Note: Can I Say This at Church is produced for audio listening. If able, I strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which has inflection, emotion, sarcasm where applicable, and emphasis for points that may not come across well in written word. This transcript is generated using a combination of my ears and software, and may contain errors. Please check the episode for clarity before quoting in print.
Scott 0:00
Hearing the voice of God in your life is is it's listening to the voice of love. And I don't know if any of us are like, nope, all filled up don't need any more of that. Because God's love or just God is love that is transforming presence. And so when you're saying like I want to get something out of it's like, yeah, I want to be transformed by love. And I don't think that's anything to be ashamed of. I think where we get in some problems is that we think that we have to be somebody else in order to be successful at religion. And that that is the work that we must work through. Is that like, you know, God is not gonna love us any more than where we're at right now.
Seth Price 1:06
Hello there, and welcome back to the Can I Say This At Church podcast. Today you are in for a treat, but before that, a few announcements to those of you that have rated and review the show on iTunes, I love you. Love you so much. I like going in, I go in about once a week and I see the new ones and I see how the show's impacting you or not impacting you, either way, every time that each of one of you does that, it really does help the show gives me some constructive feedback. And so before we get started, thank you for that, to those of you that support the show on Patreon. And if you don't, why do you not? I’m telling you right now, I've used that platform to give new content. I mean, just recently, many of you were able to listen to a conversation that I had over a year ago that have just never released with Thomas Talbott. And talking about evangelical universalism and the hope that maybe that could be right And then we could all be reconciled to God, ultimately. And honestly, what better thought than that? I don't know where I sit with it still been over a year. It's been years actually. But that's okay.
But you get stuff like that you'll get you know, other content like the four part series with with Paul Thomas on Oscar Romero and just a bunch of other little clips. And I appreciate all of you and it's so…I love that community. I love it so much. And so I would invite you to do that for less than a very, very bad cup of coffee, that literally less than the dollar menu now at McDonald's, come into that environment, consider supporting the show that way.
As this past six months is interwoven, you've probably heard me talk a lot about contemplation, and the Examen, and I'm continuing to do that this year, but I'm trying to work in a few more types of prayer into my daily and weekly routines, and I'm not very good at it, but that's okay. That's not really the point. But I'm finding that the part of church that I didn’t ever really engaged with because I didn't know how was iconography. And so iconography and prayer go hand in hand, especially when you use the two intentionally. So I had a discussion, right on election day. So this, this conversation is a little bit dated about prayer, and maybe intentionally practicing it in a different way.
And so they have co-written a book entitled, oddly enough Prayer 40 Days of Practice, and in that you're going to hear myself and Scott and Justin kind of wrestle with some of the concepts there. And what happens when we engage in prayer, and we're honest with ourselves, and what we do with that uncomfortability. And when I say we, I mean me, and maybe you but that's on you to decide.
Quick caveat on this. So you'll hear in the background, you know, sometimes you hear kids, you'll hear buses, you'll hear trains, you'll hear random static, and so because of the way that the world works, people are busy and so we use the best opportunity to time that we have but because of the conversation and the more that I listened back So I let it sit for months, and then I came back to it. I'm really thankful for this conversation. I'm very thankful for this book. And I've continued to engage in it a couple times a week. And it has really helped me the icons and the images and the prayers that I'm using today are different than the time of this conversation, but entirely still as true for me as I as I continue to do contemplation and wrestle with truths about God and myself. Enough of me and this monologue, let's start this conversation with Justin and Scott.
Seth Price 4:36
Justin McRoberts and Scott Erickson, thank you so much for taking the time at different parts of the planet and the continent, and I'm thankful for the Internet, and your willingness to be able to on on a not busy day, you know, we've all got lives and and it's an election day today as we record this, and so there's a lot and so, thank you for taking time to talk about something I think we all could do better at: prayer. So before we do that, just welcome to the show to both of you. I'm so thankful for you being here.
Justin 5:04
Thanks for having us. Thanks. Yeah, we're excited.
Seth Price 5:07
This will be hard because people can't see you. And so, so people can kind of get to know a little bit better of your voices can each of you kind of just walk through a bit about yourself what you would want kind of the little one to two minute elevator pitch of what you do, why you do it and why it's important.
Justin 5:21
Go ahead Scott.
