Lessons from the Vineyard: On the Pedagogy of Prayer Kalamazoo 2013: “Mystics and Mysticism,” In Memory of Paul Lachance

How would you like to be an anthropologist in a medieval convent? Let’s say at the Rupertsberg, where Mistress Hildegard receives a celestial vision every week—or Unterlinden, where the sisters scourge themselves in concert to delight God’s ears? I often think that our work is not unlike historical anthropology. Alas, we cannot interview our informants or observe them with our own eyes and ears. But if we have rich textual sources and a decent knowledge of history, practicing a hermeneutics of empathy is a bit like being a participant observer. We can at least imagine how it would feel to believe as people once did, behave as they did, and share their fears and desires. Yet, no matter how fully we immerse ourselves in an imagined world of the past, we cannot help knowing that our experience is, in fact, imagination. So our immersion is necessarily self-limiting; we can never truly “go native.”

The real participant observer walks a fine line between empathetic belonging and critical distance, engagement in an exotic subculture and allegiance to intellectual values that stand outside that culture. So, in a review of Tanya Luhrmann’s masterpiece of religious ethnography, When God Talks Back, Bruce Hindmarsh asks, “What kind of ‘theory of mind’ is necessary to account for the way one must split one’s mind in half to enter into religious rituals genuinely, doing the Ignatian exercises and the Alpha course, while still holding back another part of the mind, behind a social scientific firewall, to engage in analysis, critique, and theorizing?”¹ This is not a bad description of what some of us do—except that our firewall is thicker, and our bodies must remain behind it too.

When God Talks Back is a book that would have fascinated Paul Lachance, who taught the art of prayer at a Catholic seminary with a largely Protestant student body. The technology of prayer—how it’s taught and learned, and how it transforms the minds of those who pray—is precisely Luhrmann’s subject. She conducted her fieldwork at two Vineyard congregations, one in Palo Alto, the other in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, where Paul used to teach. So it’s not impossible that some of her informants were among his students.

The Vineyard is a thirty-year-old charismatic, “renewalist” church that emphasizes a close personal relationship with Jesus, forged through dialogical prayer. What Luhrmann wanted to find out is how believers, coming from secular modernity, learn to pray in such a way that “God talks back” by planting in the mind articulate thoughts, words and images. Or, to put it differently, how does the invisible God become so “personlike”—her word, not mine—that a devotee can go on dates with the Almighty or set him an extra coffee cup at breakfast? Luhrmann and her informants agree that creating such a relationship is not easy. Even after the divine presence becomes subjectively real to the believer, this intimate God must remain God—not just a consoling imaginary friend. Hence, “to an observer, what is striking is how hard people work to feel confident that the God who speaks to them in their mind is also the real external God who led the Jews out from slavery and died upon the cross.”²

Luhrmann explores the skills and mental disciplines of Vineyard prayer in three stages. Learning to pray in conversational form is the first. This involves plucking certain mental contents out of the random flow of thoughts and learning how to distinguish the sort of things God would say and the voice in which he says them. Next comes the training of imagination—what Luhrmann, following C. S. Lewis, calls “let’s pretend” play.³ It is the believer’s trained imagination that “makes God personlike,” or as I would prefer to say, enables the transcendent God to be experienced as immanent. To develop this ability, the initiate goes for walks with Jesus, chats with him about daily trivia, imagines him...