Book Review: Cries from the Heart

Title: Cries from the Heart 

Author: Johann Christoph Arnold

Date: 1999

Publisher: Plough

ISBN:  978-0-87486-227-0

Length: 219 e-pages

Quote: "Prayer gives us the opportunity to discern God’s will by coming into direct contact with him. It enables us to ask God for whatever we need, including judgment, mercy, and the grace to change our lives."

No doubt every pastor could write a book of the prayer stories people share with pastors. This is Johann Christoph Arnold's collection. People don't always get the results they want when they pray, but they feel that they get some benefit from praying. 

This is an evangelical book, given free for the asking to people who are interested in the faith that unites members of Bruderhof communes. The original Bruderhof consisted of people who pooled their living expenses in the economic mess of Germany between the wars. For a long time they could be described, as they were by Andrei Codrescu in Road Scholar, as a small group of German immigrants who survived by making and selling furniture. The group has expanded into several countries, and the different communes do other things to provide members with steady work for a decent living. Their Christian beliefs are in the general category of German Anabaptist; people must make individual commitments, even after being brought up by members, to become church members; the group oppose all war and require everyone to pardon everything even in the absence of real confession, repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation; some communes' work involves caring for those who can't work, but people who are able to work are expected to do their jobs faithfully. 

This evangelical outreach, however, is not church-specific. One of the questions Christians debate is what happens to good people who never became Christians while living, in the Final Judgment. Some picture separate judgments and heavens for people of different beliefs. Catholics have traditionally placed all non-Catholics except a few pre-Christian saints from the Bible in the Inferno. Some Protestants have suggested that the unsaved are not resurrected. Unitarian Universalists, the church associated with Berea College, have pictured different ways everyone might go to Heaven, including the vision C.S. Lewis (who was not a Universalist) shared in The Great Divorce, where the unsaved muddle on in their unhappiness unless and until they forsake their sinful ways and can be admitted to Paradise. Others imagine even Christian-friendly people from other traditions being shut out of the pearly gates of Heaven: "'Almost' cannot avail! 'Almost' is but to fail! Sad, sad that bitter wail, 'Almost,' but lost!" 

"Even for our friends, even for Gandhi," my mother said, "the Bible says that Jesus is the Way of salvation. Those who go to Heaven will have to have confessed faith in Him."

"But the Bible also says that everyone will confess, on that day," I said, "and Jesus told us to expect surprises. Some will be saying, 'But, Lord, when did I...?' and will be told that what they did for other people, they did for Jesus without realizing it. Some will be saying, 'But, Lord, I did so much for You,' and will be told, 'I never knew you.'" 

I expect to meet in Heaven some people who never considered becoming Christians because they were so thoroughly dedicating to serving God, as they understood God, in some other tradition. I expect they will be about as surprised to find that Jesus is the Lord of Heaven as Christians will be to find out how mistaken we were about Him, and everyone will have a good laugh at the silly things we imagined when we had to do our thinking with mortal brains. I have thought a good deal about Christianity in my lifetime. What I've thought I have generally not tried to publish because, at best, it's only the thoughts of a mortal brain that is not capable of really understanding what it is thinking about.

We don't know that four-dimensional space exists or that spiritual things take place in it, but for my generation there was some benefit in thinking of the spiritual dimension of life as like a fourth dimension of space in one way. We can imagine that there might be some way we might be able to move that was not up or down, not forward or backward, not right or left, nor yet some sort of compromise among those, but along a different plane altogether. We can get that far, and then we stop; we cannot imagine what that other plane might look or feel like. So it is with spiritual things. We have to take it on faith that they exist; we are not able to understand how. 

The Bruderhof imagine, as do I, that some people's understanding of God may be such that God calls them to serve as something else rather than as Christians. There may be exceptions. There may be religious cults so vile, like the old Semitic cults that practiced child sacrifice, that nobody can be saved within them. But most of the other religions, including the "other" versions of Christianity, are not vile, so when people identify with those religions God wants them to be good whatever-else-they-are. As good whatever-else-they-are people even be able to accept the grace of God through the sacrifice of Jesus in some unorthodox way. Saladin reportedly did; Gandhi didn't, quite, but he came close; thousands of people are Messianic Jews. So let them work out what "Jesus as spiritual Messiah" or "the Prophet Issa" or some other phrase from their tradition means to them, and let God take matters from there. 

Accordingly, though Arnold's closest circle of friends belong to a Protestant group that practice a fairly strict discipline, his book shares prayer stories from Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and perhaps followers of other traditions too. 

 Along with being a Christian book about the Christian life that does not urge readers to reject other faith traditions and become Christians, Cries from the Heart has another pleasant surprise in store for readers. It is not a depressing study of all the forms of unhappiness. It recognizes that the emotional "heart" cries for joy beyond happiness as well as for relief from misery. People can pray for understanding, for virtue, for marriage and family love, too. This book does, of course, contain long sad chapters about prayers for healing. It even contains some nauseous natter about how people have tried to believe that God wanted or needed that someone be disabled. 

Hello? The Power that created the universe...needs for Jane Doe to be unable to walk? What heresy and blasphemy is this? 

Yes, Jesus did say that one man was born blind so that he could be healed. Right. You. You can see us now, can't you? And then Paul, who was not born blind, tradition tells us, but whose eyes gradually grew weaker and weaker, prayed three times for healing from his "thorn in the flesh," but wasn't healed, and finally received a message that Christ's "strength is made perfect in weakness." God can bring some special benefit out of the regrettable situations that exist in this world. God does not need the regrettable situations, though. God could bring about benefits without them. Conditions in this material world have material causes. Occasionally God may alter the effects of those material causes. Mostly God doesn't; especially when things have material remedies God expects us to provide for ourselves. God did not need any damage to anyone's vision, but Paul, who was among the strongest, boldest, and proudest heirs of a tradition that had barred people with disabilities from their priesthood, just might have needed to rely first on secretaries and eventually on guides. 

But while some of us need a little "weakness" as a check on our natural vanity, most of us have our "weaknesses" merely because material conditions caused them. In the absence of the message that Paul needed to lose his eyesight, we could only say that people in the Middle East tended to lose their eyesight with age because of the bright sun, dry wind, and blowing sand to which they were exposed. It was nobody's fault. It was what it was. 

Anyway, Cries from the Heart does discuss babies whose hearts never started to beat in a healthy rhythm and elders who weren't fit to do anything but pray for the world, but it also discusses prayers for stronger faith, for closer connections with loved ones and with God, for unity in the church, for a healthy marriage, for all sorts of things that recognize the spiritual needs of people who basically enjoy good lives. Overall this is a memorably cheerful collection of prayer stories.

This book is recommended to anyone who is interested in a wide-ranging, honest study of why people pray and what happens when they do.