Tolkien, Prayer, and Doing Theology with Ashish Varma

Hey everyone, welcome to Thinking Christians. This is James Spencer. I'm here with my co-editor of A Praying People, Dr. Ashish Varma. And we're going to be talking a little bit about the book and about the chapter, specifically the chapter that Ashish wrote in the book. So welcome, Ashish. Thanks for coming on. Ashish and I have worked together at a previous institution, Moody Bible Institute, for a lot of years. Ashish was a faculty member. I was part of the evil administration, and we worked together and collaborated on this project after the fact, after I had sort of moved on. And so it's a pleasure to have you here, man. Introduce yourself a little bit. Tell the people what you're doing now, kind of what your background is, and let's just hear from you from the horse's mouth who you are and what's got going on. Sure, yeah. Thanks for the introduction. And I'll say evil administration is pretty heavy-handed, but now that you're not part of that administration, the evil washes away, right? That's right. As soon as you leave, it's gone. As soon as you leave, it's gone. Yeah, my background is... Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up, and many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian-owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free Retirement Defense Guide or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. In systematic theology, did my PhD at Wheaton College under Kevin Van Hooser, which was a great experience, if not a stressful experience, not because of him, but it's just the process, as you know. Yep. Just, I love doing theology. I've loved it probably since early grad school when I was a history master's student and I had to take a course in theology and I encountered Henri Blocher. And I thought, oh, that's theology? And the way that he would just pull so many things together. Yeah. It was really what got me excited, and I think to this day, I don't think, I know to this day that that is what drove me in doing theology. I've loved the ability to be able to pull conversations together. Yeah. And that happens in teaching for me. It happens in writing, certainly in the piece that I wrote for A Praying People and in other work that I've done and have been doing. Just the exciting reality of being able to say all these things are interconnected and don't have to be heavy-handed and say, but I get to control that, but to marvel at it is what really animates me. Well, and since you brought Henri Blocher up, I'll tell my Henri Blocher story because I went to Wheaton as well. And so I didn't do the history masters, but he taught in the exegesis program when I was there. And there's just one moment in class where he stands up and he's lecturing and he stands up and he starts writing and explaining these things in Latin. And so he's writing Latin words up on the, at that point, it was a chalkboard. He actually had a chalkboard. He's writing Latin up and I lean over to the guy sitting next to me and I go, was I supposed to have Latin before I took this class? And the other guy is like, nope. And I'm like, okay, so we have no idea what he's saying right now. And he's like, yep. But Henri Blocher was one of my favorites and almost for exactly the reason you're saying. Like he was just able to draw so many little strands together and pull it into like sort of a cohesive whole. And the fact that he was just a really sweet old guy was pretty awesome too. So sweet. So sweet. Yeah. Well, and I want to, if I can, since we're here, I'll add on to your example of what he did with Latin. He would begin every class site translating from Greek or Hebrew, whatever the passage was he decided was most significant for the day and giving textual commentary and off the top of his head telling you what other commentators say about the passage and evaluating them before he'd give us a 10-minute break and then jump into issues of history or constructive theology or philosophy. And I remember, you know, pulling things together again. You know, you mentioned the Latin. I remember writing a review for him on one of Juergen Moltmann's book, a German theologian. Yeah. And he wrote me, his writing was tiny. Yeah. Like pull out a magnifying lens. He had a full page of comments at the back. He said, I love this review. You did a good job. I think you're right. And then he started giving me all of these quotes from the German edition of Juergen Moltmann's book. I read the English. That would further, he's like, you could have cited all these examples to further make your point. And I said, yeah, sure. Okay. Yes. I'm glad you agree. And I'm glad I think I was right. And then to add on to that, I remember I had a colleague in class who did his undergrad at Wheaton, was a philosophy major as an undergrad. And if I dare say, was a little full of himself. And I remember one day he, I don't even know why, but he didn't love what Bloche was saying, but he would do it in a way and it was like, look at me, look at what I know. And he said, you know, according to Gadamer, he says blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I don't even remember what the comment was, but I do remember Bloche's response, very gracious, just turns to me and says, actually on page such and such of Gadamer's Truth and Method, he says blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I went like this and I turned to that guy like, you better be sinking in your seat because you need to be quiet now. You need to stop talking when the guy actually cites the page. Off the top of his head. You're done. Just be done. Just be done. Exactly. So sitting in that man's classes, I thought, I don't think I could ever do what he does, but if I could approximate that, that's awesome. And I love that ability to pull