This is the first in an ongoing series on prayer that I will probably end up compiling into a book of some kind. It's based on the Russian Orthodox spiritual classic "The Way Of A Pilgrim" about a man who roams the Russian country side trying to figure out how to "pray without ceasing." A helpful spiritual guide makes him aware of a "secret chain of prayer" - a string of verses throughout the New Testament that give us a picture of what prayer is all about. Here is the first installment:



Matthew 6:5-8
"And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”

Prayer is not a performance. God doesn’t care how eloquent you are. He doesn’t even care how many words you use. Jesus is laying out the basics of what a life of prayer is and isn’t. Sometimes, in the back of our minds, even though we wouldn’t articulate it in this way, we believe some very hideous things about what God is like. First of all, we believe that talking to God is like placating a bureaucratic oaf with just the right combination of checked boxes and rightly-placed signatures. We imagine that there is a procedure for getting a prayer answered or for becoming a man or woman “of prayer.” But what Jesus says here is very hard to misunderstand. He basically says, no, there’s no procedure. There is only a Father who is already well aware of what you need. Don’t assume that God wants to hear you mouth a bunch of “right beliefs” or “faith-activating statements” to get his generosity all lubed up and ready to bless. He is generous already and if we don’t get exactly what we pray for, it’s because we haven’t asked for what he knows we need. It’s because whatever he has planned, it is so much better than what we are asking for. And when we continue to come to him, even though he doesn’t always answer in the way we have specifically asked him to, that is faith.

There’s an unfortunate myth going around that faith is a substance like electricity or magnetic energy and the more you have of it, the more stuff you can get God to do for you. But faith is not a “thing” in itself, faith is a relational reality, completely dependent on the person you put your faith in. Turning faith into a substance that can be accumulated like rainwater in buckets is putting your faith in faith. It’s a bit like falling in love with falling in love; nothing relational happens. That’s why going into your room and closing the door has it’s own reward; although it may not be the reward we are going into it looking for. The reward is relationship. Yet, even just going into a room by ourselves and closing the door behind us doesn’t preclude the possibility of performing our prayers. The audience might just be you, and you might catch yourself marveling over what a wonderful, self-sacrificial “prayer warrior” you are. Of course, this usually happens in group settings, where a prayer meeting is hijacked by someone with a theological ax to grind and it quickly turns into a captive audience for longwinded, overbearing sermonizing thinly veiled as a prayer. There really is no reward in that situation, because most everyone can tell what is happening while it is happening. The pristine, eloquent prayer that serves only to send a message that the person praying knows how to pray, that can impress other humans and impressing humans is all it will get you. God is yawning the entire time, even while other humans are on the edge of their seats.

So the natural reaction is that any eloquent prayer is sinful, therefore we should make all of our prayers as ineloquent as possible. We should grunt our prayers like uncouth Neanderthals. We should mispronounce words on purpose, just to sound inarticulate. Surely that’s the way to go! But again, we are simply looking for the “right way to pray.” It becomes a performance yet again; a mechanical process designed for maximum efficiency. We are looking for the kind of prayer that “works.” And again, if it ever does work, or make people think more of us, we’ve got our reward.

Prayer works, but it does more than just work. It brings us into conversation with the almighty creator of the cosmos. And conversation, as awkward as it can be initially, can get very interesting. Eventually, as you converse with someone else you find fascinating, you begin to forget yourself. You are asking questions not to sound smart, but because you are genuinely curious. You open yourself, not because you want or need validation, but because you want to share more of who you are; you want to be known. Yes, along the way, every friendship has benefits - favors can be asked, time can be set aside, kindnesses can be given and received. But they are never the main thing (not the reward) but the byproduct of a deepening friendship. Relationship is the ultimate reward of any conversation. Conversations that see anything other than relationship to be the ultimate reward are manipulative, not real interaction.

