BOOK REVIEW – IN CONSTANT PRAYER

BOOK REVIEW – IN CONSTANT PRAYER

As I wrote before, I am exchanging book reviews for free books. This time I am reviewing the book, In Constant Prayer, by Robert Benson.  As before, it turned out to be a demanding exercise to read and review it that was far in excess of the value of the $12.99 cover price. Yet again the effort was well spent.  For it caused me to reconsider a topic I felt I had thoroughly visited before and a writing style I wouldn’t ordinarily be drawn to. To fulfill my obligation and give potential readers a good introduction to the book, I submit the review below:

  

BOOK REVIEW

Author: Robert Benson

Publisher: Thomas Nelson, Nashville, TN

Contributing Author(s): Forward by Phyllis Tickle, General Editor, Ancient Practices Series

ISBN: 978-0-8499-4603-5

PHYSICAL ATTRIBUTES:

Price: $12.99 USD

Reading Time: 3.5-4.5 hours

Format: Paperback

No. of Pages: 175 pages (forward 2, introduction 0, body 139, appendices 10, study guide 9, acknowledgements 0, glossary 170, biography 1, blank pages for notes 7)

Dimensions: 140 x 213 x 14 mm (5 1/2 x 8 3/8 x 9/16 in)

Weight: 185g (6.5 oz).

Cover Design: color cover by Casey Hooper

Illustrations: none

Maps/Inserts: none

Appendices:

            Appendix A: sample office: Morning Prayer

            Appendix B: additional resources

index: none

bibliography: yes

            biography: yes

            glossary: yes, rather good, but not comprehensive

study guide: yes

Other: acknowledgment, recommended reading, notes

                     

Other books by author:  The Echo Within: Finding Your True Calling, Digging In: Tending to Life in Your Own Backyard, Home By Another Way: Notes from the Caribbean, Living Prayer, Daily Prayer, A Good Life: Benedict's Guide to Everyday Joy, Venite: A Book of Daily Prayer, A Good Neighbor: Benedict's Guide to Community, The Body Broken: Answering God's Call to Love One Another, The Game: One Man, Nine Innings, A Love Affair with Baseball, That We May Perfectly Love Thee: Preparing Our Hearts for the Eucharist, The Night of The Child, Between The Dreaming and The Coming True: The Road

Rating 7/10

SUMMARY: This is a book in a series on ancient Christian practices and is focused on praying the offices or fixed-hour prayer.  It is written primarily from a liturgical viewpoint, but also explores a variety of other prayer related practices and viewpoints within protestant Christianity. The book is largely split between presenting a practical approach to praying the offices and recounting the author’s and others’ experience and observations in developing the habit of praying the offices. The material chiefly presumes Biblical and historically Jewish and Christian precedents and principles and draws almost exclusively from mainstream Christian sources. The author is a college educated but non-degreed professional writer with multiple books published on Christian and other topics.

REVIEW

First I want to say that this is, to date, some of the most elegantly simple and exquisitely written prose I have ever read. The several years reportedly spent on preparing the book are evident in its polished style and even topical flow. Robert Benson is a self described poet and writes with a delicate, literally apologetic style that distills about as much essence from a fairly routine vocabulary as I have ever seen. Being an engineer, I had hoped for a technically oriented manual on practical and effective prayer.  What I found was not disappointing but quite a different sort of book. As far as my needs go, the author could have condensed the material I consider useful to about one page. However, the self described poet uses 10 chapters over 150 pages to weave together a variety of things around this central subject.  It appears his method is to relate the subject to the reader by presenting it in the context of his own life and presumably that will provide the necessary connection.

About the core of a lightly historical and topically scriptural treatment of fixed hour prayer is a personal account of his experience with fixed hour prayer and life in general.  Interjected are some vignettes of other people’s approach to prayer and some brief philosophical discourses. I can summarize his essential comments on fixed hour prayer quiet succinctly as follows:

Based on the verse Psalm 119:164, fixed hour prayer (praying approximately every three hours in a 24 hour day) is a continually observed tradition dating back to the era of the Hebrew Prophets.  In the Christian church this takes the form of praying through a breviary (either formal or informal) which is a book of standardized prayers for each day, typically containing the following elements:

1. The collect – a formal prayer that summarizes the day
2. The canticle – a hymn of praise
3. The psalm – typically one of the 30 canonical psalms, cycled through each month
4. The scripture reading – a lesson derived from the bible
5. The response to the word – this may be silence, a hymn, a creed or other response
6. The prayers of the people – thanksgiving, petition or intercession as appropriate
7. The confession of sin
8. The Our Father prayer – typically and appropriately repeated only once per day
9. The blessing

The breviary typically but not necessarily follows an established church calendar with prayers composed to suit the given occasions. Two breviaries the author recommends are The Divine Hours and A Guide to Prayer.