so many things together so richly. Very cool, man. Well, what are you doing right now? I mean, I know you've written this chapter and we'll get to that, but what are you doing right now? Tell us about some of the work you're doing, especially for Bart Center, right? Yeah, for Princeton Seminary's Bart Center. They've launched this new online magazine called God Here and Now, which is named after one of Bart's books that's more accessible. And the whole point of it is to showcase doing theology that's deliberately practical. It doesn't come up as aloof, isn't devoid of technical conversations, but doesn't try to center those, tries to touch life, pull on anecdotes, those sorts of things. So I've wonderfully had the opportunity to be one of the, I don't know what you would call it, like a year-long fellow where I'll give them a piece every month for the next, we're a month or so into it already, but for the next 11 or so months now. And it's been a fun process because some of my former students work at the Bart Center, have gone or are going to that seminary. And so they're my editorial staff of sorts. And they come back and say, we can hear you in the classroom, but you need to tone down the technical. You used this example halfway through. Can we pull it to the beginning? And then I have to make my case for why I don't want, you know, those sorts of things. But it's been very fun. We're early on in the process. Just released a piece that's called, if I'm getting the title right, Resisting a Pure Theology, Theology in Proximity, where I'm drawing on the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, really influential fellow, probably more so after he passed, I think, wouldn't you say? I know he's been influential to you as well. He has, yeah. He's one of my, he's one of the sociologists I generally draw on, yeah. And really, really good work. Not necessarily the most accessible, but powerful in what he's doing. And one of his key points was sort of in a desire to defend the importance of his work as a sociologist amidst the attacks of, well, you're too close. You're allowing your biases to enter into your study, which is just a problem of sociologists, people would say. Yeah. His response was, you know, we have five senses, and too much of our lives are spent being taught that the most important ones are being able to see and being able to hear, which are certainly valuable, but you do those from a distance, right? I look down the road and I can see something or hear something, but I don't smell it. I don't feel it. I don't taste it. And so his case is that it's really important to truly understand something to have those, what he calls, senses of proximity to smell, or

But to me, I look on the other side and I see what greater theologian have we had than Jesus himself, and he picks up that seed, that little mustard seed. And it's tiny if you've ever felt one, and he says, faith is like this mustard seed. And his ability to be able to draw directly upon what people know in their everyday life, right? Or look down the side of the hill and say, look at the gates of that city. The gates of Hades shall not prevail. That's very experiential or doing theology, not just as, but in the midst of healing people, talking about sowers and weeds and oil and lamps, right? He didn't see life from a distance as the way to talk about God. And so I don't want to dismiss the wonderful gains we've had from doing theology in these more abstract ways, but I want to say, we shouldn't devalue the thought of doing theology from close by. And in fact, there are key questions that can animate us. Right. I think it was in his theology of revelation, Richard Bauckham talks about, no, maybe it was a different, it was a different book. But Richard Bauckham, New Testament theologian, he talks about, you know, we don't really experience God's omniscience in the abstract. We experience God's omniscience in the particular moments of our lives. For us, God's omnipresence, omnipresence, not omniscience, God's omnipresence is realized in the concrete moments of our lives. It's in discrete little packages. We don't experience it in its vastness. We experience it just in the moment. And I think that requires a proximity and a humility to say, look, yes, we understand that God is omnipresent. And as an abstract theological concept, it's really important to understand that. But in our day-to-day moments, we're not experiencing God in all of his vastness and all of his abstractness. We're experiencing God in these concrete moments right now. And both are important. We can't dismiss one or the other, but ultimately, I think you're right, we have overcorrected to the abstract and to the expense, really, of the concrete and have really, in theological methods, stepped away from thinking through how does my everyday experience actually inform the way I understand who God is? And does that hinder me in understanding God more faithfully? And does it help me understand God more faithfully? How does that all work? So I think it's great work you're doing, man. That's awesome. What's your next, do you have your next piece lined out or not? So I'm overdue on the abstract for it, but I do know what I want to do. I want to, in my mind, it's building. And obviously, I can't presume that people have read the last one to then move on to the next one. So I have to negotiate how that works out. But in my mind, anyway, it's a building thing where I want to say, okay, not only is theology and proximity a good and powerful thing, but theology belongs to story. So Jesus told stories when he was doing theology. But even the entirety of the revelation that we look to, the Bible given to us, is a story. It's a story with lots of different authors and lots of different movements and complexities, but it is