What is the place for written prayers in the divine conversation? Aren’t written prayers all meant to make us sound more eloquent than we are? If that is the case, we’d better stop reading the Psalms. Or saying the Lord’s Prayer. But these are “prayer-templates” graciously given to help us enter into the Living Conversation. Yes, if they are used to try to manipulate God better, then don’t use them. But if they express something that you can latch your Amen onto, and help you put into words something that was previously very difficult for you to express, then by all means use them. God might employ them to reveal something to you about himself and then you find that the ball is rolling and you two are interacting. Or short sentence “prayer darts” that you can shoot off can be very helpful during the day during work or other situations in which it is difficult to say more. Or even repeating a very profound sentence of scripture can be a wonderful way to come into The Presence. Or even just a few words and a lot of silence. Don’t look for the right, human-approved way to get God to do what you want him to. Just start the conversation and remember there are two sides to it.

"The Voice - a scripture project to re-discover the story of the Bible."

I received my copy from Amazon last week and I am enjoying it immensely. I would recommend this translation (and it IS a translation - not a paraphrase like the Message) for the person who wants to read the New Testament in bigger chunks than usual. This isn't a translation for verse-cherrypicking. It's deliberately rendered in such a way as to make cherrypicking obsolete (something I'm very happy about). It is rendered in way that the richness of the poetic text and the storytelling becomes the main focus. The language isn't English tech-speak like so many translations that approach the text as a spiritual technical manual. The result is that you naturally read MORE of the text and become more familiar with the big picture of the narrative rather than the little disputable details. This translation majors on what's actually major: grasping the "meta-narrative" of the New Testament. Overly technical translations make certain passages unnecessarily cryptic and breed unhealthy obsessions over what a certain cluster of words mean within OUR cultural understanding, completely bypassing the original cultural matrix that the words were originally penned within. The unintended result is a misreading and misapplication of the text, which God will still use in our lives, gracious as He is, but so much of the original treasure is lost in translation. We are impoverished in the process (and reading the New Testament becomes a chore and a bore).

This is why I have embraced The Message as much as I have. Yes, it's a paraphrase, but it is a paraphrase that excavates the original Story wonderfully - preserving the poetry and the richness of the original language. Yes, it may gloss over some of our favorite pet-doctrines and not give the same attention to our favorite passages that we would, but that is what paraphrases do, and The Message doesn't pretend to be anything more than a paraphrase. And if you think there is anything wrong with paraphrases, stop listening to sermons and teachings, because they also explain the text and paraphrase it for contemporary ears. And really, translation in itself DOES involve a certain amount of paraphrasing. You have to consciously decide whether you are going to use antiquated english or modern english, or even post-modern english in which certain phrases would have that extra "zip" to us while certain older english equivalents would be like a nice comforting glass of warm milk for the soul. Both are valuable, but a translation has to deliberately choose one over another.

In a sense, we have an OVER-abundance of english translations while there are probably some less-euro-centric languages that have zero. And yes, that is not a good thing. But the majority of english translations all seem to fall into the old forced dichotomy - word for word equivalency vs. idea to idea equivalency. Storytelling and poetic sensibility are never a concern. Which is a shame because good storytelling is what keeps you reading, and the gospel-authors were amazing storytellers. Paul was a gripping communicator, even if his translators were not. Sometimes you need to align people with simular gifts to the original authors rather than just technical-minded analysts. The Voice does this. See for yourself. Go here and sample some of the freebies. I can't recommend this translation enough. Here it is on sale at Amazon. Here is a free pdf of the gospel of John.

Check out this album - tell five friends about it and get it free or pay what you want (minimum $1).

Alright, make sure you aren't drinking milk while you watch...

Baby Preacher...

Yeah, yeah...sorry I haven't posted much this week... anyway here's a new online zine I will be following quite a bit; they really cover my preferred brand of music. The Old Guard.. or the "dinosaurs" of Christian Rock (Lost Dogs, 77s, Bill Mallonee, The Choir, Daniel Amos, Mike Knott, etc) who have been around the block a few times and care more about artistry than image. So here's the link... I'm going to go to lunch and flip through my printed pdf right now!

