Getting Reading Again

6th December 2006

Categories : Christianity, Personal, Quotes, books |

Normally I’m a pretty avid reader, but since returning from Africa I’ve found myself struggling to find time to read. This is for a number of reasons including general busyness, work, the Christmas season, my body clock still being out of sync due to a succession of jet lag plus daylight savings, and a little machine called X-box 360… (more about that another time perhaps) Also contributing may be the fact that the last book I read (Dostoevksy’s The Brothers Karamazov) was a marathon effort, although well worth it.

Anyway, to help get me back into it I’ve turned to a couple of my favourite authors. Patrick O’Brian, with Clarissa Oakes, the 15th in his brilliant Aubrey-Maturin series. And Prayer by Philip Yancey. Yancey is one of my favourite Christian writers - easy to read and accessible yet without being dumbed down (in fact I believe it was Yancey who first led me in the direction of Russian authors such as Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn). His works are always insightful, down to earth and honest, drawing from a diverse range of sources.

In view of trying to lighten my load, I’m not planning to formally review the Prayer book, but I might just randomly post a few quotes from it on here as I read. Here’s a couple of good ones from the first chapter…

Prosperity may dilute prayer too… Christians in developing countries spend less time pondering the effectiveness of prayer and more time actually praying. The wealthy rely on talent and resources to solve immediate problems, and insurance policies and retirement plans to secure the future. We can hardly pray with sincerity, ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ when the pantry is stocked with a month’s supply of provisions. (p7)

life with God should seem more like friendship than duty. (p9)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 6th, 2006 at 8:41 pm and is filed under Christianity, Personal, Quotes, books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

1 On January 13th, 2007, Raymond R Brauer said:

Paul,
You are obiously a learned man of some note and I applaud you for your achievements.
However, I must take issue with you with regard to your inclusion of an extract from a prayer book on 6th of December last.
Throughout my entire life of Christian up-bringing the fact was always stressed that the plea ‘give us this day our daily vread(sic)’ does not infer literal bread but rather spiritual ‘manna’ fom heaven to give us spiritual sustenance to assist us in maintaining a true spiritual lifestyle rather than simply eating a slice of toast and marmalade.
Apart from your extract the only other person to uae the literal ‘bread’ conclusion is a pastor from the Phillipines who has a bible study program on ‘C31 - Melbourne’.
I look forward to reading more from your site.
Thankyou for your forebearance.
Rx

2 On January 15th, 2007, baggas said:

Raymond thanks for your interesting perspective, and although I think there is nothing wrong with your “spiritual sustenance” interpretation of the Lord’s Prayer, I disagree that this would be the most commonly held view of this line.

I regard the prayer for “daily bread” as a prayer for God to give us the basic necessities we need to manage in life, and while this may obliquely include the “spiritual manna” you refer to, I would guess that the vast majority of people would see this as referring to physical needs - maybe not always literal “bread” but certainly food, shelter, income etc. It’s such a simple, practical prayer - the rest of it is not made up of metaphors so why should anyone assume that this line is one?

I’d be interested to hear other people’s thoughts on the subject though…

3 On January 16th, 2007, Bob said:

To be honest, I had never considered spiritualizing the phrase “Daily Bread” to mean spiritual manna. I had always understood it in the concept of daily sustenance. That being said, I would have no problem of including the concept of daily bread being spiritual sustenance. But I couldn’t see that as being the sole interpretation.

I would tend to agree with Paul on this one.