fundamentally a movement from God creates to God recreates. And it's told in the manner of not just simply saying in some sort of staid, stoic way, well, you know God made this, and now I'm going to give you a lecture of 10 points as to what that means. It's God and the author of the scripture telling us a story about God creating. There's a wonderful book by Jonathan Gottschall where he talks about how no matter how hard we try to resist it, we are inherently creatures of story. And he loves to look to kids, right? It's not just that kids are these immature, naive beings who are dallying in the unimportant things. Because when you look at kids, you know, I have four little ones, and every moment of their wakeful lives is conjuring up stories. They're sitting at the dinner table and you have to try to get them to eat because they're spending all of their time making up these live-action scenarios where, you know, it could be, I'm Elsa and you're Anna and whoever the characters are of that movie. And they're reenacting it, right? But it's not just them, you know. We dream every night. We're working out our lives and story in our dreams. And if I'm assuming I'm not so unordinary, but I tend to zone out all day long in the middle of things and I'm thinking of stories, right? Or the reason that Netflix and Max and Prime are such popular and lucrative venues is that we've, that they, the movie-making and TV show-making industry has realized that if we just make continuous stories, then people will be hooked in, right? This isn't MacGyver from the 80s and early 90s where every episode is its own thing. This is Game of Thrones, right? Where it's eight seasons of majestic storytelling and people binge-watch it or any other story. So I want to tap into that and say, this isn't just some outside observation. If this is our Bible and this is how we tick, then theology too should be very driven towards telling stories, but also we're interpreting story, we're telling stories. What might it look like then to think about theology as narrative? And then I want to work from that in future pieces to not reimagine in the sense of reinvent a wheel, but reimagine in terms of being able to speak in ways that seemed to matter more to us. You know, what might sovereignty mean as within the theology of narrative instead of as this sort of mechanical, logical key puzzle to be solved or providence? So I think about someone like J.R.R. Tolkien, who I love and came into my essay in the book, who, he has this whole creation narrative that he wrote up for his Middle Earth called the Ainulindale. And in that, he's really laying out for you what you should be able to read through all the multivarious tales that he has through his legendarium. And that's that no matter how bad things get, God's providence is at work. But that narrative sort of understanding to me anyways, more compelling than trying to play a logical game. So I want to lay those sorts of things out and work them out over the course of the coming months. Well, I mean, since you brought up Tolkien and, you know, your essay is in the book of praying people is on Tolkien and how that relates to prayer. I mean, talk a little bit about like, ease us into this. I'm sure most people are familiar with Tolkien if they're familiar with him through the Lord of the Rings series. Or, you know, if they were like me, they had to read The Hobbit in high school or something like that. And then obviously the movies did a lot to sort of help the familiarity of it. I was watching a guy watch The Hobbit, The Desolation of Smaug on the airplane recently. And so, you know, these things have been made. Yeah, they've been part of popular culture. They've been sort of pulled in that way. And I actually think at least the first three movies did a pretty adequate job of translating the Lord of the Rings trilogy into, you know, more of a cinematic media. And so talk through it a little bit. You know, why is it that you decided to sort of bring Tolkien into a conversation about prayer? And how do you see him, you know, contributing to our understanding of prayer? Yeah, great question. I'd say first, I think Tolkien would have wanted that. I think Tolkien saw at least part of his work as interwoven with theology. So I think of a letter that he wrote to his publisher in the UK where he's sort of defending the complexity of his story. This is when he wrote, when he was trying to get The Silmarillion published, which didn't ultimately happen until after he passed. He says, look, what I'm doing here is complex because I don't believe in allegory. Now that brings up its own conversation, but for another time and another place. But he wasn't compelled by allegory, but he said allegory is too neat and simple. You know, this image relates to what we know of as that thing over there, right? And you can do that with everything. So he was friends with C.S. Lewis and they had that ongoing dispute. Lewis preferred allegory. Tolkien said no. But he said, that having been said, it's not as if what I'm doing here is fully fanciful in the most pejorative sense. What I'm doing is, and this is his words, he says, inevitably fully washed through with my belief in the triune God. So he was a committed Christian, believed in the Trinity, thought that the Trinity was significant for understanding reality. And while he never brings up even this direct notion of Trinity in his works, he thinks in his own editorial musings about what he's doing, that it's inevitably present in what he's doing. Because when I read that, this is a couple of decades ago now, I thought, wow, that's powerful. And, you know, you could go into the what he, he has a descriptive essay on this called On Fairy Stories, where he talks about how what we want to do here in writing this kind of literature.

