DISQUS

Jason Winton · 1 year ago

This is a great short narrative about how Contemporary Christian Answers tend to be disorienting and inauthentic when compared to the real questions being asked around the world! I'm reminded of the anonymous 19th-century Russian peasant (chronicled in The Way of the Pilgrim) who asked every holy person he could find how to "pray without ceasing," only to get responses that clearly demonstrated irrelevant answers to questions not even being asked. This is a loose paraphrase:

Preacher: Prayer is important. It is the only way to embody the Christian life.

Pilgrim: But how does one pray without ceasing?

Preacher: Saint Paul instructs us to pray in this way! We should be grateful when God offers us this gift.

Eventually, frustrated and yet more determined, the pilgrim casually informs the reader, "I gave up going to hear public sermons." His answer to the question that he'd been asking for some time finally came by the way of a monk who happened across his path a bit later. He learned through this monk that interior prayer was barely understood or even readily explained by most contemporary preachers, but that he could point him in the right direction. And he was able to do just that.

How I long for that kind of conversation/conversion (in the company of real people and their honest questions). It's somewhat easy to theorize and much harder to have to put something into practice. What will it take for us Christians to re-learn the Way of Jesus? And while waiting for the "answers," what will we have to endure or accept from others who don't understand or who simply want non-answers given?