Alright, Wednesdays are BUSY for me, so on this day of the week I'll just share youtube videos that have greatly impacted my life. To kick it off, I am presenting two very recent performances by my all-time favorite band, The Lost Dogs. They have just completed a Route 66 tour; I got to catch up with them at the Wigwam Motel in Holbrook, AZ. That was a surreal, magical night, which I'm sure I will write about in more detail at a later date. Both of these performances were captured on September's Route 66 tour. So enjoy...

"If You Want To" LIVE at The Gypsy Cafe in Tulsa, OK



"Glory Road" LIVE at the Santa Monica Pier



Also...go here for 15 free Lost Dogs mp3s

Taken from the classic sermon “The Knowing Of The Son” by George MacDonald:

If the Lord were to appear this day as once in Palestine, He would not come in the halo of the painters. Neither would He probably come as carpenter, or mason, or gardener. He would come in such form and condition as might bear to the present [culture] a relation like that which the form and condition He then came in bore to the motley Judea, Samaria, and Galilee. If He came thus, in form altogether unlooked for, who would they be that recognized and received Him? The idea involves no absurdity. He is not far from us at any moment — if the old story be indeed more than the best and strongest of the fables that possess the world. He might at any moment appear. Who, I ask, would be the first to receive him? Now, as then, it would of course be the childlike in heart, the truest, the least selfish. They would not be the highest in the estimation of any church, for the childlike are not yet the many. It might not even be those that knew most about the former visit of the Master, that had pondered every word of the Greek Testament. It would certainly, if any, be those who were likest the Master – those, namely, that did the will of their Father and His Father, that built their house on the rock by hearing and doing His sayings. But are there any enough like Him to know Him at once by the sound of His voice, by the look of His face? There are multitudes who would at once be taken by a false Christ fashioned after their fancy, and would at once reject the Lord as a poor impostor. One thing is certain: they who first recognized him would be those that most loved righteousness and hated iniquity.


Basically, MacDonald is saying that it isn’t necessarily those who seem to “know” the most “about” Jesus who really know and recognize Him. This passage resonates with me because knowing Jesus in a childlike way is just as rare today as it was when MacDonald penned this sermon in the highlands of Scotland sometime in the 19th century. Childlike faith in Jesus is just as rare today as it was when Jesus’ own disciples spent the majority of their time arguing amongst themselves which one was the most important. When Jesus brought a toddler before them as a role model, it made just as little sense to them as it does to us. The only difference is, we’ve had 2,000 years of church history to make Jesus’ teaching about childlike faith into a soppy form of religious sentimentalism - “Aw, how precious!” That is definitely not how Jesus meant it.

Children are exasperating. They wear you out. They get into EVERYTHING. They go EVERYWHERE. They appreciate things for their own sake. They ask questions and don’t take “just BECAUSE!” for an answer. They live each moment without any kind of Platonic ideal to weigh the lived moment against. The slightest thing can make them either squeal with delight or wail with jilted anguish. They say the darndest things at the worst possible moments. They repeat things without knowing what they mean, but they will FIND OUT what the thing they are saying means, even if it takes all night. They will question you until you find yourself scrambling for your own theory of everything, and then they will tear it apart with their incessant WHYs. They will make you say “I don’t know” eventually. In short, children see the magic and mystery in everything and they LOVE to repeat the experience over and over and over and over until Daddy is so dizzy and out of breath that he has to take some personal time on the couch with an ice-pack. They want to go everywhere and do everything. And yet what they are doing RIGHT NOW is the most important thing.

When do we lose it? When does that insatiable desire to explore and enjoy things start it’s gradual fading? When do we start becoming conscious of how we look to others, to the extant that it begins to eat away at who we really are? When do we start taking on appearances and wearing masks? When do everyday things start getting “normal”? When do we lose our sense of wonder? When does theology cease to be a childlike journey into the holy mystery of the heart of God, replaced with a series of statements that are really just academic, fancy ways of saying “just… BECAUSE”? When do we cross the line where God becomes boring to us? When do we actually de-claw Christ with our own fantasies of a tame Messiah? These are honest questions of mine and the child in me won’t cease from asking them. Why, why, WHY?