Scott 5:24
Um, yeah, well, my name is Scott Erickson. And I am a professional artist, which I like to joke means I've taken a vow of poverty. But no, I'm interested in the image, the images that we make and we think about, and I'm interested in how that informs kind of our spiritual formation. And so what I have been doing for a number of years is imaging the spiritual journey, what that looks like. Because my running theory is that you know, our words are informed by an image and then our beliefs are informed by words. So really, when we say we believe in certain things, we have an inner image that we have to recognize and stuff we have to see. And so a lot of times, it's a negative working image that we have to replace and really coming out of a Protestant tradition I didn't have any of that. And so I give a nod to historic imagery, Christian imagery and stuff, but really, I'm trying to develop a new lexicon for that kind of work.
So that looks like creating artwork, being commissioned to make artwork, and then I do a bunch of speaking and performance storytelling, kind of experiences dealing with the image on different topics and and have co authored a book or two with this guy, Justin. McRoberts; and that’s what keeps him busy.
Seth Price 6:56
That's what keeps him busy or you busy?
Scott 7:01
Keeps some of me busy. And then I have three kids and a wife and two. That's and that's a whole other thing too; and a house that we're renovating, which
Seth Price 7:11
Are you building art into the house?
Scott 7:14
I am I'm looking at like three canvases that I have to make paintings for art. Which is nice to be able to be like, well, I can make the own my own art for the house. But no, we we got a great house, but it needs some work. So there's just this like constant list of things to update.
Seth Price 7:32
Yeah. And then sort of bounce that. Justin, tell us a bit about you.
Justin 7:35
So Justin McRoberts. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, East part of the Bay Area, Oakland side of the water…working backwards. Yeah. Scott, and I've put together two books. The one we'll talk about mostly this morning prayer, four days of practice, and then another one that follows that app which is awesome. I started writing books about 2012. After spending from 1998 to 2012, almost exclusively playing songs, telling stories, then became a little bit more of a storyteller.
I planted a church in 1998 as well. So I've done some work as a local pastor and speaker, I do some retreat leading. I also have kids, I've got two kids. I've got an 18 month old girl, and an eight year old boy. I also run a podcast called the At Sea podcast.
Seth Price 8:34
That's cool. Yeah, I didn't listen to any of those. But I saw it. I went to your website earlier in the week. And I noticed that and because of time, I just didn't have time to listen to it. But I've added it to the list to listen to, I didn't want to, I didn't want to tint to my view of questions ahead of time. By listening to that. I needed them to be genuine for me. So you all have written, written a book on prayer. Entitled Prayer 40 Days of Practice, and I will tell you, the first thing that struck me at it is, when I got it from the publisher, I expected a sit down and a whole bunch of meat. And what I got instead was a whole bunch of work that I had to do,
Justin 9:18
(Laughs) Success!
Seth Price 9:20
which if I'm honest, I don't know that I'm happy with that. But I will say, I will say the prayers interspersed through this are, I don't like so. I don't like having to deal with my own issues. I'm not a big fan of that. I'm a type eight on the enneagram (for clarification I’m a 5–I just didn’t know this yet). I just don't deal with that. Well, I like to set a target, hit the target, move on from target and I don't look back. So prayer specifically contemplative prayer. I'm trying to get better at I feel like it'll make me a better human. But I also hate every single moment of it. And I don't know if there will ever be a time that I jumped over that proverbial shark so
Justin 9:58
I would would assume that there will be.
Seth Price 10:03
Really?
Justin 10:04
Oh yeah!
Seth Price 10:02
Why 40 days? Is that just a magic number…it just felt right?
Justin 10:08
I mean, every year, the season of lent, posts itself up as an opportunity for folks who don't like prayer to feel or don't feel connected to prayer to actually do something in the direction of prayer. So what you know, folks, give up chocolates, folks, you know, quit the internet, folks stop drinking booze, folks. Kind of spend this season of this 40 day season in the spring doing something religious even for those of us who don't consider ourselves particularly religious. And Lent felt like the right season to do that because I think initially the idea of 40 days lighting itself up with the season of Lent. The other side of the coin there is like the thing you were just saying with regards to like, Hey, I don't think we'll ever get to the other side of you know, this particular obstacle my life. You know, Scott and I are in alignment here with the idea that, you know, most things are a matter of practice and they're not a matter of magic. There's this weird thing that's happened in the context of Evangelical Christianity in which we kind of have these magical beliefs about the things that we do.
Whether it's the reading of the Bible, or the Psalm listen to or the sermon, we're going to get that there's going to be like a magic, that it's like the one sermon is going to change your life or it's this one song with a Holy Spirit decide that the Holy Spirit's going to move; or its the one time you pray, as opposed to the reality of the human soul, which is a matter of practice. It's a thing that shapes your heart, your soul, your mind, your body over the course of time and repetition. And so, why 40 days? Well don't just do one of these, don't just hang out here for a minute; give this some time.
