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Welcome to our feature interview for Insights, the faculty journal of Austin Seminary. I am William Greenway, editor of Insights and Professor of Philosophical Theology. The author of our lead essay for the spring 2022 issue of Insights is Dr. David Johnson, Professor of Church History here at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

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This issue of insights is published in celebration of Professor Johnson's retirement after long years of service to the church, both as a pastor and as a professor. Dr. Johnson received his Bachelor of Arts from Yale University, his Master of Divinity from the Yale Divinity School, and his PhD from Princeton Theological Seminary. Over the course of his career, he served for nearly 20 years in pastorates at Wilson Memorial Union Church in Watchung, New Jersey.

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Did I say that right, David? Yes. Watchung, New Jersey, at First Presbyterian Church in Irving, Texas, and at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Galveston, Texas. He has also held innumerable posts in Grace Presbytery and at the national level with the PC USA.

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including work for more than a decade as co-faculty advisor for the company of new pastors. He has served as Professor of Church History and Christian Spirituality at Bright Divinity School at Texas Christian University and here at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Here he has also served as the Director of the Certificate in Spiritual Formation Program and as the Director of Ministerial Formation. He is the author of numerous publications and the book Trust in God: The Christian Life in the Book of Confessions.

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Again, the title of Professor Johnson's essay, which we will discuss today, is Praying in Anxious Times. An abbreviated written version of this discussion will appear in this issue of Insights. Welcome, Professor Johnson. We are looking forward to hearing your insights about prayer and praying in anxious times.

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Thank you, Bill. I'm happy to meet you. So first, I want to thank you for your insightful essay and for your decision to focus upon anxiety and prayer in years made anxious because of COVID. This edition of Insights is meant to honor your career as a church historian, and while you do not address church history directly, your essay wonderfully demonstrates the significance of history for understanding and addressing current concerns.

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I thought it was a terrific idea to turn to Julian of Norwich, who, as you say, survived a brutal illness and lived through the bubonic plague and a civil war in the 13th century, and to Karl Barth, who lived in the heart of Europe during both the first and second world wars in the 20th century. I thought it was brilliant to look to them to gain the insight into the potential of prayer in anxious times. So let's start with the principles for prayer that you discern in Julian of Norwich.

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The first of the principles you discern in Julian is an emphasis upon the love of God. And you combine this with her exhortation to pray, even if prayer seems dry and empty to us. Why do you want, why did you want to stress this exhortation to pray, even if it feels futile? I think that one of the fallacies of what I'm trying in talking about prayer is that

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Prayer is supposed to feel good. Now there are some people who approach prayer in a really crass, materialistic way, like I prayed 30 minutes a day to double my income. But a lot of the literature, the devotional literature that is out there, talks about the rewards of prayer which I don't want to denigrate that which can be real but not everybody experiences that and the people who don't often think they are doing something wrong or there is nothing at all to this prayer business Julian

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has a pastoral emphasis. She wants to help people who need help, and particularly she wants to help people who need help with their spiritual life. And so she emphasizes that how you feel about your prayer, whether it's rewarding or dry or empty or a mountaintop experience, how you feel about it is not how God feels about it.

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God, the God who loves you, wants to hear your thoughts and wishes and feelings. In the same way, a parent, I think, wants to hear what the children are saying and thinking. And it doesn't really matter what the children are thinking or talking about.

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It's communication based on love and mutual regard. And so I think Julian's words to people who might be having difficulty praying is God hears you, God loves you, God cares about what you say, and you can trust God to be there for you no matter how your prayer feels at any particular time. Where do you think this confidence in God's love and that God rejoices in our prayers, where does this come from?

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And especially how are people supposed to have confidence in that if prayer is feeling pointless to them? Well, for Julian, Her confidence comes from her conversations with Jesus Christ. The book showing recounts a series of visions or revelations that she had while she was very ill, ill to the point of dying.

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There is a crucifix in front of her. The crucifix comes to life And they talk to each other. They have extended conversations.

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The Christ who is on the cross assures her of God's love. The Christ who is on the cross assures Julian of Christ's love. And Julian emphasizes that. It is one of the, she's,

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not unique, but at least distinctive in her throughgoing emphasis on God's love and how that love is manifested to us in our own lives. Now, not everybody is going to have that kind of experience, but I think one of the grounds for Julian's popularity in the 20th and 21st centuries is that people need to hear that. People need to hear that God is love.

