the only ones praying. We belong to a small church, which meets in a local school gymnasium, and the people who have the time to come 45 minutes early are generally setting up sound equipment, organizing childcare, unfolding chairs, mounting the cloths on the communion table—well, you get the idea. We have lots of young couples in our church with small children and David and I well remember what it was like getting everyone ready on Sunday morning. (A lot of work!)So, David and I have prayed together (in the teacher’s lounge) for months—mostly just the two of us. We are at the stage in life where this is no longer a boring task, and we also love to have time to pray together. We feel that this work is as crucial as everything that is mentioned above. We are also grateful when, from time to time, someone else joins us.However, because we believe that the work of prayer is the work of the whole church, I began to organize a schedule in which types of prayer could be highlighted for 15 minutes each Sunday morning, then we would spend the next 20 minutes in intercession for the worship, the people, the children’s programs, our members, and the school and neighborhood in which we serve.February 26: Who feels strongly about prayer stations during Eucharist? Would you like to be on prayer teams? Have you had a journey into healing prayer? Are you someone who finds yourself praying for the world and the people in it (you may have the gift of intercession.) Can we set up prayer teams? Let’s respond to last Sunday’s challenge to pray for miracles.March 6: Who feels strongly about a burden, or a need, or a personal crisis? Let’s make a list of our prayer concerns, date them, and see if a praying community (two or three gathered together) has better results than people just praying alone? What have you learned about making requests of God? Of course, we will pray about these concerns.March 11: What do you know about prayers of confession? Since Lent is a time for self-examination, repentance and confession, let’s make sure we are building this spiritual practice into our journey. So what do you know? What has happened when you have confessed and repented? What does Scripture teach us?March 18: What do you know about journaling your prayers? There are probably as many different ways of prayer journaling as there are people. What has worked for you?Bring a journal and share this with those of us who get started and stop, who want to begin but don’t know how.Let’s gather together in the teacher’s lounge and delight in the many different ways different people keep a record of their daily (weekly? monthly? yearly?) prayers.March 25: What kind of prayer reminders have you discovered help you to develop and keep the habit of prayer? Rubber bands on your wrist? Coins in the pocket? A daily prayer guide? If something is working for you, let the rest of us know.Let’s gather together in the teacher’s lounge for a show-and-tell of practical helps.April 1: Have you developed an attitude of gratitude? Studies show that grateful people are actually physically and emotionally more healthy than ungrateful people. So let’s go at this spiritual practice! Do any of you keep a gratitude journal? How has this worked and what has it done for you?Let’s gather together in the teacher’s lounge for an initial plunge into healthy spiritual practice.April 8: How do you define worship prayer? And how is this different from Thanksgiving? What helps you know when you are really worshipping? Is it just an emotional feeling or is it something all together different than that?Help! Today is Easter—an ultimate day of worship on the church calendar—let’s make sure our hearts are ready for worship. What do you know about worship that the rest of us need to know?April 15: Who among us has fasted spiritually and with success? How long have you fasted? What did you learn? What if someone has health problems? How can they fast?This one is hard.April 22: Who has had prayers answered? Let’s look at the prayer request list we havebeen gathering and see what God has done for us as a people of faith over the last nine weeks.One of the elders of the church joined us this Sunday, and we were glad to have her. Seeing the handwriting on the wall—that I was going to have to take the initiative—I began asking people who I believe have the gifts of discernment and compassion if they would join us on our prayer teams.Last Sunday morning early after a busy, busy week, I finally pulled a small whiteboard, the wreath stand I use by the front door during seasonal changes and found a nearly dried-up marker and made a sign. Most of the 100 or so people who come on Sunday mornings don’t even know where the teacher’s lounge is. My sign read: PROCEED WITH CAUTION!PRAYER WORK AHEADJoin us in the Teacher’s Lounge9:45-10:20 I drew a primitive arrow, filled it in with the evaporating felt marker as much as I was able, that hopefully, this scratchy sign conveyed the teacher’s lounge was down the hall.However, as we were driving to the school, I kept hearing that little word nudging me: If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well. So I left the makeshift sign and the stand I had pulled out of the dirt by the front walk and washed hurriedly with a dish cloth. No, no, no—God’s work is always orderly, deliberate and planned. If it wasn’t ready because I wasn’t ready, then the timing for this announcement and this scheme wasn’t right either.The sign is still in the back of my car—I’ll pull it out this morning—but it keeps greeting me with the warning: Proceed with caution! Proceed with caution!Gentle reminder from God?—probably.I’m paying attention.I spy God!

