Liturgy in the Wilderness
How the Lord's Prayer Shapes the Imagination of the Church in a Secular Age
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
What you pray . . . shapes what you believe . . . shapes how you live.
The Lord’s Prayer is a beautiful, subversive passage of words given to the church by Jesus. It forms our imaginations and—given time—transforms us. And today, we are in desperate need of renewed imaginations. Christians are living in a wilderness of secularism. The historic Christian faith is seen as absurd at best and dangerously oppressive at worst. Followers of Jesus must begin to imagine life as a faithful minority who are ever seeking to subvert what is evil with good, what is hateful with love, what is corrosive with nurture.
In Liturgy in the Wilderness, Anglican priest D. J. Marotta shows how the Lord’s Prayer provides a framework in our secular age for understanding, believing, and living in light of Jesus Christ. When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we’re planting seeds that can split concrete. We’re dripping water that can wear away granite. We’re shifting spiritual tectonic plates that lie deep beneath culture, society, and the depths of our own hearts. When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, our imaginations are stirred, moved, and transformed. We’re taken apart and put back together. We’re stripped of our idols, addictions, and false hopes. We’re offered new words of trust and mission. And we begin to see the world differently—the way Jesus saw it.
With this book, Marotta awakens our hearts to the beauty, sustaining power, and bounty of the Lord’s Prayer and shows us how to live faithfully in the wilderness.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Anglican priest Marotta debuts with a spirited if less than convincing close reading of the Lord's Prayer. Because secularism stymies the imagination, the author contends, Christians must use prayer as "tinder" to fire it up. Marotta homes in on the Lord's Prayer and suggests that its appeal lies in its simplicity, as well as its ability to foster connection through communal recitation. Offering a line-by-line analysis of the prayer, the author suggests that "our Father" implies that each Christian has a "family relationship" with all other humans, even sinners, and constitutes a radical call for empathy. He continues that the phrase "hallowed be thy name" ensures God stays at the center of one's prayers. However, Marotta's cultural commentary comes across as reductive and tangential, as when he defends the assertion that the " ‘Our Father' phrase subverts... the idolatry of the nuclear family" by postulating a false dichotomy, asking if readers would prefer "having a happy, successful family where everyone has nominal faith or a suffering, struggling family" with deep faith. The author's punchy prose ("Most people have an allergic reaction to the idea of calling God ‘Father' ") entertains, but some shaky interpretations drag this down. The result is a mixed bag.
