Marked Pages

Why does man create? If the Bible is true, as we believe it wholly to be, then the reason is clear: Man creates because he is made in the image of the Creator-Artist. As the bearer of God’s image, the imago dei, man was fashioned with a capacity for artistry, creativity and choice. Design and order, symmetry and symphony, all these please something deep and original inside him, so that participating in whatever creative work that involves the bringing forth of such things satisfies him in inexplicable ways.
 

The likeness of the Creator-Artist in us means that we are often inspired to respond to beauty, whether we like it or not. This does not mean we are will-less, for it is clear that we have a choice whether to pay attention to our “gut” responses or not. Everyone would be momentarily held breathless at the sight of the sudden bursting of the dawn over the horizon, for instance. Some respond by throwing themselves into the moment and experience; others choose to walk past. The decision to give in to the pull towards beauty is ours; similarly, the willed choice not to.
 

The psalms are full of instances where poets and musicians, writers and prophets deliberately chose to give in to the pull towards beauty, because they recognized in the created world the astounding artistry of their God. Psalm 8 is one such psalm that extols God’s wonderful creation and by doing so, exalts God’s majestic beauty. There are many other psalms like it. Such was the depth of the psalmists’ appreciation of how beautiful God was that these singers and songwriters had to burst into poetry and song themselves. It was the startling perfection and symmetry of God’s creation that caught their breath. Their response was “hallel,” which simply means, “praise ye!” And of course, for the pristine loveliness before their eyes, who could they praise but “Jah,” their Yahweh God? “Hallelujah!” came naturally to their lips, because they were artists engaged in the highest task of all, the worship of God.
 

Psalm 8 is a psalm of David, God’s consecrated singer-musician. David was a man who was clearly what we would call the artistic type these days. He lived in the full appreciation of the senses: he understood beauty and harmony with an enjoyment and intensity that few men in his time did. David rightly channelled that understanding and enjoyment of the beauty of the created order to the praise of God’s glory—most of the time. His songs have a quality that is visceral and spiritually elevated at the same time. Psalm 8 is no different. It is often categorized as a hymn of creation praise, and approaches its theme by directing the people to see that the Lord is always the focus of creation beauty. All the glories of the universe find their centre, their axis, their pivot, in God the Maker. His rule over all creation is established in the opening verse of the psalm: “O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” God the Creator-Artist is also kingly, full of majesty and greatness. The psalmist realizes that creation itself stands in awe and worship of this “LORD our Lord.” In small measure, we can understand the psalmist’s effusive praise if we consider the way we praise an artist, a singer, or a writer for some creative work that we call a masterpiece. God’s masterpiece, being his creation, is so wonderful that it displays his glory in ways which the psalmist calls astonishing and formidable. God’s creation, in seeing how fearfully and wonderfully it was made, is compelled to rise up and praise God for having created it. Here, it is “the lips of children and infants” (v. 2) that sing God’s praise. Certainly, children and infants rank among the more tender-hearted and innocent of created human beings, and therefore, their ringing praise must sound like angelic choirs in God’s ear. This is of course to contrast the sly and cunning lips of the slandering “foe and avenger” (v. 2), which are full of deceit and cursing for God’s goodness and sovereignty. But in this psalm, such voices are thoroughly silenced by the pure sounds of singing praise from infant lisps. The psalmist David, in contemplation of this, brought out his harp and sang his song.
 

That is the heart of man’s creative capacity and his choice to worship God through that gift. The psalmist knows this, and says in wonderment and gratitude:  
 

When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
the son of man that you care for him?
                                                            (vv. 3-4)
 

The heavens, the moon and the stars, being immense and beautiful, mirror God’s sovereign majesty. His finger not only brought these imposing creations into being, but set their turn and course by its smallest twirl. Yet this glorious ruler has appointed a special place for man. He is “mindful” of him, caring for him as a father cares for his children. How could the psalmist not praise him? God has made him “a little lower than the heavenly beings” (v. 5), but has also given to him a royal status: “you … crowned him with glory and honour” (v. 5). Man is to maintain harmony and order, symmetry and design on the earth, after the manner of the Creator-Artist. Given the place and appointment to be his creative and artistic steward, man is to work out his role in disciplined and conscious caring for creation. His beneficence and care must be generous and lavish as God’s; his stewardship and husbandry of the earth’s soil and harvest must be creative, beautiful, efficient and fair. Love and concern must be foremost in his dealings with the precious creation that God made long ago. Only then would he truly and effectively be imago dei, fulfilling that original impulse to create and give life, to order and design, to bring harmony and symmetry to the raw materials of nature. Dominion over creation must be godly and kingly, as God’s majestic dominion over nature and man demonstrates. Only then would man understand the depths of his own creativity; only then would his hymns of creation praise be fruitful and fitting worship of God.
 