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And if they hear that secondhand through reading books, it still works. It still is the assurance of God's love. Now, there is, of course, the Bible, and Throughout the Bible, you find expressions of God's love.

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You find other sorts of expressions. You certainly find expressions of God's wrath in the Bible too. But I think the emphasis that God is love is both scriptural and is there in the Christian tradition. And in that sense, the words from Scripture are trustworthy.

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And it seems to me that the words of Julian are trustworthy as well. So the second principle you discern in Julian is that the purpose of prayer is to unite us to God. Yes. And you speak of this in terms of our transformation, and in particular, our release from sin.

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Is this the only purpose of prayer or the ultimate purpose of every type of prayer, whether it's petition or confession or thanksgiving or any other, is the ultimate purpose of every type of prayer to unite us to God? In this sense, are all prayers passed to the same, different ways to the same end? Well, it seems to me that all the prayers that are genuine prayer, bring us closer to God.

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That might not be the only thing that they do. But praying is communication. And one of the ways that you keep love alive is through open communication.

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That is true for us as individuals with each other. That is true for parents and children. That's also true for God and the children of God. So prayers can do a lot of things.

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It is. standard in words from prayer, to divide prayers into different categories. Prayers of thanksgiving, prayers of intercession, prayers of petition. Talking about what the content of any particular prayer is, but every prayer is done with knowledge that we are talking to the God who loves us.

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We are transformed by that knowledge. Transformation may be slow. A lot of times it is slow. But it's a transformation that involves healing.

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It is a transformation that involves uniting our will with God's will and uniting our work with God's work. So I wouldn't say that The only thing that prayers do is to bring us closer to God. But I would say that every prayer does that no matter what else the prayers do.

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Can you say more about what this transformation feels like? I mean, how do we know it as we experience it? I think it's hard to discuss what the transformation feels like in general terms because it might be different for different individuals depending on where they are in their lives and what they're experiencing.

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But it seems to me that a part of the transformation would be the confidence in the presence of God and the goodness of God and the willingness to let our lives be shaped by that confidence. If you read Christians who write on spirituality throughout the tradition, you often find that there is an emphasis on decreasing the importance of material things in your life, being willing to give up things, not basing your identity on what you own.

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And so I think that one of the One of the signs of the transformation would be a less materialistic understanding of the importance of your life. Another sign would be that your capacity for love grows, and in particular, your capacity to love people who are disadvantaged, or your capacity to love even those who are your enemies.

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So that's what I would look for, the transformation, an increase in the capacity to love and a decrease in the importance to you of material things. Now, I'm sure those aren't the only things. This does not necessarily make you happy. It might...

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might be that you are subjected to tremendous suffering. But that shouldn't be news to anybody. The New Testament tells you that you have to pick up your cross. And you don't get to choose which cross you pick up.

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And even in Luke, it says pick up your cross daily. But the only way that you can do that, or the only reason you can do that is because of your trust in the love of God that will not abandon you. So you say sometimes it seems like our prayers are not being answered. No, but this is because, and I'm quoting you now, The answer is really who we are becoming.

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which speaks to the transformation we're just discussing. It sounds like in terms of you're talking about increasing in our capacity for love, our openness, our less desire for material things and things like that. But does that mean, would it be possible then to read you as saying that we should not pray, for instance, for physical healing or for escape from physical danger? And that if we do pray for these things,

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that we should not expect changes in our health or security. It seems like that was kind of what you were just saying now when you're saying, you know, daily picking up our cross or understanding what happened to those who were faithful in the New Testament. But the change we should expect is only a spiritual transformation. So what would you say to all this?

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And to people who might ask, well, you know, what about praying for healing or for a new job or safety on the battlefield? And if we do pray in these ways, should we not expect changes in what happens in the world, but only in our spiritual transformation? I would encourage people to pray for healing, to pray for safety, but to ask God for whatever they think they need. I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

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I think people should do that. But if what you ask God for does not come about, that doesn't mean that nothing has happened. That's actually the point that I want to make. Sometimes what has happened is

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within you, your own transformation. Sometimes what has happened is not apparent to you or to other people. That does not mean that nothing has happened. I think that it's important for people to understand that God hears prayers, that God desires to hear our prayers.