Have you ever gone on a God Hunt? A God Hunt begins when you teach yourself to look for God’s hand at work in the every day occurrences of your life. Here’s one of my personal God Hunt Sightings:
 
 “They should have paid us to sit in these seats,” I joked to the women who were adjusting their chairs in the box next to ours during the first intermission of a Saturday afternoon performance of the Joffrey Ballet.

A friend of a friend had discount tickets she couldn’t use, so David and I found ourselves at the beautifully restored Sullivan and Adler Auditorium Theatre in Chicago.Box seats, I thought as the ushers steered us to the second-floor balcony, pretty good. I was soon to learn that there are box seats, and then there are box seats.

The people in the first row of seats in our box had an unobstructed view. David’s and my seats, however, in the second row of the first balcony box, offered us almost completely obstructed sightlines. The boxes were designed front and forward so if we sat straight in our seats, we looked across the concert hall to the second floor balcony seats across us, not toward the stage.

So? you might be thinking. Just twist your bodies or reposition your chairs. Not so easy. The boxes were crowded, giving us limited room for negotiating space, and even if we twisted toward the stage, my whole right sightline was blocked by all the people sitting in the four other boxes closer to the stage than ours.

The purpose, of course, of going to the ballet is to see the dancers. Mr. Louis Sullivan, I thought, Mr. Dankmar Adler, you goofed.

The Auditorium Building in Chicago is one of the best-known designs of these two architects. Completed in 1889, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1970 and designated a Chicago Landmark in 1976. At the time of its construction, it was the largest and tallest building in the United States. Ferdinand Peck, a Chicago businessman, wanted to develop a cultural center that would rival the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. He wanted to make high culture accessible to the working classes.

The building was equipped with the first central air conditioning system and was the first to be entirely lit by incandescent light bulbs. In 2001, a major restoration of the Auditorium Theatre was begun to return the theater to its original colors and finishes. It now is the home of Roosevelt University.

However, even in the best of plans, there is often a glitch. The glitch in the Adler/Sullivan architecture is that anyone in the second tier of chairs in the first balcony box seats, number six, right-hand side, is unlikely to be able to see the stage due to the heads of all the people in the other boxes positioned to the right of said person in said box seat. This is particularly so when the baldheaded gentleman in the first row of box seven rests his head on his right hand.

All during the first half of the opening performance of modern interpretations of classical dance, “In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated,” I fumed. I do have a pet peeve when seats perched behind posts at sporting events are sold to unsuspecting fans (or when discounted tickets are not marked with the disclaimer: “Welcome to the Joffrey. You will be unlikely to see the stage from these seats.”) But somewhere midway in that rendition, I became captured by the sheer beauty of the choreographed muscularity, the exquisite physicality of the dancers and gave myself one of those all-too-frequent and necessary lectures, Oh, Mains. Grow up! You peevish, privileged middle-class woman! You are at the Joffrey Ballet! Stop pouting and just stand up. You can sit during the intermission.

This, of course, made quite a difference. If I stood, I could see. I had an unobstructed sightline of the stage. And I quite enjoyed the rest of “In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated” (how ironically appropriate that title to my circumstances). We had a charming chat during the interlude before the next piece “After the Rain,” and then another intermission.