Scott 11:49
I think that's great. I mean, there's Biblical precedents for that number of a significance of that time whether it's literal or kind of metaphorical, that lends to this kind of transformational process. And so along with the built in framework for Lent, this kind of Biblical number, it just made sense that if we're going to give like a series or like a time, in order to do this, we said why don't you commit to this time?
I like, I'm gonna go off the rails a little bit, I like your…I like the…I think what Justin's saying is really important about kind of what we start thinking is like, if I could just do this song or I can just do this prayer, there's gonna be this kind of one time and then I'll be transformed versus this constant, kind of keeping the soil tilled, like if you think about the idea of spiritual practice. Spiritual practice is not the the one off thing that we're going to have this experience. If you look if you think about the metaphor that Jesus gives about the sower planting seeds. What spiritual practices is, it's keeping your soil tilled. Because God is actually the one that plants the seeds. So spiritual practice is a way of like being ready for when that seed is planted.
So prayer in of itself isn't this like, moment of like, “Oh, I'm gonna have this spiritual kind of Prozac moment of ecstasy”, not that that not that that can't happen. But the practice of prayer, which you could say is like silence, openness, sitting with the presence of God, sitting with like the presence of myself in my own life and my thoughts in my in my secrets, and all those kinds of things. That keeps me in a space so that when God wants to plant some kind of seed or some kind of word, I'm ready to receive it. Like I'm cutting down the noise of my life of my ego of all these other narratives and I'm giving a space for God to plant that seed.
Seth Price 14:08
I like that. Because prayer in that way, and so something I've been wrestling with ever since I read Aaron Niequist’s book, The Eternal Current is the examen. And it's all the contemplation that I can bite off and chew. It is gradually changing me, but it requires more time than I usually have. And a lot more thought than I was raised to pray with, if that makes sense? I was raised like Southern Baptists. And for me, prayer was always a, I did that it's off the to do list. It's done. Yay, we did it! And that was a way to absolve myself from any actual action, as opposed to doing something. I pray for it. Someone else's job now.
So when we talk about content contemplative prayer, you all talk about that there's four different ways. And so you talk about there's guided prayers, contemplative imagery, meditations, and suggested practices. Can y'all just kind of break those apart in brief? What are we talking about when we do those four things or is it that they all interplay in or weave into each practice?
Justin 15:20
Well, yeah, but they do interleaved with the way we do it in the book as they do in our weave. And just for the for the record, I mean, they're, they're probably endless ways to enter into contemplative prayer. Because contemplative prayer has more to do with the posture than the particular practice. But then again, you have to practice your way into that posture. So it's a little bit of a little bit of a process. But with the book, maybe like what we'll do, I'll open it with a couple and then Scott can pick up the, specifically maybe Scott can pick up the way we need to engage within and journey with contemplative practice because it's one of the things that makes the book really, really unique.
But the suggested practice because although the lifting said, you know, part of what Scott just got after hearing in terms of in terms of your soul, treating your soul, like soil, and tending to soil, that's the thing that has to happen. You do have to spend more time than you want. If it's just a matter of applying myself the way I'm ready to apply myself than I'm going to shape my prayer life around my existing condition. And therefore, I'm not transformed by the renewing of my mind; but my mind’s current corruption is going to transform my prayer life, my view of God and that is in fact the way we go about our spiritual lives.
A lot of the time where a lot of what happens in the context of American Evangelical spiritual practice, we're really good at accommodating our like existing place. Where are you and lets meet you there. I think we're really good at that. We're good at meeting you know, we used to say seekers, we're good meeting congregants where they are, we're good at meeting each other to some degree where we are. We're not as good as taking that to somewhere else. We're not as good at the challenge part of it. So it does take more time. So suggested practice, I think it does oftentimes have to come from the outside. What do you want to do? Do you want to spend 15 minutes in silence? No, you don't! But I'm going to ask you to, I'm going to ask you to spend 15 minutes in silence.
Do you want to refrain from praying for the things that you want to get in your life, but instead, take the time to, like, be thankful for everything you do have before you ask for something else? No, you want to move right into like, what am I lacking? What do I want from God? What do I need to happen? But I'm gonna ask you to not do that for a while, maybe for a couple months, maybe for a year just stop praying for things you think you need to then start being thankful for the stuff you already have and then reframe the things you actually want. In order to honestly be transformed and to actually posture ourselves for what God may or may actually be doing in our lives we have to till the soil have our souls and that usually comes with hands, with practices suggestions, that are that actually are outside it's it doesn't necessarily emanate from like my desires, my will and my existing needs. So a suggested practice usually has to be someone else's suggestion.