The concluding ascription of praise in verse 9 repeats the ascription of praise in verse 1. Within its opening and its closing are verses expressing the psalmist’s joyful abandon of inexhaustible praise. The repetition of the opening in verse 9 completes and rounds off the psalm’s main focus and theme: the glory of the Creator-Artist is the reason for praise and worshipping celebration. The opening thought of awe and reverence is reiterated in its conclusion. The majestic King and loving Creator is Lord over all his people and creation. Psalm 8 is a song that begins with the psalmist’s posture of prostrated worship. He bends his knee, he bows his head. David as king and man sees that he is only a human being, part of the worshipping created order. He is “less than the heavenly beings” (v. 5) and does not wish to be anything more before the sovereign LORD. The psalm ends on the same note, with the psalmist assuming that same posture of submission and prostrated worship, singing the doxology begun in verse 1. If he is imago dei, he is, after all, only image and likeness. 
 

Psalm 8 is a beautiful and well-made psalm which contains the heightened poetic use of image and language that rightly places it as a hymn of creation praise. Its hymnic quality might perhaps be compared to Beethoven’s “Hymn to Joy.” Both begin on that same high note, that same elevation of the soul in praise and worship. Both consider the “work of [God’s] fingers” (v. 3) and then effortlessly extend their amazement and astonishment towards the Mind behind the artistic hand. God alone forms the focus of their beginning and their end.
 

There are so many views of prayer these days that I get lost in the barrage of words and instructions on how to get God to answer when you call. Christians genuinely want to learn to pray, not always for the right reasons, but the lifestyle of praying is one that both obfuscates and mystifies at the same time. So we buy books, reflecting the common frenzy to “get” a handle on God one way or another.
 

The reason for our blankness with regard to the prayer life is that God is greater than our understanding can accommodate, and prayer is the most immediate way we have to touch him, and to hope that he returns our touch. The point of our frustration is that very often we do not feel God’s returning touch of affection … so prayer is befuddling and worrisome. Our reactions at this juncture of frustration show the grittiness or otherwise of our faith: many of us prefer not to be further troubled, and drop out of the struggle; some of us stay the course, stumbling our way through, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, in the effort to understand the God who does exactly what he wishes.
 

The prayer life is difficult. Some propose retreats into the “closet” and “monastery” or some beach-like alternative in order for us to listen more carefully to God’s voice. Perhaps the monkish types have got it right—the medieval monastery is a figure which reminds me to regularly examine my seasons and rhythms to ensure that I am moving to the musical bars and phrases of God’s intentions. But such proposed withdrawals are partly to blame for the common notion of praying being for the select and initiated “few.”
 

In these busy days, who can carve out such niches of time? Not everyone is self-employed or works on a flexi-time basis; not everyone can afford to offend the boss by citing the Christian’s need to now and then disappear, withdraw and just “be” with God! Some of us work very hard because we base our lives on the illusion that busyness means significance and worth. But many of us are busy simply out of necessity. How then do we negotiate our way through the conflicting demands of quiet and activity, social engagement and prayerful withdrawal?
 

Books which tell us to follow the seven steps to praying victory, three ways to get what you want from God and so on are only so many pages of paper. Prayer is not formulaic, neither is there a guarantee that if we push the right buttons, God the candy dispenser will sportingly deliver the goods. Prayer is a way of being and living, based on a growing desire to be intimately involved with God. The relationship grows and deepens because the praying person discovers he/she is changed and transformed to be like God—the nature of the prayers, the contents and preoccupations of the praying mind also change to mirror more of God’s burdens, and joys and concerns. So the truest answer to all our praying is the evidence of our transformed heart and mind rather than in the number of things God gave us when we prayed.
 

God’s heart is such that when he stops his heavenly activities and turns his fatherly ear to listen to the broken and imperfect prayers of his children, he cannot but offer a reply immediately. But a reply is not necessarily an immediate solution, or an answer only in the affirmative. Even God’s “no” comes from the love that cherishes us and knows our hidden matter completely where we do not yet know ourselves. The growth of our persons comes when we understand this in the depths of our unfinished beings and learn to trust the One who had us in mind before the world began. Such a view of prayer is more spiritually vigorous and encompassing, and more humanly enriching, than some of the expressions of intercession we find today. To be honest, I could not possibly generate or sustain enough energy to continuously storm gates, heavenly or hellish, though I understand the need sometimes for such bold praying. We should not underestimate the power and authority that rests in the name, “Jesus,” so even “violent” prayers do have a place in the life of the praying Christian. But prayer, essentially, means much, much more than this, and is directed towards God alone.
 