I read my program and realized that we were attending the U.S. premiere of what the notes told me was a piece of “sumptuous beauty and shimmering possibility” (who writes stage notes for ballets and concerts and plays? How much do they earn for doing this writing? Is it the artistic director, Ashley C. Wheater or Scott Speck, the Music Director?) Or maybe—just maybe, it is the choreographer him/herself who writes glowing stage-reviews… “Dancers perform intense and thoughtful choreography, exposing the agonies of indecision, doubt and hope that lie under the surface of the skin.” Oh, I see this quoted bit is attributed to the critic of The Telegraph (and where exactly is that published?).

Somewhere, while standing again for the last ballet in order to be able to see, this thought intruded. Life is full of glitches. Sometimes the most beautiful experiences are threatened by the fact that you are situated in such a way that you can only view a third of what is going on, can only see half the dancers on the stage. The exquisite beauty of this event, whatever it is—sunset streaking the sky as you ignore it while hurrying onto an evening appointment; a grandchild happily and ecstatically destroying your ordered basement with the detritus of concentrated play—can be lost because you are sitting in your seat, hurrying to dinner, craning your neck, so to speak, and allowing yourself to be filled with peeve at the Architects of this high cultural event for the common masses.

Or—or you can choose to stand through the whole performance, leaning against your chair that you have moved in front of you to act as a prop. And if you choose to stand at life’s ballets—no matter the seeming inconveniences—I promise you will see the whole thing. You will be able to puzzle about the “transforming direction of the dance” constructed by the Three Choreographers (in theological terms this is called perichoresis koinonia). Joy will rise in you. I am here, you will think. We are at the Joffrey Ballet. You may be in the middle, somewhat elevated, but that will be quite enough.

Savor each moment, large or small, give praise for the beauty of the work. Lift your heart to the Master Artistic Director. Give thanks. Let us just be glad that a friend of a friend has given us tickets to the show.

I spy God!

Have you ever gone on a God Hunt? A God Hunt begins when you teach yourself to look for God’s hand at work in the every day occurrences of your life. Here’s one of my personal God Hunt Sightings:
 
 
 I found three journals hidden away behind a stack of books in the bookcases in my home study ... one brief line intrigued me. I had written, “Enjoying reading and copying out quotes from Capon’s Supper of the Lamb—such lovely thoughts on being attentive.”

I do not know exactly where I copied out these lovely thoughts on being attentive, but this hidden-away journal reminded me that I had delighted in reading Robert Farrar Capon’s amazing book. An ordained Episcopalian minister, and at the time of the writing Professor of Dogmatic Theology and Instructor in Greek at The George Mercer Jr. Memorial School of Theology, Robert Capon captures in all his writing the exquisite beauty of the commonplace experience of living sacramentally. The book is subtitled “A Culinary Reflection.” Taking the ingredients for “Lamb for Eight Persons Four Times,” the author builds what simply looks like one meal reconfigured four ways into a profound meditation on finding God in life.

I pulled the book again from my cooking library, which is in the old post office desk in our finished basement and read my comments recorded on the frontispiece:

This is a mighty book with an original and daring metaphor.
Capon is an incredible writer & has made the common holy & the holy common.
Wondrous work! Would that all Christian writing was so incarnated with the meaning of the world & with the world of meaning.

So I give to you just a few of the lovely thoughts on being attentive I highlighted in one of my numerous readings of this volume:

“The whole world looks as it if has been left in the custody of a pack of trolls. Indeed, the whole distinction between art and trash, between food and garbage, depends on the presence of absence of the loving eye. Turn a statue over to a boor, and his boredom will break it to bits—witness the ruined monuments of antiquity. On the other hand, turn a shack over to a lover; for all its poverty, its lights and shadows warm a little, and its numbed surfaces prickle with feeling.

