A Review of Justin McRoberts and Scott Erikson’s “Prayer: Forty Days of Practice”
Reimagining Prayer
Prayer is something I’m still practicing, and I probably don’t do it enough. However, I know enough about the subject to know that you can do it any time, anywhere. So I read Justin McRoberts and Scott Erikson’s Prayer with some interest, hoping that I might learn a thing or two about the any time and anywhere bit. Well, as McRoberts (the author) and Erikson (the illustrator of this book) point out early on, Prayer is a book devoid of content. It’s meant to be consumed in 40 days, but you can practically flip through this book if your heart so desired. There’s a point to the lack of traditional linear content. This, it turns out, is a book of prayer prompts in a way. You look at a picture of paper airplanes or houses within a house or whatever Erikson has craftily put to ink, and you read the sentences that take up a page that McRoberts has spun, and the content comes from the dialogue that you have with God while processing these words and images.
To that end, I probably used this book wrong. For one thing, I got it on my Kindle, which may not be the best way to read it because it forces you to read things from start to finish. Prayer is meant to be really picked up and read at random. This is less a book in the conventional sense and more of a tool, so that might mean for some people starting at the end and working backward or going to the middle and hopscotching around. So there’s that. Two, well, I read this book kind of fast. I really should have spent 40 days and not 40 minutes with this title. I may have to come back to this and tell you later if this form of prayer as offered by this book really works. However, I do have a sneaking suspicion that this is a book that might work best when “read” by a larger group of people together. What I found myself wanting to do with this book is have a dialogue with it, but with others present with their opinions and interpretations. I’m curious to know what someone else thinks of the fact that all of the written prompts start with the word “may.” I’m also curious to know from someone else what they thought of the pictures and what they actually mean — as things get quite abstract at points.
Yes, I’m probably using this book all wrong. I’m like the child McRoberts talks about early on, trying to get a statue of Jesus to stand properly on end before settling down to prayer, only to spend all of the time making sure that the statue is positioned properly.
However, that said, even as I found myself really wanting to be guided through this book with perhaps my pastor leading the way, I did find some utility for it. Though I read the book quickly, I found it to be soothing and provocative — if both of those terms can exist in the same spectrum at the precise same time and place. The book is soothing because, well, it’s about prayer and prayer can be soothing. It’s also provocative because some of the illustrations are really abstract. God only knows what all of those paper planes in the book’s illustrations actually really mean. But I did wind up thinking about those images (and the words, too) a little bit. I started some kind of dialogue with the Divine, even though I wonder if I’ve really finished it or not. This book nudges you to create your own content in a way, which is why its authors so brazenly proclaim that it is an empty vessel. It’s up to you really to make sense of the book, and making sense is probably something you’re going to have to practice a bit in your “reading” of this title.
Still, I have to admit that Prayer: Forty Days of Practice is a book that is refreshingly unique. I don’t think I’ve ever read (experienced?) anything quite like it. This is a book that pushes the reader towards a wider dialogue with God as he or she conceives of that deity, and the point perhaps is to not quite understand what the authors’ intentions were, but what doorways and paths the book nudges you down towards having a contemplative moment with the Almighty. I suppose I should point out that this is a book meant for Christians, although it does cross the boundary of theology as I suspect that other religions might get something out of this tome. That’s a good thing, because Prayer is an openly inclusive book meant for many different readers.
Despite having said all of this, I still wish that there was a study guide or some such document that you could have a peek at whenever you got stuck on a particular page — and I know I was scratching my head from time to time. I know that the authors would consider such a resource as getting in the way of the intended use of the book proper, but what’s in here seems rather radical and as far as masterpieces going so far as to teach you how to read them, there doesn’t seem to be much of a lexicon or way to make sense out of these images or passages other than to really look at them and find something stirring in them. In the end, I found Prayer to be a rather curious book. It definitely wasn’t something that I was expecting at all.
As noted, I feel I really needed a full month and a half with this book to really make sense of it, and I probably raced through it too fast. Those willing to make the journey at less than a breakneck pace might glean something useful and profound. Maybe. I have a lot of questions about this volume, but really thought that the unique flavour of the book was profound and, in the end, find that this book is really worthy for those looking to amp up their prayer life and need a new way of speaking to God. This is a book that goes down to unexpected places — and I can tell even in my short read of this. How much of a conversation you have with God going to those places is, well, probably proportionate to how much time you spend in Prayer itself.
Justin McRoberts and Scott Erikson’s Prayer: Forty Days of Practice will be published by WaterBrook & Multnomah on February 5, 2019.
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Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