Ten years ago or so, when I found myself interacting with the Risen Christ in a meaningful, life-changing way, I came to the realization that He was not unfamiliar to me. That I had known His presence before without knowing Who it was at the time. He was an old, wild childhood friend. There are glimmers of this presence throughout my childhood. Sharp stabs of bittersweet joy. Unexpected tears, unexpected laughter. Moments of emotional deepening. And through it all, an unmistakable voice, speaking through events; speaking through daydreams, through longings, through the sheerness of silence. YOU ARE LOVED, YOU ARE KNOWN. And then growing up - losing the memory of that voice - fumbling the threads of any sense of coherence; then suddenly when the world had turned darker than I thought it could ever get…hearing that familiar voice again: YOU ARE LOVED, YOU ARE KNOWN. I shared the great, deep laughter of Christ under a starlit night. I wept bitter tears with Christ over the time wasted and the people hurt. And then I felt the warmth of His blood in my veins, His wild and adventurous heart pumping in my chest, and I found that Life was just beginning and it would never, ever end again EVER.

So here’s my theological pledge: to be EXASPERATING. To get into everything. To ask the hard questions and refuse to take “just because” as an answer. The appreciate the moment of life I am living NOW and not weigh it against some Platonic ideal in my fickle mind. To squeal with delight (celebrate). To wail with jilted anguish (lament). To grow younger every day. And to know Jesus. Not just “know about” Jesus, although I certainly want to. But to KNOW Jesus experientially. And He said Himself; the best way to do that - the ONLY way to do that, is to become like a little child. Learn to ask questions again out of curiosity. Learn to not try to guess what’s around the next corner. Learn to be surprised by what may be. Learn how big the world is; and how much adventure is to be found in it. Learn to make friends with people you wouldn’t normally, like kids do. Learn to listen to what your life is telling you; because the One Who speaks through it loves to listen to your questions, and in typical rabbi-fashion answers your questions with bigger, better questions. (Job 40-41)

Here is a piece I wrote for my last blog "So Goes The Sojourn" - I just want to tuck it in here at the beginning so that it's "on the record." It is a good introduction to where I'm coming from. Also, here's a picture I took at a rest-stop in MN in November of '07. It was a glimpse of the New Creation for me and I always want to remember it.

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

“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” - T.S. Eliot

“He who breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.” - Gandalf the Grey

There’s an old story that probably began as a folktale, grew up to be a parable and somewhere along the way got modernized so it now includes a “scientist.” I’ll tell it as I heard it. Once there was a scientist who found a bird. The scientist wanted to know what made the bird alive, so he put the bird on the dissecting board. Piece by piece he took the bird apart, and mysteriously, the only thing the scientist was looking for was the one thing that increasingly disappeared the more he looked for it.

Well, scientists take a lot of flack from people of faith. I’m sure people of faith don’t mind scientists when they are creating cures for the common cold or coming up with robots that mow the lawn, but when they dangle their toes off the edge of methodological naturalism into the murky waters of universal implementation, we people of faith can get a little edgy. That is because science as we know it deals heavily in reductionism (ironically, so does a lot of religion these days). And there are a lot of mysterious realities in the real world that cannot be explained away in formulas and theorems. And when we try to “explain away” these mysteries, we only isolate and impoverish ourselves.

The television show “LOST” is a brilliant parable illustrating this truth. The basic premise of this show is that a plane crashes on an island, people survive, and the island is weird. People see things on this island from their past; things and people that can’t possibly be there. Out in the jungle, you can hear invisible people whispering. There is some sort of monster that no one ever sees that is eating people. And there seems to be other people already living on the island, who elusively try to “blend in” with the survivors. This is a postmodern epic - “postmodern” because nothing is explained on the show, and the more you find out about the island, the less you know. Every revelation about the nature of the island uncovers twenty new questions. Yet “getting the answers” is not what the show is about. The way the people on the island are connected is far more fascinating. Through flashbacks, we see that these strangers have all played significant roles in each other’s lives - even though they are unaware of it. So the show presents us with two ways of seeing the island. The spiritual; one character says, “I have looked into the eye of the island and what I saw was beautiful” and the scientific (or the methodological naturalist): seeing the island as having “unusual properties” that can be harnessed. The show doesn’t try to influence you in any way from whatever point of view you choose to see the island from; it simply gives you a big enough experience to keep you asking questions.

