Sunday's Book Review: Prayer

Title: Prayer Author: George Arthur Buttrick Date: 1942, 1970 Publisher: Whitmore & Stone (1942), Abingdon ISBN: 0-687-33361 (sic) Length: 345 pages text, 22 pages endnotes, 14-page index Quote: “Those who pray are the real light-bearers in any age Perhaps by these pages some may be added to their bright company.” This book is a classic. It doesn't really need a review, but it deserves a few remarks... British-born George Buttrick, a Presbyterian minister, finished his distinguished career at Harvard. He was editor-in-chief of The Interpreter’s Bible (which is, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Woman’s Bible, neither a translation nor a revision but a commentary on the Bible). He wrote several books that were successful in their time; the one that’s been reprinted, and cited by contemporary writers such as Richard J. Foster, is titled simply Prayer. Perhaps the best way to describe Buttrick’s writing style is to remind readers that he was a Late Victorian, contemporary to George Bernard Shaw, G.K. Chesterton, Rudyard Kipling, C.S. Lewis, and H.G. Wells. Although the Scopes Trial took place while Buttrick was a relatively young pastor, he doesn’t debate about evolution, or challenge the psychoanalytical theories that, in their crude and extreme form, reduced all religious faith to projections from the subconscious mind. For him Freud and Jung, and even Hitler and Stalin, were living men—men to be prayed for. Authors that are seldom read or cited by the present generation, Ménégoz and Masefield, Santayana and Sidney Lanier, were the trendy and even bestselling authors he quoted. So, he came of age in a period when religious writers were expected to risk a little high-flown rhetoric. What topic could be “worthier” of the highest-flying rhetoric than prayer? Buttrick even says that public prayer “should not be ancient or modern, but...the language of a devotional poem,” and in Prayer his language is sometimes really poetic and sometimes just delightfully archaic. “Prayer, far from being superfluous, is the proper air of thought and labor. For man’s toil without prayer is finally meaningless, unrenewed, undedicate—a treadmill drudgery or a suicidal snare.” Buttrick quotes poems, and flights of poetic language, from other writers, and offers as many memorable, quotable, poetic lines of his own for others to quote from him. The twentieth-century misbelief that a Real Man should be ill at ease with abstractions, emotions, or words of more than two syllables, had no hold on him. He was not at all afraid that someone might think he was venting his own emotions rather than giving readers data or showing them pictures. Venting and directing emotions is, after all, one of the purposes of praying—and, for Buttrick, it seems also to have been one of the purposes of writing about prayer. Prayer is very much a product of its time. As such, it sheds light on its time that may surprise the contemporary reader. Were Americans really solidly united in supporting “The Allies” in 1942? Americans were pretty solidly united in supporting U.S. troops and giving no visible aid and comfort to the enemy...but let Buttrick testify: “Letters pour in upon Amer­ican Christian agencies to urge special days of united prayer for peace,"”he says on page 136 of the 1970 paperback edition. “Several suggest prayers for Brit­ish victory, though a few hint that God this time may be on Germany’s side.” And he asks “whether the hasty assumptions in the proposed prayers can ever be upheld...It is assumed, first, that certain nations are almost black in character and others almost white, and that we have power to read the inmost character of nations.” Historians now agree that things going on in Germany, and in Russia, at this time were morally intolerable. In 1942 it was possible for American Christians to suspect that what information had leaked out to us, about the war crimes of either country or about our own, was partisan propaganda that real pacifists were best advised to ignore. Note also that a victory for “The Allies” was still seen as “British victory,” rather than “our victory.” Even in 1942, and even though he was born British, Buttrick couldn’t bring himself to agree “that God’s purposes are wrought through the mass killings of war.” Prayer is not a “Progressive” political tract, but it reflects the “Progressive” sense of morality, the perception “that we must build a better world.” It also reflects the psychological fashions of the early Advertising Age, the fear of “the dangers of introversion.” In the early twentieth century many people accepted some version of an idea of the primacy of the collective. “[P]sychology now assures us that our consciousness was not first individual and then by deduction social. It seems likelier that we were first social—that we became aware of ourselves only by...the friction and cooperation of other wills,” as Buttrick puts it on page 109. By the 1970s even avowed collectivist philosophies would come to admit that “we are born screaming ‘Ow’ and ‘I’,” but many of Buttrick’s generation were prepared to believe even in telepathy as a possible means by which infant humans could be “first social.” Buttrick was one of those Christians who accept the trendy ideas of the period, without question, in their eagerness to formulate Christian responses to the trendy ideas. His book is dated by his desire to be trendy. Few would now argue that we are “first social”; what previous generations called “telepathy” most of us now chalk up to subtle communication via “body language” and pheromones, and we now recognize a clear difference between true introversion, an hereditary trait with a physical basis, and the withdrawal and alienation produced by psychotic conditions. Meanwhile, he seems to be addressing both a literal-minded and barely literate audience who imagined that prayer ought to enable them to do anything, and another literal-minded and barely literate audience who had concluded prematurely that if God didn’t answer their prayers with an audible voice God didn’t exist and prayer was useless. Buttrick could not have anticipated that neurologists would locate a “spiritual center” in the brain, that by now atheists would be arguing that religion was a disturbance of the spiritual neurons and Christians would be arguing that animals who keep the use of their eyes are animals that sometimes see light. And introverts in search of a respectful, appreciative spiritual teacher won’t find one here; Buttrick writes as if he came closer, in his lifetime, to being a self-hating introvert than to being a self-actualizing one. All this can, of course, be understood in its historical context. What Buttrick has to offer is encouragement to Christians praying privately (with emphasis on the psychological benefits of regular prayer to those who pray), and clear instructions for Christians, such as ministers, who are called to pray aloud for a group. Preferring that prayer leaders and ministers recite or even read other people’s prayers rather than offer the “irreverence” of an awkward ad-lib, he then offers an outline for group prayers in church. Anyone who has ever been embarrassed into awkwardness, or avoided a religious meeting from fear that some clumsy extrovert will demand that everyone pray aloud, will be helped by Buttrick’s advice that public prayers be planned, outlined, and “wrought” into a form that will be uplifting, rather than boring or distracting, to the audience. He even supplies a few examples—not too long to memorize. And how do we know whether the “working” of a prayer is merely a performance, or an act of real worship? By the experience of regular private prayer, of course. I started to type the list of seven prayers Buttrick recommends for a church service and the page on which the short list of five appears, but the younger self who used to be dismayed by the demand that everyone pray aloud for the group said, “No! Young Christians need to read the whole book.” In order to understand exactly what Buttrick means by the list of five you need to have absorbed the chapters that explain these forms of prayer, and practiced each form of prayer in private. Prayer is an interesting book, well written, and worth the attention of any Christian. I think it will be most useful to Christians who need some preparation for public prayer. One can pray privately without reading any book on prayer, but in order to pray publicly many of us need guidance.