He's sort of the creator of what we think of as modern fantasy literature. Yeah. Is to create a secondary world, but in creating that secondary world, this gives you insight into that trinity comment, is we're creating something that mirrors the world as we know it, just for a moment, if we forget that hobbits are strange. We're brought back to it when you describe, and they're the fully grown hobbit is, I don't know, four foot nothing and has huge feet and hairy feet and doesn't wear shoes. Right. So now you're not going to forget, okay, they're strange, but then you're drawn back into it again. And you're meant to identify through it. And his hope is there's enough similarity where you think of them as just little people as we know them, but enough difference that you have to reflect upon them. That now I can say something about the primary world, the world that God made, he says, through the mode of the secondary world, which is the world that he makes, the fantasy writer makes. And reading that, I thought, wow, this is rich. So he's inviting us to interpret as an act of enterprise. And in some ways, I remember the 20 years previous version of me, that gave me a deeper appreciation for scripture. Because with all the technical ways in which you can learn about languages and recreating contexts, the most powerful thing to me was realizing, oh, wow, he's right. All the things that he's doing here and the richness of his story really is an imitation of sorts of what we get in the very diverse reading of the Bible that we have through all these different books and authors. One of the things that he likes to pull on that motivated me here was he creates a stark contrast between those that embrace being tied to the world in which they're created. And by world, I don't mean structures of authority, governments, civilizations as we know them. I mean, simple seeming things, trees. Right. The natural world is kind of, right. Yeah, the space they inhabit. Yeah. Yeah. And he contrasts that with, you know, a very mechanical feel. And some of this is a product of his time, right? Where mechanical is especially geared to a man who lives within World War I, lives through the horrors of World War II as well, and is in the heart of it. He lives at the center of where those battles are not entirely, but many or most of which are taking place. Well, a fascinating discussion on J.R. Tolkien and a praying people. Ashish Varma is our guest today on Thinking Christian with Dr. James Spencer. More about this and those parallel worlds that he was talking about. Hi, I'm Richard Beattie. You're listening to Thinking Christian on Life Audio. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian-owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free Retirement Defense Guide or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. One of the things that he likes to pull on that motivated me here was, he creates a stark contrast between those that embrace being tied to the world in which they're created. And by world, I don't mean structures of authority, governments, civilizations as we know them. I mean, simple seeming things, trees. Right, the natural world is kind of, right, the space they inhabit. Yeah. And he contrasts that with, you know, a very mechanical feel. And some of this is a product of his time, right? Where mechanical is especially geared to a man who lives within World War I, lives through the horrors of World War II as well, and is in the heart of it. He lives at the center of where those battles are not entirely, but many or most of which are taking place. Yeah. And so for him, machinery is very much tied to destruction, the destruction of people, the destruction of heritages, homes, landscapes. And so he's reflecting on the other end of that, of what might it mean to value these things. And so he builds that in. So you have hobbits that live in holes in the ground. You have trees that are living entities, and they have themselves tree herders that look like trees and can disguise themselves. You have the guy who is sort of one of the facets of a Jesus type character, King Aragorn, or the man who will