Saying the office is a difficult discipline made particularly problematic by individual weaknesses and modern society’s densely packed and demanding schedules and other constraints. To overcome these challenges, the author offers some very straightforward advice:

Pick a practical time and place to pray, make it a habit, don’t do it alone and just do it. Also, he recommends using a breviary that is written for individual (as opposed to corporate or group) use and he gives several recommended titles. (Peer pressure seems to be one of his most effective devices.)

By way of motivation, the author promotes fixed hour prayer as providing benefit on two sides of the paradox whereby we offer our prayers as selfless service to God because He is Who He is, and yet we benefit because we are transformed through our prayers to become more Christ like and blessed with the incomparable joy of communion with Him.

Mr. Benson makes some very salient observations, one of which is that fixed hour prayer is a long standing tradition still practiced by liturgical Christian (e.g. Episcopal, Roman Catholic and Orthodox) churches as well as cults, Jews and other religions. He charges the protestant reformation with the decline of liturgical (and therefore fixed-hour) prayer in the church and attempts to link a recent decline in the evangelical church growth to the general neglect of this practice.  It’s an interesting theory which, while there is a historical correspondence, the author does not make a persuasive case for  true correlation.

After reading it, I find three major faults with this book (hence its rating of 7/10): first, the author deals very narrowly with the subject of continual prayer for a book of this length.  Second, the book is more a recounting of his own peripatetic spiritual journey than a useful, well structured guide to the practice.  Third, the whole tone of the book is weakly apologetic for both the author’s modest credentials and the mild efficaciousness of fixed-hour prayer. Another title for this book could be: “My Journey Through Praying the Offices and Other Unfinished Business.” If word pictures could become illustrations then this book would make a good travel album on Robert Benson’s Facebook page. The personal experience approach may work well with the narrow audience of depressed, divorced, dilettante poets by lacks the certainty, dynamism and purpose I hope for from an author claiming to share faith with the  apostles, martyrs and church fathers.

I would rather he had co-authored the book with the help of his mysterious friend “Bettie” mentioned in the book who’s prayers apparently were really efficacious and went far beyond the author’s experience of feeling connected to the One and being progressively transformed in his own person. Also, I believe the protestant reformation was largely about discarding wasteful and ineffective accretions to and perversions of the true practices of God’s people and regard that as a good thing. If fixed-hour prayer was an unintended victim of that general purge then it should be brought back in a way that matches St. Paul’s call to prayer in the 6th chapter of his epistle to the Ephesians:

12 For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places. ….18 With all prayer and petition pray at all times in the Spirit, and with this in view, be on the alert with all perseverance and petition for all the saints, 19 and pray on my behalf, that utterance may be given to me in the opening of my mouth, to make known with boldness the mystery of the gospel. (NASB)

This is a call to unceasing and unapologetic prayer with power and the aim to transform all of creation, not just ourselves! To me praying in the Spirit goes beyond reading from or memorizing a breviary.  It is something like what the Rev. Dwight Moody is reported to have said in answer to the question, “How much time do you typically spend in prayer?” 

“About ten minutes,” he replied.

“And how often do you pray,” he was asked.

“About every ten minutes.”

That is a type of continual prayer that pervades all of our waking hours and activities and is my ideal! I believe the continual prayer St. Paul wrote of is where prayer is always in our hearts and on our lips, inspired and guided by the Holy Spirit. Fixed-hour prayer can train and discipline a believer to do this better, but is no substitute for the real thing.  C. S. Lewis described his methods of praying as creating an image in his mind of the object and end of his prayers.  That too is a form of prayer that lends itself to continual prayer in a life that is lived in daily

In closing, this book is a gentle and literate introduction to a serious and demanding calling – continuous prayer.  If it helps to introduce the reader to the discipline of fixed hour prayer that can lead to a rich and dynamic relationship with the God Most High, then it will have done well.  I deeply appreciate the humble and reverent way in which Robert Benson presents the subject and this is very good.  This is a holy matter with eternal consequences. However, the book is best seen as an introduction to a vast and potent subject that should either be revisited by the author when he has furthered his spiritual journey (and perhaps finished his degree studies), or by someone like Bettie who can unveil to the reader the mystery of praying in the Spirit that St. Paul wrote about. I think combining Robert’s skill as a writer with Bettie’s skill in prayer would be a wonderful combination.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher through the BookSneeze®.com <http://BookSneeze®.com> book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255 <http://www.access.gpo.gov/nara/cfr/waisidx_03/16cfr255_03.html> : “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.