A searchable, downloadable PDF of the original review appears below. Eugene H. Peterson Eugene H. Peterson is the pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church in Bel Air, Maryland and the author of several books. Printed by permission of the editors of CRUX, September, 1990 – the journal of Regent College.
The Transforming Friendship: A Guide to Prayer, James M. Houston. Batavia, IL: Lion Publishing, 1989. 304pp., hb., $14.95.
He spotted this book, James Houston’s The Transforming Friendship in my attaché case and said “That book, that book made me want to pray. That’s the finest book on prayer; that made me want to pray. All the other books told me that I should pray, but that one made me want to pray.” Scott was a senior at a midwestern seminary where I was a guest, giving lectures on his campus. I was between lectures and we were sitting over a cup of coffee and talking about the life of a pastor, which he was soon to be living fulltime. We were going over the difficulties that pastors in particular seem to have in maintaining and deepening a life of prayer. The pressures of congregational life seem to be so powerfully externalizing, so insistently casting the pastor in the role of religious program director that there is little energy left for interiority, for prayer that is anything other than ceremonial. The job descriptions that congregations hand to pastors don’t ordinarily have prayer high on the list, if on the list at all. That is the place in the conversation at which Scott noticed the book and exclaimed, “That book, that book made me want to pray.”
Though I was carrying the book with me, I had not yet read it, and was glad for this spontaneous witness that it was worth reading. My subsequent reading confirmed Scott’s witness, “that book, that book made me want to pray.” It is always a pleasure to find a friend in a book. My reading became a long and leisurely conversation with a likeminded, like-spirited companion.
James Houston uses two sources to provide substance to the practice of prayer and its metaphor “friendship.” First and primarily, the biblical sources: he immerses us in exegetically rich and meditatively warm considerations of the biblical prayers: prophets and psalms, the praying of Jesus in the comprehensiveness of the Trinity, and the prayers of Paul. All this praying is understood in the context of friendship with each other and with God. The other source that Houston engages is the extensively praying Christian church. He has made friends with people who pray. He knows Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, Luther and Calvin, George Herbert and Francis de Sales.
Commenting on Paul’s practice of praying in company “with all the saints,” we are encouraged to do what Houston himself has done, “read the great classics of the Christian faith” in order to understand how other Christians have grasped this same love of Christ. So the writer of the Cloud of Unknowing actually explores the “width, length, height and depth” of Paul’s prayer. We rob ourselves if we do not learn to live with Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Martin Luther, Jonathan Edwards and the whole host of the saints who have truly been friends of God. This love for the people of God, which characterized Paul’s own life, should mark us out too. We will pray much more richly when we pray “with all the saints.”
The controlling metaphor in the book is “friendship.” Prayer is friendship with God, or in Clement of Alexandria’s wonderful phrase quoted on the first page, “prayer is keeping company with God.” It is quite natural, then, that men and women who pray by keeping company with God should also keep company with each other and become good friends. Houston’s style and tone invite this conversational response. He is completely unpretentious. He does not set himself as the master to whom we become apprentices. He insists that he himself is ever a beginner and no dabbler or dilettante.
Since friendship is the metaphor that shapes our practice of prayer, it is obvious that anything that smacks of the technological is out of place. Friendships do not thrive on formulas or techniques; we have to be there, put ourselves in company with the other, and see what happens. We are dealing with innerness, something organic, that must grow, not outerness that can be engineered. Houston aims to get in touch with the totality of our innerness – temperament, personality, culture – and realize this assembled wholeness as responsive to God.
In his chapter, “Friendship within the Holy Trinity,” Houston is at his very best, setting before us a rich harvest of mature reflection. The theological structure of the Trinity, which is to say, a comprehensive and personal doctrine of God, is correlated with a careful exegetical treatment of Jesus’ prayer in John 17, the Son praying to the Father through the Spirit. This kind of integration of theology, Scripture, and experience is masterfully executed and permeates the entire book. Our theological minds are engaged along with our praying spirits with and over the pages of holy Scripture.