Reviews for Opening to God: A Guide to Prayer

The average rating for Opening to God: A Guide to Prayer based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-08-11 00:00:00 Hector Salgado About a year ago, I decided to cease my efforts, for the most part, at personal "structured" prayer. This decision was an outcome of my continued dissatisfaction with my prayer experience, particularly with the rigid and forced nature of my prayer. On a positive note, I was encouraged in this decision by my increasingly rich encounters with "spontaneous" prayer. These prayers seemed to be a more genuine expression of my heart and certainly less forced and legalistic. On the downside, I could not help but feel that I was not growing in my prayer life, that there was something important missing in my relationship with God - probably in the area of prayer. To be honest, I also struggled with the old guilt messages associated with my perceived "failure" in prayer. I was therefore encouraged by the reminder of Thomas Green in Opening to God that "the desire to pray is itself a clear sign of the Lord's presence" (p. 19). But the prayer I desire is a very different kind of prayer than what I had decided to abandon. Green helpfully admitted the limitations of his own religious background that tended to "reinforce this stress on a 'pulling-myself-up-by-my bootstraps' kind of spirituality" (p. 34). Green's revision of the Baltimore catechism, accomplished by simply exchanging the one word "lifting" for "opening" ("opening the heart and mind to God"), succinctly captures the primary premise in his book - that prayer occurs primarily at God's initiative and our efforts are simply to predispose ourselves to his initiative. God is always the initiator and the dominant partner in prayer! The rigid structure that I had been taught and since abandoned - that I now see as so performance based - was to pray according to ACTS (adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication). It is almost laughable that I would imagine reducing something as intimate as "adoration" to a stepwise formula! So when Green actually made specific reference to this very "catalogued prayer" of ACTS and stressed that we need to go much deeper than "acts" of our own, I was helped to see the limitations of my past prayer efforts and affirmed for abandoning such efforts in a quest for something deeper. I am tired of making formulaic speeches to God and desire for listening to become a more crucial element of my prayer. I have always found it so much easier to encounter God by listening to him through scripture than by talking to him in "prayer". I wondered why my scripture meditation could be so rich while my prayer life so empty. Green very helpfully reminded me, through his statement that our "principal sourcebook of Christian meditation is the scripture", that my consistent discovery of God though scripture meditation constituted prayer proper, albeit the prayer of the beginner. Furthermore, he suggested that "the first breakthrough in our life of prayer is when our meditation or contemplation becomes easy and joyous. When we find much fruit in just a few verses of scripture" (p. 115-116). In recent years, my meditation of scripture has indeed become increasingly easy and joyous and Green's reassurance that this may represent a "breakthrough" is most validating for a struggling pray-er like myself. However, I view myself as still a "beginner" and recognize that there is more. Green reassures the reader of this prospect by entitling his final, brief chapter "Prayer Beyond the Beginnings".

Review # 2 was written on 2016-03-25 00:00:00 ITUMELENG Tshabalala Wonderful little short book on prayer.