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And God does not censor our prayers in terms of the content, but God does not necessarily respond to prayer in the way that we expect or desire. That, to me, is the importance. We haven't talked about Barth yet, but that is, to me, the importance of what Barth says about God hears all prayers, but God perfects our prayers. And the perfected prayer is what is answered.

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But I think that God's love means that God is open to what is in our heart. And God does not abandon us or ignore us if we ask for what is in our hearts. I think the only way you can pray wrong is to try to lie to God. But the fact that your prayer does not seem to be answered does not mean that you have been abandoned.

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And that is the point that I want to mention. So the third principle you discern in Julian is, and again I'm quoting, Prayer begins in God. So what exactly does this mean or feel like, this sense that our prayers do not begin in us, but in God? What experiential or spiritual dynamics would lead us to accept or even just understand this idea?

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Well, Varian said that even the desire to pray is a prayer. that God works in individual souls to move them closer to God's own self. And prayer is a manifestation of that work. We pray in part because the Spirit

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moves us to pray. And so I think for people who might be saying, I tried to pray, I couldn't, it didn't make any sense to me. I tried to pray, nothing happened. I tried to pray and it seemed like I was just speaking empty words out into the blink, the very fact of praying.

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for you in Julian understanding. The very fact of praying means that God is already at work within you. And that no matter how prayer feels in any particular time, if you know the hymn, Sweet Hour of Prayer, and you sing that hymn, now, that was my grandfather's favorite hymn. I learned it against my will.

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He was a farmer. He would sing it to himself as he was out on the tractor picking fruit or something. It's not necessarily that way. The hymn does not describe everybody's experience, but the very fact that you try to pray

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Even if you don't think anything is happening, even if you think appointments are cruel, the very fact that you try to pray is an indication that God is already here. If you were to just sum up extemporaneously the essence of what Julian teaches us about praying in anxious times, what would you say? Do it. It's that simple.

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As Julian says, pray heartily. Now, sometimes are anxious because Things are dangerous. Things are scary.

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That's how life can get sometimes. Sometimes our anxieties seem to be coming from within us. Sometimes it's a response to what is outside of us. But Julian's understanding of prayer

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is that given God's love, given God's work, given God's desire to make you into the person that God intends you to be, don't stop praying. Don't worry about how it feels. Don't worry about what the results might be. Just do it.

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I think that's Julian's messaging. And I'm getting a little maybe ahead of ourselves here, but is it also fair to say, given how your emphasis is, is that prayer never substitutes for doing either, right? So if, in other words, you don't, if you're worried about healing, you don't pray for healing while not going to the doctor or not pursuing other means for the healing, right? So the prayer goes along with this, but it's never something you do

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instead of it's not what is that would that be correct? I think prayer is doing something. I wouldn't want to make too hard an opposition between praying and doing. I do think that if there is a divorce between what we pray for and what we do that that indicates there is some kind of problem and that

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may be part of the difficulty that I have, the common saying, the bumper sticker saying, let go and let God. Well, I think that we can let God and don't have to let go. If our transformation is one of the things that is happening in prayer, our transformation to a dead visible ghost.

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So now, Julian herself was an anchoress, which is something like a hermit. Anchoress and anchorites, men and women, were giving up living in secular societies. Julian lived in a little hut that was built on the grounds of the Cathedral of St.

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Julian of Norrish, actually built, it was a part of the church. Once an anchoress or an anchorite, anchorite or men, anchorist or women, once they went into their hut, they never came out of it. They nailed the door shut and a part of the liturgical act was of the anchoress or anchorite entry in the hut, they do a funeral.

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The idea is that this person is already dead to us. So Julia, in her hut, is going to be doing a lot of praying, but she is not going to be doing a lot of work in the world. She does talk to people. She does write her book twice.

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And what she has done has had considerable effect several centuries later. So I wouldn't want to make prayer and working as hard either or, but I would say that what you pray for and what you commit your life to ought to have some kind of identity. What you pray for and what you do should have some relations with each other.

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So all the doing should be consistent. So if you pray for the poor, you should also be doing for the poor would come across. And Julian in her own way is doing for others and she had people coming and she gave them guidance as well as her writing, right? Right.

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Is that correct? Okay. Well, let's you next move to Karl Barth and the first principle you discern in Barth is the same as the first principle you discern in Julian, and that is this love.