“Or, conclusively, peel an orange. Do it lovingly—in perfect quarters like little boats, or in staggered exfoliations like a flat map of the round world, or in one long spiral, as my grandfather used to do. Nothing is more likely to become garbage than an orange rind; but for as long as anyone looks at it in delight, it stands a million triumphant miles from the trash heap.”

Or how about this quote?

“Between the onion and the parsley, therefore, I shall give the summation of my case for paying attention. Man’s real work is to look at the things of the world and to love them for what they are. That is, after all, what God does, and man was not made in God’s image for nothing. ... If an hour can be spent on one onion, think how much regarding it took on the part of that old Russian who looked at onions and church spires long enough to come up with St. Basil’s Cathedral.”

This book is an outrageous, extravagant and breathtaking look at the real Supper of the Lamb when believers of history will sit down to an unending banquet with the Son of
God. Appropriately, the vehicle for this meditation is a work the publishers have classified under “cookbook.”

And I had forgotten how wonderfully it is written or how worthy of another read except that I rediscovered the notebooks I had hidden on a shelf in my writer’s study.

It makes you want to take up journaling again, in earnest, to finish the incomplete pages, to record life for that time, perhaps, when the timeline is waning so that I can remember what have been the real lessons—that “only miracle is plain; it is the ordinary that groans with the unutterable weight of glory.” —Robert Farrar Capon

I spy God!

What happens when you learned that one of the most vocal atheists of the day is diagnosed with a life-threatening disease? If you were a leader of the church that he so eternally protested, attacked and offended, will you feel sorry for him? Read on as Karen Mains talks about Christopher Hitchens in the latest issue of Soulish Food .

***

Our friend Drew Dyck, an editor at Christianity Today, writes about visiting the atheists club in Wheaton, Illinois as part of his interview process for his new book, Generation EX-Christian: Why Young Adults Are Leaving the Faith … And How to Bring Them Back.

Now, I admire this. My tendency is to avoid the opposition however I can and only deal with them when I am caught in unavoidable confrontations. After checking out the group’s Web site (with messages like “looking to meet like-minded individuals in a nation that is cuckoo for Christianity”), Drew discovered what he terms a “whole underworld of doubt.”

This excerpt (quoted with the author’s permission) is his account about attending an atheists club:

*    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *

The next meeting would be at a pub less than a mile from my house. I showed up feeling a little jittery. What was I—a Bible-believing Christian since my youth—going to say to atheists? How would they react when they learned that I was a Christian? Would it be all-out war? I intended to observe, ask questions, and then keep my mouth shut … but I’m not very good at keeping my mouth shut. And some of them would be expecting me. In my online profile I’d written that I was a “Christian journalist writing a book about ex-Christians…”

I walked over and introduced myself to the young man opposite the table from me. He shook his head.

“I saw your profile. I know who you are.” He let out a mock groan. “Why did I have to sit on this end of the table?”

Not exactly the reception I had hoped for.

Before I could respond, a gray-haired woman smiled warmly in my direction. “I don’t think I’ve seen you here before. What’s your name?”

“I’m Drew,” I said cheerfully. “I work just across the street at Christianity Today.”

Her brow furrowed. “When did you become an atheist?”

“I didn’t. I’m a Christian.”

The word “Christian” seemed to hang in the air. The conversations around the table died, and I felt twenty-five pairs of eyes fasten upon me.


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This encounter is a marvelous example of the way we all see the world from the place where we stand. That is an axiom that applies to everyone. Few of us take the effort to consider the other side; too many of us don’t even recognize that there is another side. If we enter into any kind of dialogue it is for the sole purpose of proving the other guy (or gal) wrong. Then we demonize the opposition. Sound familiar?—this attitude is a map of our current culture wars.