Seth Price 18:57
A follow up on that. It's been my experience when I try to tell people about what I'm not learning, but trying to learn in the Examen, they ask questions that I'm entirely not ready or prepared to answer, because of my lack of practice and lack of understanding of the way that that prayer works. And so when I'm suggesting things to people or hearing suggestions from others, how do I weigh that for, not quality, but for truthfulness?
Justin 19:28
That's really good
Scott 19:30
Truthfulness…in what do you mean in like, what, like your honesty, like truthfulness and like kind of honesty?
Seth Price 19:35
I feel like when I say truthfulness, I tend to manipulate things to better me and I’m fearful of doing that with prayer. If I'm brutally honest. And so when i when i get suggestions of either books or reading, or podcasts or music, there's always an inherent part of me that's fearful that I'm going to get it and take what I want from it and turn it into something that it wasn't intended to be. And so how do I guard against that when I'm getting suggested practices of prayer and contemplation?
Scott 20:07
What I mean, it's the process of seeing that kind of desire in you, which I would say isn't necessarily that I would really check and see where the root of maybe that kind of shame or or saying that's wrong. You know, like, hearing the voice of God in your life is is it's listening to the voice of love. And I don't know if any of us are like nope, all filled up don't need any more of that. Because God's God's love or just God who is love that is his transforming presence. And so when you're saying like, I want to get something out of it's like, yeah, I want to be transformed by love. And I don't think that's anything to be ashamed of. I think where we get in some problems is that we think that we have to be somebody else in order to be successful at religion?
And that is the work that we must work through is that like, you know, God is not going to love us any more than where we're at right now. And I think a lot of people I, we're, I'm actually working on this like kind of essay about just why why you'll eventually give up on praying. And one of the reasons is because you can't be yourself. Because you don't think that you can be yourself in prayer. And we because we, like Justin has worded this really well; and this is in the back of our book. We don't pray because we're religious, we pray because we're human. Prayer is a human response. Religion can help us give a structure and wording to that response, but it's not the root of that response it’s just giving a structure to it. So what I found helpful, so like, I think a lot of us when we think about prayer, we think about, like, I gotta be sitting down, and then my hands clasped and I gotta be silent and I gotta be holy. It's like, No, you could you could be a person who goes on like, goes on walks, I have a friend who's a pastor, and every morning his prayer practices, he gets up at 4:30. He's got like, six kids, so he has to get up really early to get any sanity.
But he just puts on his coat and coffee, and he just goes walks for like an hour. And he’s like, “that's how I pray. I can't pray any other way”. I can just go out in the dark in the morning and I walk around and that is A-Okay, like, you can't get prayer wrong. You need to figure out what, what makes sense for you. You need to figure out how you as yourself can enter into it instead of trying to be somebody else in prayer.
So I often tell people I'm like, hey, if words aren't working for you find a song that works for you. Oh, hey, guess what it doesn't even have to be a Christian industry song. Like, you know, when you hear a song and you're like, oh man, that's my song right now, what are we saying? We're saying sonically and lyrically that form is helping me go, this is what it feels like to be in my own skin. Maybe that actually we can use that as a vehicle to approach God honestly, maybe we could just like sing that song, or use that poem, or use that image or use that written word, as the way in which we get to that honest conversation with God.
And that's really the intention of our book.
Justin 23:48
Yes!
Scott 23:50
Our prayer book isn't like, “Here are five paragraphs every day that you need to read it will tell you what prayer is”. We're just giving you some excavation tools through words and images to help you get to that inner conversation with your Creator. Which is what prayer is, is that honest, ongoing inner conversation with the one who gave you life? So I think reframing or just kind of seeing prayer from that aspect, it takes a lot of the guilt away or like, I'm not successful at this. Sometimes, like, I really resonate with what you said, I started, you know Jesus says, when he's telling his disciples before, he gives them the Lord's Prayer. He says, Hey, your Father in heaven already knows everything you need.
And I was like, what do you pray about then? You know? And so I took that as a prompt, and for a year, I would get up at five, like most, like three quarters of the time, I'd make a cup of coffee and I'd sit in my living room in the dark, and just go, “you already know everything. What do you want to talk about”? And sometimes it was just kind of being in a silence with myself. Sometimes I would, I would hear God speak some things out. Sometimes I would after some silence, I would read some Psalms or some Scripture. But I stopped and Justin was alluding to this I stopped feeling like I had to carry the weight of the prayer conversation.
Justin 25:16
Yes.