So in one TV show, you have a fascinating narrative and multiple realities with which that narrative can be experienced. Kind of like life itself. The more you try to explain it, the less there is of it. But to simply ENTER IN and LIVE it without trying to manipulate or control it; THAT’S where life is found. This is why the “kingdom of God” is such a potent metaphor. In our day, we are caught in the middle of so many competing realties (I will go into more of these in future posts; this post is mainly regarding reductionism) and yet the question is whether or not there is one fascinating narrative that encompasses all of them. See? When I set it up like THAT and then say, “Why, yes! And that grand meta-narrative is the gospel of Jesus Christ” you will think, “How weird that would be if it were true.” But the gospel never claims to NOT be weird. It actually thrives on being so.

The question we never ask is, “What is the gospel?” because we all think we know. We’ve either reduced it to a divine business transaction or have imagined it to be some sort of Gnostic, mystical thing that makes no sense until we “lock into it” with whatever “special knowledge” we’ve got that gives us the “inside scoop.” But the gospel of Jesus Christ is neither transactional nor overtly mystical (and it’s especially not Gnostic.) It is a merciful RESPONSE by God to EVERY (and ANY) ONE of our wayward life-threads. It is “sharp as a double-edged sword” meaning it is “precise” enough to respond meaningfully to any human life in any cultural context. You don’t have to be specifically executed under ancient Roman law to know the “way of the cross.” Even the word “gospel” had a distinct cultural meaning in 1st Century Palestine BEFORE Christians adapted it into their vocabulary. Now, certain people latch onto to certain aspects of the gospel and try to make a whole from that one aspect, which is the definition of idolatry. The point is: Jesus said, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light” on one hand and then said, “Everyday deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me.” So the way of Jesus is both very easy and very hard. To try to reduce it to one or the other is to make it something else entirely.

It is very easy because it has no prerequisites: only desperation. It is very hard, because it doesn’t end with “getting saved” - it BEGINS. Basically, it pulls you roughly from whatever secure “womb” you’ve been curled snugly up in your whole life and throws you out into the big wide world where the winds are violent and the sun is fierce. The gospel is NOT a security blanket; it is a passport to a BIGGER reality. Many Christians have re-arranged it in different ways through the centuries - some have shrunk it and some have preserved its “weirdness” - some have entered through the “door” into greener pastures and others have simply redecorated their womb with crocheted bible-verses. But one of the main messages the gospel communicates is this: we will all get ripped from our nice warm little wombs someday and better sooner than later.

You may be thinking, “Wait a second…? Isn’t the gospel basically that Jesus died for my sins and if I accept him as my personal lord and savior, I will go to heaven when I die?” I understand that it has been predominantly phrased that way over the last couple of centuries, in the interest of “saving” as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time. But something gets lost in translation along the way. That way of phrasing the gospel makes it only a “bank-note” to be cashed in at a later date. Whenever you die, or whenever Jesus comes back. The thing about making the gospel a way of securing a “one-way ticket to heaven” is that RIGHT NOW the life you live becomes all about “waiting to live” rather than “living to live.” Yes, Jesus “wiped our slates clean” on the cross; but he also unmasked the cruelty and gutlessness of the world-powers, he also planted a “life-grenade” in the bowels of death, he also gave us an example of winning by losing, he also…did so many things by dying on the cross, one paragraph (or a thousand theological volumes) will never do it justice. Only a heart fully alive to God can do the gospel any sort of “justice.” The formulas we try to scrunch the gospel into don’t really capture it; but somehow the lives we live can. Not perfectly, but somewhat.

