Praying like Monks, Living like Fools
Book Review (Tyler Staton)
In which I get cranky about Greek grammar…
I picked this book up thinking, "Yes, I could probably do with another book to encourage me and teach me to think about prayer, written at a popular level", and I have mixed feelings about this one. Overall, I feel like this book fits into a publishing niche and enough tropes that I could simply predict a lot of its contents and overall shape. So, if this review is a bit cheeky, that's why...
The book covers 10 chapters, with topics of 'pray as you can', 'prayer posture', adoration, confession, intercession, petition, participation, prayer for the lost, silence and persistence, and unceasing prayer. I'm going to pick out a few slices here and there to discuss.
Chapter 1: Pray as you can
I think it might be a mistake to start your prayer book by talking about how you, as a kid, did prayer walks around your school twice a week, and revival broke out in your 8th grade. Not because it's not an encouraging, awe-inspiring story, but because it almost immediately puts this giant rift between you and the reader where the reader thinks, "well, if only this happened in my life" and either is crushed by guilt or expectation, or is so expectant that "if I pray right, things like this will happen".
I don't think Staton intends either of those, and I do think Staton actually argues against either of those responses to the book and ways of thinking about prayer, right here even in this chapter. But this is the power, and danger, of Christian books dripping with stories. And Americans love to write Christian books full of illustrative anecdotes. This one is no different.
Ironically, I actually like the main thrust of this chapter. Staton works through reasons why we don't pray, and then some key reasons why we should pray, and the whole chapter argues towards praying about anything and everything. Just get doing it. Like breathing. And this dynamic - things I don't like but an overall message I'm on board with, probably sums up my feelings about the book as a whole.
One of the curses of being a professional Ancient Greek nerd is that I have to suffer a lifetime of listening to people make incorrect claims about Greek grammar, and then spin out unjustified theological claims from the same. χαλεπός ὁ βίος as they say. I almost groan in anticipation when any popular author makes a claim about Greek, foreseeing the pain I am about to feel in my inner grammarian.
So, all of chapter 7 brought me great pain. It paints this picture of two poles of 'active' and 'passive' prayer and then confidently asserts that Jesus prayed 'in the middle voice', which apparently means "I am an active participant, but the action did not begin with me. I am joining the action of another". Reader, this is untrue nonsense. Even if Eugene Peterson came up with it. Then we read more nonsense like "In Eden, the middle voice was the only form of communication."1 What?
I get what Staton is perhaps trying to do: play out for us the complex interaction between divine and human wills in prayer and the communion between God and his people, across the pages of history. It's an atittude to prayer that sees us as not totally submissive or passive, but caught up in what God is doing. It's just that there's no way to argue to this position based on language.
Lord, how many times must I forgive the misuse of biblical languages? Not seven times, but seven times seventy.
Apparently the Lord knew I needed this lesson, because there's a second, slightly less egregious instance in chapter 9, "silence and persistence". Again, I actually quite liked this chapter. Chapter 8 was a huge encouragement to pray for those yet to know Christ, and Staton stopped short of promising the absolutely outrageous (i.e. you almost felt like, after reading the classic example of D.L. Moody, that if you just pray regularly for your unbelieving friends, they will all become Christians). Chapter 9 opens with a brutal and heart-wrenching story of the pain of unanswered prayer and life's unmitigated sufferings. I think this is one of the most difficult and 'to-be-wrestled-with' parts of prayer, and Staton didn't shy away from it, but engaged it whole-heartedly.
Which is why I cringe when reading about, "ask, seek, knock" the following nonsense: "a Greek verb tense we don’t have a grammatical equivalent for in English. It implies not a single action but an ongoing action, one that takes place in the present and into the future."
This, sadly, is overstating the case. We do have a grammatical equivalent for the Greek present-imperfective, we have several. It is incorrect to say that the Greek present implies "not a single but an ongoing action", because that is just one of several things it can do. And so you just can't build a theology of prayer on this kind of assertion, because your foundation is shaky.
But you don't even need to do this kind of bad Greek exegesis to get where you are going. The lesson of persistence is right there in the teaching of Jesus. This chapter did end up where it needed to - not with the promise that if you pray long enough eventually God gives in, but the far more profound that if you keep asking you will develop the kind of faith that sustains you through a lifetime of tears to the restoration of all things. We just didn't need to abuse the Greek language to get there.
I know, I know - I'm hammering this book a bit, and that's not usually the kind of review I like to publish. If I don't like a book, I prefer not to talk about it. But see, I actually do like this book. And I like it's last chapter as a fitting capstone. Here we finally get to the content that justifies the title. Prayer is about love, Staton writes, and we need 'the heart of a lover and the discipline of a monk'. Now, Staton's picture of monks is pretty idealised and stereotyped, but go with it. Spontaneity and routine; emotion and discipline; like a "wild, unruly monk". That's the paradox Staton thinks we need to sustain a lifetime of unceasing prayer. And I think that's right. Both/And.
Should you read this book? Honestly, I'm undecided. I think there are better books on prayer. I also think Christians today in the western church are wildly prayer-less. Almost anything that gets us praying is good. It's one of our biggest faults. We don't even think of it as a sin, but we probably should. We just think of it as something we're not good at, and we don't feel the existential need of it. But there is probably no more important thing that Christians should be doing than praying. It's our chief duty and ought to be a daily joy. So let's give Staton the final word today:
What if at the center of your every day, you placed communion with the God who personifies love? What if the waking thoughts of your day were spent dreaming with God— dreams as big as “kingdom come” and as ordinary as “daily bread”?
Amen.
Staton cites Eugene Peterson’s The Contemplative Pastor, and I went and read what Peterson says. And, yep, Peterson is to blame for this. Peterson is also to blame for the Eden stuff:
“Now comes a most fascinating sentence in my grammar: “Nothing is more certain than that the parent language of our family possessed no passive, but only active and middle, the latter originally equal with the former in prominence, though unrepresented now in any language, save by forms which have lost all distinction of meaning.” No passive! Think of it: back at the origins of our language, there was no way to express an action in which I was not somehow, in some way, involved as a participant.” E. Peterson The Contemplative Pastor
There’s a grain of truth in this, but it’s a long grammar lecture that my students typically endure, and not really relevant here. The grain of truth is virtually obscured by the lofty, precipitous edifice of false corollaries and non-sequiturs.
Thanks for the review