Scott 25:17
Yeah, I think that's the biggest. It's like we feel like it is all up to us. And so that is a, that is a very freeing move to not put it all on you.
Seth Price 25:29
I want to come back to imagery and iconography. But before I do, so, where do you feel like at least here in America, we went off that deep end? Because as I've done this podcast and spoke to people of other parts of our faith, not everyone has this issue with prayer specifically? A lot of people are much easier or much more able to engage in a contemplated prayer but for some reason we aren't and I don't really know why we disconnected or felt the need in the West to disconnect that part of our brain from our heart? As you were writing this, did any of that researcher or impact come up in this?
Justin 26:09
Yeah, for me, it was a matter of research per se, as in like, specific, like, why I went and did the research. I mean, I like I said, I planted a church in 1998. And I paid attention to the way that people around like, so therefore, I was I was also responsible to or for but I was at least attentive to the spiritual, emotional, psychological needs of a particular group of people over, you know, 15-20 years. And I watched folks struggle. Like the way we would talk about it, like I struggled with prayer. And then we would go to resources that would tell us all about prayer that would diagnose prayer and we’d talk about this is what prayer is what prayer potential looks like here's a hearing out here all these things about what prayer does and it was like, all about prayer in the same way that make sermons talk about God.
So we ended up having encounters with people who tell us about God; or we read essays by people who are telling us about prayer. And so we ended up like how should I say this? We end up like it like a step or an arm's length away from the thing we're really wanting.
Scott 27:22
We are like archaeologists, like we're not in the place we're just like reading about the place. We are studying a historical thing instead of like actually experiencing it.
Justin 27:34
So the dark side, if I work backwards, forgive me if this is a little too far down the prophetic angle here to the prophetic road here, then you want to go. But the truth of the matter is it's a lot easier for me to sell you something that I can offer you than it is for me to actually teach you, if I can, to encounter and recognize God. So part of why we are where we are is because in all reality there is a salesmanship strain in American Evangelical Christianity that dictates way too much of what we do and how we do it. We want to keep butts in seats because I want to keep my job and I want to be able to pay for my staff and my worship leader and our lights and our building. And that means that I've got to create something that you need from me.
So what I'm trying to sell you that is my teaching, as opposed to help you actually commune with God in a way in which I'm no longer actually necessary; where I can be potentially helpful. So part of why we are where we are is because we are, and here is the big prophetic stream, is because American, and white Evangelical Christianity, has been deeply deeply infected by Consumer capitalism, and we're more interested in selling things oftentimes, then we are in actually helping people connect with one another, with each other, with themselves, and with the Lord.
Scott 29:01
Dang! Mic drop.
Seth Price 29:03
Dropping all the mics.
Justin 29:04
That's a lot of why we are where we are. And, again, part of what we're doing with the book is what you'll find in the book is like Scott's got these beautiful pieces that he's drawn. I've written these prayers, but there's not a whole truckload of Scott and I in the book. There's enough of us to prompt and a push but we're we're honestly interested, I swear to you, this is really what we're up to, is we really do believe that you have everything you need in order to connect with the divine. Which is to say you are alive, and God is present to you, period.
So the next steps…the next steps are, how do you dig into you and discover what is all already true, real, and beautiful about your connection with the divine where you are exactly where you're at? So you don't need 750 word or 2000 word essays telling you about prayer. No! You need to look into your own soul recognize He’s been good to you. You are shaped beautifully. You are beloved, you are blessed.
And so these short little prayer prompts, the tiny little prayers, the guided prayers. My intention is to guide you to recognize the presence, the activity, the beauty, the goodness, and truth of God in your life. The same thing with images.
What Scott is doing is like, maybe you're someone who doesn't connect with words, in the same way and I’d love to pass the baton back to Scott here in a second, and get into images that way you want to do Seth does because like, words sometimes for us, my take with the words…like why isn't this book full of words? One, I think we have too many words in general. And two, we don't pay enough attention to the words we already use.
So this is the book, it's got far fewer words in it and they're just way more intentionally chosen. So that you can just sit on like a tweet length prayer for a day and let those words dig into your soul and the images do something really similar.
Seth Price 30:55
I will say before we go to images being that I've already read the book a few times, because it's easy to read, is I'm not allowed to tweet those yet. And it's like, I'm like, I want someone else to read this. So I've been reading it with my son and he's nine. And so it's good practice for him to read. But he also recently got baptized. And so it makes it…it's different. We can still, it's allowing me to work through prayer in a way that I wasn't certain on how to guide him into pray outside of praying over our food.