Once we catch the vision of the praying life as full-orbed, multi-dimensioned and faceted, as textured and layered with ever-deepening riches and treasures, we will discover that such matters of technique and technicalities rightly recede to a more background setting. We will find that the troubling difficulty of retreat and withdrawal just to “be” with God becomes a nearer possible, a more certain consideration than previously thought. Things have a strange way of opening and enlarging in the spiritual life that makes our problems, in happy retrospect, seem silly and small. How many of us have been amazed by the inexplicable yet natural and non-intrusive ways in which paths and windows, openings and escape hatches have presented themselves to us when we have rested in God’s creative care as we prayed. “Things that once were wild alarms,” the old hymn goes, “cannot now disturb my rest …” That is the beauty of the praying life: the burden of my yokesome self no longer bows me down. I do indeed learn, through the discipline of prayer, to take on Jesus’ easy yoke and his light burden. I come to understand that the praying life is all life, that the joy of gazing at his face is the reward of my exercising my spiritual sinews in learning how to pray.
 

In speaking of the life of prayer as a matter of the heart at rest in God, the Orthodox Church has an ancient tradition of prayer called the Jesus Prayer (also called the Prayer of the Heart). This offers a better appreciation of full-orbed, multi-dimensioned prayer in a way that seems more consistent with the Christian’s complete and utterly abandoned obsession with Jesus as the object of all human desiring. The Jesus Prayer describes a technique, too, and because it is Orthodox, we Evangelicals usually prefer to look the other way. But simply put, it requires the neophyte to breathe in and out while repeating the name “Jesus” in prayerful posture: Je (in) sus (out). Taken to extremes, this prayer degenerates to the level of ritual and meditation technique without the regenerating life and personal intervention of God the Spirit. No wonder we are suspicious of it.
 

I mention it here to point out one thing. In breathing and voicing the name of Jesus, we are, in effect, attempting to realign our crooked steps to the straight path of God. In learning to be conscious, deliberate and disciplined in our bodily breathing, we learn to re-orient our frenzied lifestyles and schedules to the in-breathing and out-breathing of God’s natural rhythms. Instead of unthinkingly living in a rush, tyrannized by the urgency of momentary things and pressing matters of a timed and clocked existence, we learn to stop awhile to say to our souls that God, the unchanging and unmoving focus of the universe, is the true axis and pivot of all life and consciousness. In him, all things move and are and have their being (Colossians 1: 16-17); through him all the anxious ticking of the clock of time is subsumed and silenced by the imposing stillness and hushed reverence of a universe at rest.
 

The Prayer of the Heart belongs to a fuller Christian tradition of prayer that focuses on a Greek word called hesychasm, which simply means to rest, or to be at rest. Hesychasm and the Jesus Prayer remind us that engaging in prayer may begin with the turmoil and tempestuousness of a storm-vexed soul, but its journey ends in the safety of God’s harbouring heart which offers the suffering soul the same restfulness and restedness. All restlessness recedes like the threatening waves of a dynamic and churlish ocean when they meet the shore, and gives way to the sovereignty and majesty of the God of the heavenlies: our loving Father. This understanding of prayer makes me see that the renovation and reformation of my heart and mind are essential parts of the discipline I am engaged in, and that it is God himself who cuts and carves and mends and heals my spiritual innards, renewing and refreshing me all the while. I understand that the Christian walk is filled often with sorrow and hardship, as with lightness and joy, and that I must not focus on one to the exclusion of the other. Such a view of prayer allows me the range of all my human experiences, which God created and controls, and tells me of the depths I can arrive at in my appreciative intimacy with God if I allow him the free play of the great Artist of my soul’s canvas.
 

Learning to pray in ways which lead to an ever-increasing disclosure of God to us, of our deepening intimacy with him, of our learning to trust his goodness and therefore to be perfectly at rest in him, these to me are the central preoccupations and points to mull over in considering how to establish a prayer life for ourselves. The life of prayer is an intricate relationship and engagement that takes the effort and creativity of a lifetime of attentiveness of my art, God’s art, my love, God’s love, my prayerful hands, God’s saving hands, my adoring gaze, God’s gracious gaze. These are the main elements of prayer, and I believe they are all that is necessary.