become King Aragorn, who he walks out and he says, find me. Oh, I forgot the name of it, but it's common tongue name was King's foil. And the reaction he gets is, oh, that's just a weed. What to other people was a weed was something he had a deep, intimate understanding of as someone who could track well and knew the ground. And he said, I can use this to heal. He saw it as a medicine and an herb, right? And all these things are littered throughout what Tolkien's doing in a way where he's trying to powerfully help us see that We are creatures in a theological sense who belong to the dust of the ground. And if he can get us to think about that more fully, maybe that affects us from an ethical standpoint. Maybe it affects us as well from the standpoint of reimagining what it means to encounter God. So as we encounter God, or at least believe we encounter God in the midst of climate controlled warehouses or stone cathedrals, you know, whatever one's tradition is. Moses encounters God in a bush that's burning, but not being consumed, right? Or the people of Israel encounter God in these very naturally driven miracles meant to denounce the status of divinity in Pharaoh and to pull up the status of divinity of their covenant God, Yahweh. Or they encounter him in passing through waters that, you know, it's one miracle to have waters of the Red Sea or the Sea of Reeds be pulled back. It's another miracle for that land to not be mushy. You can walk through it. Right. And I think that must have been something they realized in that moment, right? As people that belonged to that environment. And then their, their food raining down from heaven over 40 years. They have this light in the sky that's guiding them. So before you ever get to Jesus pulling up a mustard seed or using planting or farming metaphors to tell parables, it's just natural to who we are. We forget this sort of thing. And so that's the sort of thing that I would often tell my students that was kind of a wake-up call for me was, I remember being in my first year of marriage and in our PhD program, we did an annual Labor Day picnic and it was kind of one of those nice moments to say, life is stressful in a PhD program, but here's a moment to relax. And students were there and all the advisors, supervisors were there and it was Labor Day weekend. So it's always warm, right? And it was a nice sunny day. Well, my wife and I had just moved into a condo with an attached garage. And then to that point in my life, I'd never had an attached garage. Actually, since then, I still haven't, but we had an attached garage at our family home growing up, but that was for my parents. My car was outside. So I go outside and I have to deal with the, you know, they go off to work while I'm scraping ice off the window and that sort of thing. So this was a wonderful moment of, I don't have to scrape ice off the windshield. So you look out the window Labor Day weekend, it's sunny. There's a little stream back behind the condo subdivision. And there were ducks swimming in it. It looked beautiful. We put on shorts and a t-shirt. We go to the car, we drive 15 minutes to this park and we get out of the car and we realize, oh no, it's cold. And the funny thing is like, how did we go that far and not know it's cold? That's kind of profound. And I remember my doctoral supervisor saying as much to me as he watched us chafing the shadow line as afternoon waxed into the evening. And not ironically, he wasn't trying to ding us or anything. He just said, I guess that goes to show we really are abstracted from the land. And that kind of awoke in something in me alongside this growing understanding of what Tolkien was doing to say, our theology should pay attention to this thing. Even the fact that we don't says something theologically about us, right? That as creatures made from the dust of the ground, creatures who breathe the air that come through these organic hepha filters, trees, right? And we're cut off from it all. And I'd say as a final observation, I know I'm getting verbose in this. No, you're good. An observation that I think everyone's probably had at some point or another.