And so I've been greatly appreciative of that just as a thank you—an unrequested, thank you, it's, it's not often that I've had something that I can pray in a way that's meaningful that he gets the same amount out of it as I do, and it fosters more conversations, and often unexpected ones. Although I will say the question that he asked and so Scott, maybe this can be a good transition is why are there so many trees and so many roots and why do they go not into the ground? And that was his question to me, I was like, well, I'll ask the guy that I think drew those. And so can we start there? Like, what is the relationship of imagery to prayer being that it's not necessarily spoken or even thought? Did I miss you, Scott, are you gone?
Scott 32:18
I probably hit mute. There we go, I’m sorry.
When Jesus is talking to people about anxiety, and he's saying “consider the lilies” and then like, “Look at the birds”. He's saying, look at what's going on and just contemplate it, consider it, consider what you see. And he's like, there is a world that is revealing, what and how God works in the world. So a good question for the visual is what is the mean, another good question for the visual is, what is this bringing out of you? Like, what is this excavating out of you?
Because when we are used to language and we're used to going this is what the words mean. And what what's helpful with poetry is that kind of plays with that. But with imagery it’s like a different kind of language. And so we want to approach it the same way and ask what does this mean? But it actually has like a different function. It goes, What is this? What is this? What is this revealing in you? How is this a mirror for you?
So, these prayers, so these one sentence prayers, and then these images are really the same prayer, they're just kind of working in different ways together. And so what happens is when we see this image, like, and Justin and I do this because we do this live teaching of this stuff, but we'll we'll dissect an image and we'll be like, what does that say to you and Justin will say something completely different than me. You know, they're similar and they have similar things because we start coming at it from the context of our life, what's concerning us right now, what we're thinking about, you know, it helps reveal all those things.
So this was lost in Protestantism, I mean this still exists in the Orthodox and Catholic churches because for shocking for all of those who who love the Bible, like the church didn't have a Bible for like 1500 years like the priests did in Latin, but people didn't have Bibles and they didn't even know how to read, a lot of people. So if you get a chance to go to Europe or something and you see these kind of cathedrals and churches, they were communicating the wisdom and the truth of God through images, through icons, paintings, sculptures, all these kinds of things. But after the printing press was invented, and they started translating it into German, and then local languages, and then people started learning to read through that. Like, they were like, We don't need this stuff anymore. So we kind of lost this tradition of a forming image contemplation. So that's what it is.
So your son’s like, “why does the trees go…why did the roots not go into the ground”? They go into…are they just hanging out there?
Seth Price 35:31
There's a few that go into hearts. There's a few that go into hands. Yeah, there's a lot of root imagery. A lot of heart and a lot of tree imagery. There's only one I think that goes into the ground prayer that you that I don't know which one of y'all wrote it, or probably both. There's one that says
May I never considered my weakness and faults, the larger or most authentic part of me.
And yeah, those roots are obviously deeply rooted beyond the surface. Which I see as the deepest part of me, not my weaknesses or my faults. I might be doing that wrong. But that's what I see.
Scott 36:10
So you're not doing that wrong. That's what's in you bro. You’re not doing it wrong, you nailed it insofar as that's what it's like and I love the way you open it up to you because you're like, Hey, I have this thing, I don't want to do that work because of what I see in me like, what you're describing right now, like you're engaging with the piece, like that's exactly the way we are hoping readers dig in. Again, like there isn't like I think I might be getting this wrong. No, man that's like, like, what does it make you think of wasn't make you feel? Okay, cool. Well, offer that back to the Spirit and see where you go from there. Like that's not wrong. That's like that is the ballgame. Yeah, that's prayer. That's real spiritual, actual, like self engagement with the Spirit of God.
Seth Price 36:55
It's uncomfortable.
Scott 37:00
Yeah. there's a there's a Jesuit priest….(Justin bouncing in and out…)
Just to our listeners out there Justin's on a tour bus because he's a #bigdeal. Somewhere in the county of somewhere in Texas where the reception cuts out every now and then you cut out there, buddy, you were talking.
Seth Price 37:26
No big deal.
Justin 37:28
Oh my bad.
Seth Price 37:30
I'm gonna blame this on my brother. So he lives north of Dallas, which I think is where you are. And so I'm just gonna say that if he paid more in taxes, you wouldn't have this problem. And so James if you're listening I need you to do better. I need you to do better. Oddly enough, who knows if you'll ever listen, and I'm not even gonna tell him I said that. And so that's how we’ll know.
(Music)
Seth Price 38:22
The image that stuck with me the most, I don't know if either of you have your book in front of you, but Prayer 21 where you talk about the depth of generosity and never being swayed by the depths of thanks. The hands and the inputs to the hands are different shapes. Something still doesn't sit right with me about that image. And so can either of you talk to me a bit about either that prayer or that image or how the two interplay?
