Praying and Reading

I began teaching Prayer 101 this week so I decided to do a little reading about prayer. Roberta Bondi’s To Pray and to Love, Conversations of Prayer with the Early Church has been on my shelf for a while. I started reading it in seminary and only got through a couple of chapters. That happens a lot in seminary. Any book that is not required reading has a pretty good chance of being shelved in favor of something that from a current class.

Bondi’s work is very interesting in its appeal. Some people I know find it very light and uplifting, some find it a little hard to get through. I don’t know why that is, but I am somewhere in between. I love what she has to say, but sometimes I get a little bogged down in it.

In To Pray and to Love does a wonderful job of placing the early writings on prayer from Christian monastics in a more contemporary context. Bondi helped me see how similar my modern struggle with prayer is to the struggles that the earliest Christians had. As in all her work, she also reminds us of the depth and far-reaching nature of life of prayer. She says it in rich, deep ways, but also says it simply with the words, “prayer is a shared life with God.”[1] If that was all this book offered, a reminder that prayer is more than simply something we do, but rather a way that we live, than the book would be worth reading.

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[1] Roberta Bondi, To Pray and to Love, Conversations of Prayer with the Early Church, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991) 27