I’ll end by quoting Eugene Peterson, from his tasty book “Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places”:

“Writing about the Christian life is like trying to paint a picture of a bird in flight. The very nature of a subject in which everything is always in motion and the context is constantly changing - rhythm of wings, sun-tinted feathers, drift of clouds (and much more) - precludes precision. Which is why definitions and explanations for the most part miss the very thing we are interested in. Stories and metaphors, poetry and prayer, and leisurely conversation are more congenial to the subject, a conversation that necessarily also includes the Other.”

Oh great, another blog taking up bandwidth. Another monkey in front of a keyboard pecking letters, forming words, articulating experiences, making assumptions, saying what's already been said better by more brilliant minds. My name is Derek, and I am officially (again) a blogger. What that means is that for some unknown reason, I think my thoughts are worth writing down and submitting to other sentient beings for consideration. And what makes me think that? Hubris? Meglomania? Or just plain garden-variety pretentiousness? Yes, probably. I think anyone who blogs has a healthy balance of all three. But I guess I blog in the hope that they can be transcended and some meaningful interaction can transpire anyway.

That can only happen if I am as real as I can be about who I am. Not who I wish I was. Who I am. And who am I? I am someone who has to ask that question a lot.

My exterior identifiers tell me that I am a male of European descent, early thirties, somewhat creative - meaning that I daydream a lot, and sometimes find ways to sketch out the daydreams with words - I have a wife and two daughters. I change a lot of diapers. They wake me up a lot in the middle of the night. Like a lot of people, I struggle to keep up with all the bills. I watch the news and worry about global issues and the economy. I worry about the world my daughters will inherit. I worry about my daughters. The things they will go through that I can't fix or prevent. I am neurotic and pessimistic by default.

But then again, I am a Christian minister, and hopefully not in the worst sense of the term. Which means I don't want to be a Christian (or a minister) who unthinkingly reacts to life without wrestling with the gargantuan leaps of faith I am making. Who looks through eyes of love rather than of fear and suspicion. Who brings Christ with me wherever I go. I pray that this vision of my reality eclipses the pessimistic, neurotic side of me. I have been a Christian for roughly ten years. Before that I was a lot of different things. But today the only thing I care about being is a disciple of The Way that Jesus of Nazareth introduced 2,000 years ago in the backwoods of Palestine. And I realize that being a disciple of a Galilean Rabbi who walked this earth 2,000 years ago is hardly a simple thing. There are all kinds of contextual considerations, there are mystical realities that must be experienced, there is continual doubt that must be faced head-on, and there is joy to be tasted as well as sorrow to be bitterly choked down. In short, there is life to be lived.

So that's a brief doodle of my perspective. I used to have a blog called "Shards Of Eternity" and the best pieces from that blog can be found in the free ebook "Altar of Uncut Stones" in the sidebar. I have changed a lot since I wrote it, but most of it still holds up. But back then I treated the blog as a more literary endeavor. I have since grown to appreciate the art of blogging in itself, as an open door for meaningful interaction and simply marking the road behind me. So the name of this blog is "Ragged Dreams and Tangled Prayers" because it is not going to be a meticulous arrangement of my finest literary moments. It will be a life-drenched scrapbook of who I am, what I'm thinking about and doing. I hope to be more interactive than I was on my last blog, and that includes book reviews, poetry, theological ruminations, exposure to the music I enjoy and maybe even some essays on the things in pop culture that I resonate with. It'll be ragged and tangled, but so is life, and so am I. Feel free to leave comments, but I can't promise that I will have enough leisure time to answer them all. I am slowly but surely working on a few book projects that will be available here when they are ready for release.

So that's the brief intro. Stay tuned for Rich Theological Content (TM) and maybe even some ensuing hilarity.

Grace and peace,
Derek Luptak
Show Low, AZ

deep wind
blown forth
into dark holes
where mysteries hide
and sharp wind
updrafting
carries the spice
of worlds unknown
while soft wind
whispers the secret embrace
around the stone flesh
of biographic echoes
deep wind curling back
as light retracts in
continuous rhythm;
the seasons pulse
and the high wind descends
to fill our empty cycles
with the scent of unexpectedness