Scott 38:45 Yeah, that image is weird for me, because I suggest in the way that this book kind of came around is Justin had spent three years tinkering with these one sentence prayers during Lent. And then so he had a pretty complete list and then he gave it to me and then I just spent a number of months going through it and, and prayerfully thinking through them and then making these images. So that one is kind of a is sort of for our listeners, like it's got a it's kind of a Ying and Yang. So it has got a hand you know, an arm and a hand putting in a piece into something.
Oh…Justin, are you on a bus?
Justin 39:31
I'm back now. I made movements that should be way better than I was before.
Scott 39:35
Perfect, perfect. And then it's placing an object into another cylinder that goes into another hand that's placing an object into the cylinder which is the arm. So it's kind of this like rotating thing. That idea was just like, where we give from should not be an empty place. Like where we give from is the place where we also receive from and so I think sometimes we think that we just have to be endlessly generous. And yet God is always inviting us to ask, what we want, what we need, what we desire. To spend time in His presence and receive the love that we need. And this is going to be the place that's going to form the way in which we give and are generous to the world.
See, again, the ways in which religion ruins us is that it makes it all up to us; it puts a lot of the weight on us that we have to be these endless givers instead of giving as just a natural part because we've already been receiving, we've already been receiving grace. There's a Jesuit priest named Anthony de Mello, and he's got this great prayer, which I gotta say, at a certain part of my life I would have been like “that sounds like heresy”. But he says be grateful for your sins, because they are doorways to grace.
And as I sat with that for a number of years now, what it reveals to me is how much I think I need to earn God's love by my perfection. Right? And what he's saying is he's saying like, you your weaknesses and faults, or whatever it is, that is the place that God meets us. God is giving grace to us in those spots, and that is the thing that's going to transform us the most, more than our piety and our righteousness. Um, and so if we think about generosity in a similar vein of like, Where's the place maybe the place of like, lacking in fear is the place that I can trust and give from or maybe the place that I've actually taken taking time to receive. And that's going to inform more of this moving away from a scarcity mindset, that kind of stuff. So, that's what I think is going on there. Again, I want to say there's no so solid “This is the only answer” as much as that was my intention with that image.
Justin 42:25
Yeah. I mean, the original prayer, came out of my own personal life, experience had to do recognizing that if I'm going to be generous, my generosity needs to be rooted in the abundance of God's goodness as opposed to A: like what I feel like I have to offer or B: more insidiously what I think I'm going to get out of giving.
And that's where it's really corrupt, because then all my generosity is like, rooted in this sort of ROI equation. Like if I invested this person's life, then what's going to happen is I'm going to get this and we're going to get this and this out of that investment. So specifically I'm working as a pastor, like some of the strangely, like twisted pastoral training I received had to do with like making sure I was investing in ”the right people”. And usually the right people are people who are going to be able to turn around and reinvest in institutional setting in which I was functioning.
So just my thinking had to do with like, putting time and effort into already qualified people who are qualified according to the needs of the institutional setting in which I was working as opposed to how about you love, cherish, care for exactly who it is God gives you to regardless of what your institution is going to get out of it. You just let the Spirit form the Church, as opposed to you feeling like you can build that by way of your generosity. Yeah, that's where the prayer came from in me is like I need to reorient why it is I give.
Seth Price 43:54
a few weeks ago, about a week ago, I think I put out on Twitter during my lunch break. I was reading through this one of your prayers that was I didn't put out on the prayer, I just put out that I needed this today. And so I had been struggling with a conversation at church about generosity and abundance of grace. And we worked through a bunch of the episodes from the podcast at Sunday evenings at church with a very small group spread out amongst all of the ages and the demographics and whatnot. It was it was beautiful. But something we talked about a lot was being generous, and we could actually impact our community if we just stopped hoarding gifts.
And so when I saw the image, you know, that had sat with me for weeks. And so when I saw the image, what I saw was, I have this gift that I've been given, that I'm supposed to freely give, it's shaped like this and somehow going through the work of the arms of this person, it's transformed into a different gift, which is also freely given in a reciprocal…
Justin 44:55
That's good
Seth Price 44:58
…in a reciprocal way. But again, so the image is just stuck with me. I've revisited it often I took a picture of it and made it in the background on my phone for a few days. I couldn't get it out of my head. So both thank you and not thank you for that.