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Yes. Is that a coincidence, or do you think that would be the first principle that we would find in all sorts of theologians and mystics? Well, I wouldn't think it's exclusive to Barth and Julian, but I do think that you can find other theologians and traditions that approach something differently.

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One of the things that seems to me to be true, or at least Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, it seems to me to be true, is that in Calvin, you find the sovereignty of grace. In Barth, you find the sovereignty of love. and I think that sovereignty of grace is one of the things that shows up in Calvin's understanding of predestination that that God determines before creation that certain people are going to be saved and that has nothing to do with God's foresight of how they will live their lives.

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It's just God's decision. Barth is fairly critical of that, although he takes Calvin very seriously. So, now, I'm not entirely sure that that's all that there is to say. But it does seem to me that sovereignty of grace and the sovereignty of love in traveling on the one hand and brought on the other, look rather different.

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I do have a serious problem with people who talk about what God hates in terms of individuals rather than qualities of individuals' lives. It seems to me that there is solid ground in the New Testament. And I guess I've got first letters of John in mind as much as anything, that if you talk about God, you have to talk about God. But I think that the emphasis on God's love that you find in Julian and in a rather different way in Karl Barth is distinctive within their traditions.

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You quote Bart as saying that God commands us to pray and that God loves us is the meaning of God's command. So two questions. How do we hear that command to pray? And how is love the meaning of that command?

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Well, that actually has to do with Bart's whole approach to Christian method. You know, Bart, gives a very amount of time to ethics in his multi-volume work, Church Dogmatics, and the ethics is based on the command of God, but the command of God is the expression of God's love. We might not experience commands as things that are

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expressions of love. That's because there are things in life that command us that are not divine. But Bart is insistent that if you talk about God's commands, God's commands are based on law. And one of the commands is to pray, love, fall,

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famously says, Pray without ceasing. There are various interpretations of what he actually meant. Make your desires known to God. Pray to God.

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Pray to the one who loves you. Don't clam up. And that is not just a suggestion, but that means, I think, for us that Prayer is a matter of obedience, and how that prayer might feel at any particular time is kind of irrelevant.

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But I think that the basic principle is one thing you see all through Barth, that God does command, but God's commands are expressions. That's right. So the second principle you discern in Barth is that God answers all prayers. But actually, we'll get to that in a moment, because in that section, you actually, what you emphasize is that God hears the prayers of all.

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So the emphasis is on the all, whether they're Christian or not, saint or sinner. So what do you make of this emphasis upon this kind of universal inclusion? I think that's entirely consistent with Bart's theology. You find a kind of universalism that shows up in...

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Barth in many places. He does say, and this is in his doctrine of reconciliation, that God justifies all, God sanctifies all, and God gives a vocation to all. And that is decisively universal. Christians, Christians in the church, have a special job to do.

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And their job is to announce the grace of God, to share good news. But the love of God, for Barth, is universal. God loves all of his children.

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And God's love in one way is expressed in the willingness to hear all prayers. And I think that means prayers that aren't explicitly prayers. might be a wish or a hope. I hope my child does well in his exam today.

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It's almost a prayer. I hope that my friend who has cancer experiences healing. That's almost a prayer, and I would argue that God hears those things as prayer.

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They're almost all you've got to do to make them actual prayer is you think about who it is you're talking about. I have heard a lot of people say things that I find problematic at best. One of the things that I've heard people say pastors say, television pastors say, they talk about prayers that God doesn't hear. Well, that seems to me to be almost blasphemy perception, that God

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Why would God create someone who God does not love? So the basis of the individualism, I think is, well, I think he would find scriptural New Testament justification. Does this mean that all will be saved? Well, Barth considers that question, and he said something like,

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We might deduce that from our theology, but God is not going to be bound by anybody's theological deduction. So universal salvation is not something we could deduce, but it is something we can pray for. So you also say that Barth says that God perfects our prayers. Yes.

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And is this the sense in which God answers all prayers? Because God perfects prayers that might be deficient. And so, I guess what sorts of prayers need perfection? What are the sorts of deficiencies that Barth has in mind?

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What would be the characteristics of a perfected prayer? Well, I'm not sure you can address that in general term, but I think you might have to look at particular prayers by particular individual. But the closing of prayer with the words in Jesus' name or in Christ's name. Now, and this is one of the places where I have heard people say that if you don't say that, God doesn't hear that prayer.

