Book Review: Opening to God: Childlike Prayers for Adults by Marilyn McCord Adams
By Frederick Quinn
During her five years as Regius Professor of Divinity and Canon at Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, 2004-2009, Marilyn McCord Adams was widely known for her sermons, which she worked on all day Saturday and delivered without notes on Sunday morning. She was equally known for the specially composed prayers with which she concluded services of choral evensong. The place for the three concluding collects chosen by the canon in residence allowed Adams “an opportunity to speak in another voice and to try and convey the relevance of what we had just done in another way.” Some 258 of these prayers were published in 2008 by Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, Kentucky. “Over time, I got more comments on these prayers than I did on any of my sermons,” she wrote in the book’s introduction. “People reported themselves moved, surprised, provoked, or startled. It seemed that the prayers had touched something. My guess is that it touched their own desire to be childlike with God.”
The prayers were written for the specific Christ Church Cathedral setting, with its steady flow of global tourists. Many of those attending the six p. m. daily service might have limited fluency with English and less familiarity with the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. Adams envisioned a congregation of children between the ages of seven and ten years of age, with a good command of language, an awareness of the world around them, ”but who are not yet civilized into adult inhibitions.” The language is frank, trusting, and uninhibited, different from that of the public services in the Book of Common Prayer that “get treated as the Emily Post or Miss Manners of prayer practice, authoritative manuals instructing us in the approved terms of flattery and self-deprecation.” Instead, it is a response to Jesus’ invitation to enter the kingdom of heaven as children.
Presently Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and formerly on the faculties of the University of California at Los Angeles and Yale University, Adams concludes that such prayer “is a way of sharing the ups and downs, the disastrous failures and wrenching losses, the satisfactions and sweet successes, all the twists and turns of our lives with God.”
The prayers are gathered under three headings, Opening the Self to God, Faith Seeking Understanding, and caring for God’s World. The language is not carved in stone. The author suggests that readers try different prayers that speak to them, not as finished works, but as models for their own efforts. This is a book that could easily be used by parish prayer groups and in adult classes, and for laity and clergy bold enough to move their prayer life in a new direction. It could easily become a “go to” volume in daily prayers and is eminently worth adding to the small shelf of devotional works from which a person draws.
Three representative prayers provide an example of Adams’ work: On Death (29), Terrorism (187) and For the Incarnation (83).
On Death
O God, you made us out of dust. But it’s hard to believe that the people we love are just fancy mud pies. For years we’ve known them as full of life and creativity, working towards goals and polishing skills. We’ve experienced them as persons we connect with – giving and receiving and living so deeply into relationships that we scarcely know how to say who we are and what we’re about without them. It’s hard to accept that all of this – they and we – will unravel. O God, help us trust you with our dead. Enable us to trust you with ourselves. Through Jesus Christ. Amen.
Terrorism
O God, even within our own families, we sometimes get so upset that we splatter our anger all over the room onto whomever happens to be around. But there are orders of magnitude. What would it be like to think it permissible, even a right and noble thing to blow up oneself and other human beings with bombs? O God, the thought terrifies us, the reality so stuns us that we don’t want even to understand this. Only your mind is wide enough to take this in. Only your heart is deep enough to love the perpetrators and be good to the victims. We need your wily wisdom to persuade us, to teach us how to love together in better ways. Amen.
For the Incarnation
O God, when life gets really difficult we sometimes wonder where you are and why you aren’t making it easier. You know how readily we feel abandoned, worry that you are hostile or really don’t care. O God, thank you for reassuring us at Christmas that you are not aloof but ready to share our lives. Thank you for being with us in the good times. Thank you more for being with us in the worst times, when projects fail, when relationships shatter, when love is lost through betrayal or death. Thank you for being Emmanuel, with us always, no matter what. Through Jesus Christ. Amen.
Frederick Quinn is an Episcopal priest, holds a doctorate in history from the University of California at Los Angeles, and has written books about law, history, and religion.