Tuesday Prayer 33

This is my 33rd 'Tuesday Prayer' post. It represents an attempt to connect some of the theology that I'm doing for my dissertation, to the kind of stuff I do on this blog, through the medium of the thing that has dominated my writing job, the theme of prayer. In her 'Toward a Theology of the Body', Mary Prokes writes the following;

“Honest prayer of praise can best be expressed when there is an integral realisation of its splendour and its woundedness, beginning with one's own body. To 'pray the body' requires a prior capacity to receive embodiment as a gift of love. The 'prayed body' integrates reverence, a sacred freedom, and the offering of the embodied self as a gift”

Often, especially in British evangelicalism, we can get a bit sniffy about connecting our bodies and worship/prayer. But it is vital. The body, our body, is the place that we pray, it is our selves that we form into an attitude of prayer - perhaps kneeling, often closing our eyes, clasping hands, bowing heads, or standing up and raising open eyes and arms to God. I wonder if you have ever thought about the way you pray with your body.

At the heart of praying with and through our bodies, as Prokes identifies, is the profound challenge to recieve our bodies as gifts of love from God. The great centrepiece of history is the Incarnation, life, death and resurrection of Jesus - the God who took on flesh, the God who became embodied, like us. Just as the passion of Christ, the Cross that we reflected on last week, has both 'splendour' and 'woundedness', so do our own bodies. Our prayers, mediated to Jesus through our words, thoughts and actions, are intimately linked to our bodies and the way we receive our body as a gift from God.

As well as the challenge to pray in a way that incorporates our whole self, perhaps there is a challenge to receive our bodies - imperfect, fat, thin, short, tall, broken, strange - as gifts of God to be brought into our worship of him.

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Don't forget to check out the previous posts in the series, featuring quotes from Tom Wright, John Wimber, Richard Foster and Don Carson, the great J. C. Ryle and theologians Alister McGrath and James K. A. Smith. Since then, I've shared quotes from Justin Welby, E.M. Bounds, Vineyard Pastor Ken Wilson, C. S. Lewis,  O'Hallesby, Paul Miller, John Piper. Recently, we've heard Matthew Henry, Charles Finney, Andrew Murray, Tim Chester, Vaughan Roberts, Oliver O'Donovan, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and John Bunyan. Then we got rather retro, with quotes from Church Fathers John Chrysostom and Tertullian, before returning to more recent thinkers with Rowan Williams, Mike Reeves and Peter Jackson and Chris Wright and Andrew Case, R. C. Sproul, and (representing a slight change of tack) the Westminster Confession. Recently we considered Karl Barth, and last week was Donald Macleod and a challenge to pray in light of the Cross.