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It seems to me to be wrong. The point of saying in Jesus' name is, is this the kind of a prayer that Jesus would pray? Or is this the kind of prayer that Jesus would not pray, the kind of prayer that Jesus would refuse to pray? So if, say, you prayed that someone that you do not like, someone who has injured you,

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If you pray that someone who has injured you should suffer misfortune. God, Fred ran all over my lawn and messed it up. So I would like you to give Fred terribly itchy skin rice that would last for several weeks. Well, I think, you know, that seems to me is

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not a prayer that Jesus would pray or encourage us to pray, but that prayer might be perfected in a way that says, God, Fred, give me an injury. And so I ask you to take away my anger and help me to understand that Fred is just a person who's trying to get along just like everybody else is. Now, is that a perfect prayer?

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Probably not. But is that a prayer that is directed at, that acknowledges your anger, but that still is concerned with present welfare? I think that's the kind of thing that a perfected prayer might look like. Now, that's just an off the top of my head example.

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As far as I know, none of my neighbors have racked up my yard. But I think that's the kind of thing that it seems to me Buck has in mind. Sort of a prayer that would turn hate into love and would turn anger into forgiveness. And you'd see a deep tie here, right, to Julian and talking about how the end of prayer is the transformation of ourselves.

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So this would be an example of that. And you say here, sometimes we think the prayer has not been answered, but actually the prayer has been perfected. And so seeing the answer is a matter, I'm quoting now, a matter of faith, and not sight.

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But that sight would be more about expectation of things that might happen which really aren't consistent with the love of God or something like that. Can you maybe unpack that line where you talk about a prayer, you think it hasn't been answered, but it's because it's been perfected, it's a matter of faith, not sight. It seems to me that that would tie into what you were just talking about. You know, partly it means that we cannot judge the effectiveness of prayer and empirically.

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Although I have read some articles that try to do just that. But I think that we pray with trust. And the trust is that God will first of all hear our prayers And secondly, respond to our prayers in a way that is an expression of God's love.

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We might not experience that. It might happen outside of our sight. But it seems to me that's part of what it means when in the Lord's Prayer, We say, Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.

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And we don't, in the Lord's Prayer, we don't get to what we actually need until the second-half of the prayer, when we say, Give us this day our day of bread. And bread symbolizes all, all that we might need there. But we don't say that part until after we have said, Thy tend to come.

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And so I think that that is, that's what I've got in mind when I say that having faith that prayers are answered might not be a matter of seeing, but the faith is that the fact that we don't see it doesn't mean that it didn't happen. And is there something about that dynamic of praying, and here, I'm getting ahead of myself maybe again here, because you say we can't measure it empirically, but maybe we could measure whether people are changed over time through prayer. And it seems like that's an effect you expect when you say, God, the answer is all prayer. Yeah, yeah, well, maybe I should not.

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make statements so unequivocally that prayers cannot be judged in prayer. Sometimes they can't. But the fact that, now let me say it again. I was about to say something I said just a few minutes ago, but I will say it again.

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The fact that we don't see something happen doesn't mean it didn't happen. The fact that we don't see how God could be at work in this particular situation does not mean that God is not at work in this situation. That's the difference between faith and sight. Sometimes we see, sometimes we don't.

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And then you make an interesting move in the essay, 'cause up to now, when we've been talking about prayer or thinking about it, I think it would be natural for all of us to think of it in individual terms. But the next thing you stress, again, moving from Barth, is the R in the Our Father, and how prayer is a communal activity. And what is it about that you want to emphasize? And is there a sense in which, even when Julian is praying alone in her hut, that it's still, or other, you know, the desert, mothers or fathers, is it still a communal activity?

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Is there a sense in which it's always a communal activity, as well as an individual activity? There's a reason that the Lord's prayer doesn't start with my father. Actually, this is kind of a quit note, but let me say it. From the very first Christian treatise on prayer, which was written by Origen in the 3rd century, up to the present day, people have used the Lord's Prayer not just as a prayer to say, but as a model for what prayer should be.

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And so starting the Lord's Prayer with our Father, means that we pray with other people. I mean, sometimes we know what we're doing. If we're in a congregation, we pray together.