Drew Dyck makes the point that the new atheism is aggressive, confrontational, angry and militant. “They specialize in dredging up old arguments against God’s existence and peddling them to a credulous public.” Despite this (and knowing how nasty conservative Christians can become when they feel threatened), I have been given an interesting assignment regarding one of the most vocal atheists of our day, Christopher Hitchens, whose commentaries and literary criticism I often enjoy in The Atlantic or other Eastern establishment periodicals. Among an endless list of works, Hitchens is the author of God Is Not Great. In The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Faith and Practice, he disclaims Mother Teresa as a fraud and wishes for her to go to a place he ardently does not believe in. This aside, much of Hitchens’ protests against the church make me feel like a kindred spirit. Often, I read his stuff, admire the intellectual analysis and because I am fond of contrarians, I find myself thinking, Well, I feel exactly the same way. That really bugs me as well. Sometimes he and I are mad about the same things!

What I have been left pondering, however, in this distant juxtaposition of opinions is: Why, given the same irritants, have I landed in the camp of the rabid believers and he in the camp of militant disbelief?  

This kind of oxymoronity (in myself and in others) always makes me laugh, and I have often found myself laughing while reading Hitchens—not in scorn, but in delight at having discovered a fellow malcontent, who incongruously happens to be in the other camp. Why don’t you pray for Christopher Hitchens? came the still soft inner word. Not, Pray for his conversion; not, pray that he will stop offending me, his Creator. Just something like, You like him; why don’t you pray for him?

So I did what was in my heart to do—I attended, albeit at a distance, the atheists club. At bedtime (when I am trying to stay awake until 9:00 p.m.), I began to read his collection on various topics first published in national magazines, Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays. So far, I’ve read reviews of biographies written about Rudyard Kipling, a reconstruction about popular attitudes toward Churchill, other reviews on books about Trotsky, thoughts about the pertinence of Huxley’s Brave New World, Graham Greene’s body of literature and Evelyn Waugh, the author of Brideshead Revisited.

I attempted to see the world not from where I stand. Authentic prayers (the inner nudge, though gentle, is always persistent) for Christopher Hitchens demanded that I attempt to see the world from where he stands.

I noticed an ad, maybe in that progressive rag The Nation, in which Zondervan Publishers pushed a book by Peter Hitchens, Christopher’s brother, titled The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith. This all had occurred of course, before my prayers began their feeble passage heavenward as did the cancer of the esophagus national
media reports he has contracted. “Stage-four cancer,” he told Steve Kraft in a 60 Minutes interview two weeks ago (which I happened to catch while waiting for David to finish getting ready for a concert we were attending). “There is no stage five.”

Interestingly, I still don’t feel led to pray for his conversion—perhaps I don’t believe that will happen, given his position of adamant disbelieve. I just pray for the man. I pray suspecting that he protests too much. I pray because I delight in much of what he writes. Isn’t it ironic that the God who Hitchens proclaims does not exist so gently and mercifully reminds me to hold him tenderly in my heart?

Of course, being a leader of a cadre of publishing-industry atheists (more of Hitchens’ titles include The Portable Atheist: Essential Reading for the Nonbeliever and God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist—you get the point), he certainly isn’t going to recant and consider the state of his soul at this time in his career (life). And he must know he is dying. But I am praying for him. If I can laugh at the man—certainly he can’t be serious; he’s over the top with an ingenious marketing scheme for attracting reviews and readers—then God must see the humor in his “there is no God/I hate him” incongruity (and the offending further incongruity of a brother coming to faith because of militant atheism). Irony upon irony; they are belly-gripping in their dead seriousness.

So, David dragged me away from the 60 Minutes interview, not wanting to be late to the chamber music concert, saying I could catch the audio broadcast on WBBM radio in the car (we were at least ten minutes early). “Who is Christopher Hitchens?” my husband inquired. I explained. And we listened, just in time for me to hear Hitchens tell his interviewer that one of the things that has touched him deeply are all the messages and e-mails telling him that people are praying for him. 

Obviously, I am not the only one a loving gentle God is nudging to pray. 

Oh how hard it is, atheists and believers alike, to view the world from where the other guy stands.