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"Prayer will never rust for want of use," Walter Wangerin, Jr., reminds us. As long as there are terrors in the world and physical needs and spiritual hunger and moments of thanksgiving, people will pray.
But many people pray poorly, and then they eventually despair of prayer and simply give up on it. In Whole Prayer: Speaking and Listening to God, Wangerin calls readers to deepen their relationship with God by setting aside simplistic views of prayer in order to understand it in a more complete and profound way.
Wangerin's book is a careful examination of what he identifies as the four parts of prayer, two of which are ours and two of which are God's. In the first part, we speak, and in the second, God listens. The circle of communication cannot be completed, however, without the third and fourth parts, which many people leave out: God speaks, and we listen.
Such a description of prayer may sound deceptively simple, but the author delves into each of these four parts of prayer in challenging ways. In showing the ways in which "we speak," for instance, Wangerin demonstrates how we can use the prayers of others, including the Psalms, to teach us how to pray. He takes the reader through an analysis of two psalms to illustrate how we not only can read and understand these magnificent prayers, but how we can make them our own messages to God.
Wangerin's approach toward prayer is a combination of exposition and illustration. He provides information on various types of prayers, such as the "Collect," worship prayers, and occasional prayers. He also frequently takes an appealing personal approach to this subject, describing how prayer has worked in his own life.
One intriguing aspect of the book is Wangerin's discussion of aspects of our spiritual lives that we may not have realized were connected to prayer. For example, he discusses "giving alms" as one component of the fourth part of prayer, which is listening as God speaks. What does giving to the needy have to do with listening to God? It prepares us to hear God, since those who give "will see in the needy the Lord himself--answering prayers in general and in specific and always in the very nearness of his presence." For Wangerin, prayer fits into the whole of our spiritual lives and is not a separate act we do apart from everything else.
The author of Whole Prayer: Speaking and Listening to God, holds the Jochum Chair at Valparaiso University, where he is writer-in-residence. His latest work will be a challenge and a blessing to any reader who seeks to draw closer to the Lord through prayer.
Joseph Bentz, a professor at Azusa Pacific University in California, is the author of the 1995 novel Song of Fire.
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