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That's one of the things that congregations do. But even if you are alone, even if you are following the directions of Matthew 6, when you pray, go into your room, shut the door. close the blinds, turn off the TV. Is that all in Matthew six?

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I don't remember the TV bit. Well, you know, it's implied. Anyway, the fact that you are alone and pray does not mean that the prayer are alone because other people are praying at the same time.

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The prayers that we pray are shared prayers. Now, they're from our individual points of view. One of the aspects of faith in prayer is faith that when we pray, we are not alone. That

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Other people are praying in their own individual ways who are humans who experience the things that humans experience. Not just the good things, but the pain and the worry, the anxiety, the trials. We pray together. And God, that seems to me that God knows us as individuals, but God knows us as a people as well.

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Now, we've been talking about praying throughout here, so this might seem like an obvious question, or I don't know, but at the same time, maybe a difficult question. What would you say the essence of prayer is? I mean, if you were simply to describe it, not Bard or Julian, although, you know, I would imagine consistent with them, what is it? What is the thing itself?

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What essentially is it to pray? I think to pray is to speak to the one who led us. That's part A, and part B is to surrender to the will of the water above God. Prayer is talking to God, but we should have some idea of the God to whom we speak, and we should also remember that

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The Lord's Prayer bids us to pray, Thy will be done. So in that sense, to pray is on the one hand to ask for what we think would be, but it's also to submit to God's will. So you frame your essay with talking about the famous foxhole prayers, there's no atheists in foxholes. And also in reference to a young boy and W.

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Somerset Baum's book on human bondage. And so the boy in the book is Philip Carey and he prays to be healed of a club foot. And I want to ask a couple of questions in relation to these examples. So and first, how is a prayer in a foxhole a real prayer?

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how might it need to be perfected? And let me build on that a bit. And let's say I'm in a foxhole and I pray, but in short order, a shell explodes in my foxhole and I'm killed. And so how in that...

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context? Would you speak of my prayer and it's being answered? Or let's say I survive and am grievously wounded. And maybe you're the chaplain who goes in and comes and talks to me.

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How in that context do you talk about that prayer and it being answered? Or and the prayer being perfected? Sometimes people live and sometimes they're wounded and sometimes they're killed. But I think that the perfected prayer might be something like, God did not abandon me, and God saying, I will not abandon you, even through death.

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And at that point, the last few verses of Romans 8 come to mind. Now that's something that also is a matter of faith about sight. But I think that God saved me, or God did not let me be wounded, or God did not let my friends die. It seems to me that the response to that

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from God's side is something like, I will not abandon you even in pain or moving or death. Now, as you tell us, in W. Somerset Baum's book, the young protagonist, Philip Carey, reads that the one with enough faith can move mountains through prayer, so he prays for his foot to be healed. The foot is not healed, so he goes to the Reverend, who's also his adoptive father,

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and asks why he has not been healed. And the Reverend tells him that it proves that he does not have enough faith. That's why it's not been healed. You say that his uncle's response was rather cruel.

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I wholeheartedly agree with you. It also appears to reflect an understanding of prayer very different from that of Julian or Barth. So what would you have said to that young boy? Well, okay, first of all, I think

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In the book, mom is very careful. Philip does not tell his guardian, I prayed it didn't happen. It was more devil turn. Why did somebody pray for something that didn't happen?

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At that point, the guardian said, The life suppose it means he didn't have enough plea. And then a few sentences later, Philip concludes that nobody has enough plea. What would I say in that particular situation? I'm not sure.

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Quite honestly, I am not sure. I think that I would certainly want to say that your disability does not separate you from the love of God. that God's will was that you endure this for whatever reason. And you can do that with grace and faith and a sense of humor and the sense that your life still has value.

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I think I would try to say something like that. I wouldn't want to make it cheap. I wouldn't want to... I wouldn't want to give young Philip gratitude.

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But I do often think about the situation in the Gospel of John where Jesus encounters a blind man and he is asked, who sinned, this person's parents or himself that he was blind? And Jesus responded, nobody sinned. Nobody sinned, but this was done to show the glory of God, and then he heals them.

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I haven't come back to that story. And I wonder about, I think about the ways in which those who are unhealed can still be manifestations of the glory of God. And I think that happens. Actually, I know that that happens.