Justin 45:12
See…yes this is…Yeah! Yea, no, I think it's really important to recognize, like, why is this capturing me so much like that is the doorway to a deeper conversation, right? And it's like recognizing that and then sitting with it. This happens to me a lot with like, a song. I'll hear a song and I'll just be like, what is that? And I'll just listen to it over and over and over again. Yeah, but that's great. That's great. No, man. Yeah, that's exactly right.
Seth Price 45:41
Last question for each of you. And it's not going to be fair. What is either your favorite prayer in this book, and or your favorite image in this book, and they the two don't have to be related. But then why? Like if you had to choose one of these 40 days, this is my baby.
Justin 45:59
That's good.
Seth Price 46:00
Knowing full well, that answer is probably going to change in 30 days for many reasons. But for today anyway.
Justin 46:06
Yeah. Well, depending on honestly insofar as it will probably change by the end of the day, depending on the election results go for me; if I’m being honest.
This prayer about being the same person in all circumstances, that I would be an uncompromising whole person, may I be the same person, regardless of my circumstances, in posture. May I be an uncompromising the whole person, and the image that's associated with that and that it's, for me among the images in the book is the image that keeps coming back, because it is as whole feeling as an image. It's this, it's really there's a there's a base with reach and out of the roots, these leaves are going and it's encapsulated by this sphere and it feels like this there multiple elements to the image but it still feels like one single image its whole, I come back regularly, and it continues to speak to me and inform me and challenge me. That's the prayer that I come back to, you know,
Scott 47:13
Yeah, for me there's a prayer it says
may I have hoped for myself the way I do for others
and then the images this kind of this boat and inside of it as a lighthouse. And I like the words and the images a lot for this because the boat with the lighthouse has kind of become an image of pilgrimage for me, instead of this kind of idea, like, “Oh, I'm just on this journey, and I gotta go to this light and that's the safety” you know, whatever the lighthouse represents this kind of like safe harbor something.
I think putting the lighthouse in the boat is like we're all on this pilgrimage. We're all in this journey. And each one of us have something to offer to the other. So often we'll see other people's light and that's a helpful thing for us. But we can't disregard that our lives have our own light to it. And I can offer I can often, like, see people and be like, then I'm so excited for you, I have so much enthusiasm for what's ahead of you. And then I examine my own life without examining the filters I put on myself, and just go “there's nothing for me”. And it's like, well, that's not true, either. So I think that's a good…that one's been resonating with me.
Seth Price 48:33
Nice. Well, thank you both so much for your time today. And then so in closing work in people listening. Obviously, I would recommend you go out and get this book for a few reasons. It's not extremely expensive. It is entirely engaging and in a way that is not not taxing mentally because it's too much to read. It will be taxing emotionally but I think that's worth the effort. So where would you direct people to both engage with the book and engage with each of you?
Justin 49:00
You can start with just visiting 40DaysPrayerBook.com and that from there you can go to any of the places you would normally buy books instead of picking out one seller and then…
Scott 49:13
40 and in Four Zero
That's the best place to start.
And then Justin is JustinMcRoberts.com and at @JustinMcRoberts on all the social medias. And I'm Scott Erickson, ScottErickson.com and then @Scottthepainter on all the social medias. And that's where you can find out kind of what we're doing.
Justin 49:43
We will be like talking about this content in the next year doing shows and things like that. So we'll have all that information there.
Seth Price 49:48
Yeah, very nice. Well, good. Well, open invitation if you come to the Charlottesville Virginia area, I'd love to reach out…I have no contacts to make that happen. But if you're close enough Hey, I would love to make time to come in and chat with you in person. Yeah, definitely. Well, thank you again so much for your time. Justin, tell you in your #bigdeal friends who don't know me, but I said hello, why not? (laughter all) And Scott, good luck with your um, with your renovations appreciate you both.
Scott 50:22
Thank you
Seth Price 50:50
I don't really know a good way to end this episode and so I'll just leave you with this.
I pray for each of you that you will dive deep into contemplation and sit in silence and pray in new ways this year. That you'll find new facets of the love of God in prayer and that those facets will work themselves into your being at a level that you live differently but not intentionally, it just becomes the new status quo.
You don't try to do it it just becomes you that theosis that part of you week over week over week is changed to be more Christlike and so be well in your prayers. I'm praying both for you and with you as I hope you are for me and honestly everyone else that we come in proximity with.
Today's music was provided by permission from Justin McRoberts. That's right. You heard that name right, the same Justin McRoberts that I just finished talking with. You'll find links to all the music used today in the Can I Say This At Church Spotify playlist, the tracks specifically listed in the show notes.
Talk to you next week.
Be well everyone.