My favorite biography is “George Whitefield,” by Arnold Dallimore. It fills two large volumes but does a great job not only with Whitefield himself, but also with his friends and others from the Great Awakening. One friend decided to read it on my recommendation, but then went on to say he was going to speed read it, because “only what I remember is of value to me.” (And, I suspect, he was especially interested in finding material to use in his sermons).
But reading is not just filling our minds with information. If the only benefit of reading came from what I could remember, most of my reading over the years would be pointless. The truth is that we are being formed by the things we engage with, whether for good or ill. As I encounter the ideas of another person in a book, my mind is being formed in a particular direction.
This doesn’t mean that I am a passive recipient of whatever the book has to offer. As I read, I can, and should, be involved in the process, engaging my mind, thinking critically about what I am reading. And as I interact in this way with the author, my mind is also being formed even more than I am aware of at the time. In reading, we are not just out to get information (especially information we might be able to use in some way); we are learning to think and are engaging with the mind of the person we’re reading (and, in the case of a biography like that on George Whitefield, with that of the person we’re reading about).
I’ve noticed a similar phenomenon in worship, both private and corporate. For many years I assumed that spiritual exercises were only of value when I was fully engaged, and especially when my emotions were involved. Like many evangelicals, I saw liturgical worship as something inimical to true worship “in spirit and in truth.” Liturgy is something one just rattles off, and worship should be “from the heart.” I’ve often spoken of visiting a sick man in the hospital who had been plagued with one thing after another. He said to me, “I don’t even know what to pray anymore.” So I suggested using the Psalms as prayers to give voice to things he couldn’t say clearly, but his response was contemptuous: “I thought we were supposed to pray from the heart.”
Where, though, did we get the idea that praying from the heart means, of necessity, praying off the top of one’s head? Does prayer have to be extemporaneous to be genuine? What, then, about singing choruses, a practice many evangelicals find very meaningful? These are not words that occur in the moment but ones that have been prepared ahead of time. So why cannot this also be the case in our prayer and worship? I began finding immense help, about 25 years ago, in using written prayers to guide and supplement my prayer life.
But in prayer and worship, also, like in reading, we’re not only concerned with the immediate effect or experience. When we engage in worship we are being formed, for better or worse. And if in our prayers and worship we are just saying over and over again what comes into our minds (because, at least for very many of us, praying off the top of our heads leads to praying in a circle) we can easily end up reinforcing our own self-centeredness. Liturgy can help us break out of this cycle, and it also is forming us with the words of Scripture and the historic Church.
A good question to ask ourselves, about both our reading and spiritual exercises is, “what might be the longer-term effects of this practice?” “How am I being formed as I engage with this material?” The direction I am being moved in is far more important than how I feel about what I am doing at the moment or what details I can remember in the future.