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But I also know that people who are wounded in some way, physically or psychologically or spiritually, suffer because of their wounds. and think about, is there some kind of calculus that means that I have to endure this because of something else? Now, you know, Phillip Carey goes on and lives a life.

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Somehow, that experience, that early experience, which it seems reflects something of mom's own life, was so wounding that you lost faith. Well, I think that I would want to say to anybody, particularly people who suffer with mental disabilities, first of all, The fact that you are disabled does not at all mean that you are, you have lost your worth as a person.

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Your value as a person does not depend upon your disability. The second thing I would say is that you can still do something, and a part of your task as a disabled person is to find what it is that you can do and to do it. It might take you a while.

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You might not be able to play wide receiver for the Denver Broncos, but you can still do something and you are a valuable person and what you can do is valuable work. It's interesting you go to, 'cause many commentators think the club foot in Mom's novel, and I say this 'cause I looked it up, not that I'm expert in Mom, whose name I couldn't even say, but that it may be a stand-in for his own stutter. He stuttered. And it's interesting that Philip Carey in the novel becomes a doctor after he doesn't get healing.

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Mom becomes a writer. and makes a contribution there. It'd be interesting to think about that. And of course, those of us who know you know that complications and perhaps medical errors at birth left you permanently paralyzed from the waist down.

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So it's hard not to wonder if there are parallels between a young W. Somerset Nammam and a young Philip Carey and a young David Johnson. And if your scholarly insights into Julian of Norwich and Karl Barth and prayer may not also be rooted in a lifetime of hard-earned wisdom. And so this is my final question is, could you reflect upon your topic and your reflections upon prayer from that perspective?

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You already had just begun to do that, but I wanted to be sure to get the question in so everyone knew the context as you answered that question. Well, first of all, I'm not exactly paralyzed. I have cerebral palsy. Cerebral palsy is a brain injury associated with birth or shortly after birth.

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And what it looks like depends upon what part of the brain is injured. Well, mine is a little unusual in that my legs are rather severely compromised. my arms are not, and I, my speech is not. So partly that meant that I could make a living by talking, which I have done.

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But I did, I can't remember when I first read A Human Bondage. I was I might have been a teenager. And it might have been one of those books that is not the hundred books you should read before you go to college, which I took seriously.

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But I was struck by this passage, not because it reflected anything that I had personally done, but it did And I understood it. I really did understand it. I understood the desire.

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I understood why you have to pray to be healed. I understood the disappointment. And I understood how that could compromise or destroy one's faith. I understand that.

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For me personally, thinking about my own life, I think that my fundamental desire in relation to my disability was not to be healed as such, but it was to belong. It was to be a part of things. And that was what I really wanted. I wanted to be law.

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Well, you know, boys growing up compete with each other. You play football, you play basketball, you play volleyball, you roll around on the ground, you do that. Well, I was no great asset to the football team. or any other sport.

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I wanted to be because I wanted to belong. I wanted to be a part of that. So my prayer in relation to living with a disability, partly it is, you know, let me belong, let me be a part of things. But

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Finally it is, and I think more fundamentally it is, let me find ways to do what I love doing that I could do without reference to being disabled. And it seems to me that in terms of whatever gifts I've got, and in terms of where life has taken me, I've been able to do that. Would I like to have lived a life without a disability?

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Yes, of course I would. Sometimes I wonder if part of the reason that I have to live with a disability is because if I didn't have it, I might be dangerous. I might have got to beat somebody up or something.

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I don't know. I don't know. And I think there's a massive, I don't know, that is a part of the answer to any consideration of disability.

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Why am I blind? Why am I deaf? Why can't I not? I don't know.

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I honestly don't know. Once you get beyond the physiological, once you get to the point where, okay, Why did God allow this to happen? But at that point, I think, I don't know.

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But it doesn't mean that you are without worth, and it doesn't mean you have nothing to contribute. So your task in life, and now this is to myself and to other disabled people I've been, your task in life is to find that something that you can do and to do it as well as you can. Well, thank you, David.

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This has been a delightful and informative discussion. Thanks for taking on a deadly, serious, difficult, and vital topic that I think, especially today, with all the anxiety that's out there, is just so important to people. And thanks for your own vulnerability, and in addition to your addition, in talking to us about prayer.

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So thank you for your wisdom and we appreciate, we appreciate your insights. Thank you, Bill.