But when you're sick and you're in the middle of the winter and you have the windows shut and you have trouble sleeping because your nose is stuffy, and then you walk outside and all of a sudden it's all clear. Your nostrils open up, your sinuses open up, and it's nice for a few minutes. And that's not an accident, right? It's something about the quality of the air that we're tied to that's cut off when we're in it. Look, I live in an air-conditioned and heated house, so I'm not saying go find a tent somewhere, but I'm saying all those sorts of things I thought, that's all important. And now when we think about prayer, does that importance all of a sudden for our being move away as we pray? Yeah. Well, arguably, no, it doesn't. So I wanted to use Tolkien. I wanted to use observations from philosopher Barfield, Owen Barfield, who talks about the use of language. I wanted to use information from scientists who talk about these sorts of things, you know, that cliche kind of thing and pull people together. So ultimately get at what my question was, which was really going into it. I didn't have an answer. It was, does it make a difference to be creatures who belong within creation when we think about prayer? And by the end of, it wasn't as if I was writing it not knowing what I was doing, right? But by the end of really working through this and then beginning to write, I said, yeah, it does matter. Yeah, you know, I mean, it strikes me as just, I mean, obviously I enjoyed your essay, but I think what also strikes me is, as you're talking about it now, you know, you think about the way the tabernacle was constructed. You think about the way the temple was constructed. You think about the gestures it made to the garden of Eden, the different, um, floral and vegetative imagery that was included in the tabernacle in the temple. Um, you know, you even think about Solomon's prayer about the temple. When he's establishing the temple, he's asking God to come in and be present in this temple, uh, knowing that it's almost sort of out of the norm, that this isn't something in other words, that is, um, you know, oh, God expects this, right? This is, this is, this was the pinnacle of all we were supposed to do. It's almost as if he's sort of entreating God as if it's in a, uh, an accommodation, right? To have this centralized temple structure. But ultimately those temples were designed to remind Israel of the garden that they'd abandoned. And so I think your point about prayer, you know, and the connections between nature and, uh, particularly we might even say instead of nature, God's creation specifically, as opposed to man's creation, which, you know, to your point, I'm living in an air conditioned house too, and I hope I never have to not. Um, uh, I'm not good sweaty. Uh, but I will say, I mean, I, I think that there is something to our overdependence on, um, and over, uh, how would you say it? Almost a fetish with, right? Our own technology and the way that it sheltered us and the way that it cares for us that disconnects us from what God is really trying to help us remember, which is not our own creativity necessarily, but the creation that he's given us. Yeah, for sure. Um, I think to your point on that, that first of all, that it's creation that we want to speak here, Norman Wirsba has that great book where he says moving from nature to creation, where that's the point he's really wanting to evaluate that. It's not bad to say nature, but understand that we're caught up in, I have a callback to earlier, a story when we say nature, as opposed to a story when we say creation, we say creation, we're speaking of our having received something. Yeah. And so to be caught up in that, but to miss that point, I think is the real tragedy. Right. And I'm not about to again, go live in a tent, but maybe that says more about my own weakness right now. Very exactly. Um, that most people in the history of the world have lived in those kinds of environments. Right. Uh, but what can I still learn from it? Right. Is it just the normalcy of life where we live here doesn't even provide the opportunity to go live in a tent anyway. That's right. But what can that mean for everyday practices? Perhaps it's, um, something as simple as when we pray, um, be breathing the fresh air as we pray, you know, it doesn't mean every moment of prayer has to be that. Don't, you know, we can't pray yet, kids. We have to go outside first. Right. Um, that's, there's a, there's an obvious absurdity to that. But the more, the more meaningful statement might be to say, um, I used to commute to the train and the most, I don't mean productive in some sort of economic way, but the most meaningful prayer or productive times I had were while walking and you're praying. And, you know, right now it's the autumn, so you see as you walk to the train, these beautiful red trees and I couldn't help but think while praying, this must be something like what Moses felt when he saw that burning bush. Yeah. You know, or I've always loved gazing at the sky and right at some times of the year while walking to the train, it's early enough. The sun hasn't fully risen and you see the morning star Venus and this could, this could ties into Tolkien, by the way, who did a wonderful job of trying to remind us that seeing Venus matters. So he tells this whole tale called the fall of Gondolin that culminates in this character named Arendelle who rides, um, to the angelic beings of the world for their help. And they give the help, but they say you also can't return. Now that you've seen us and experienced us, you must be pulled out of the world. And so what they do is they place him in the sky and he's now, um, a bright shining, looks like a star riding through the sky and moving throughout the year. And the way that he describes it, the reader who's attuned with the sky as a, as a map of things, um, hears and then realizes, oh, this light of Arendelle in the sky is his mythic way of describing Venus. Yeah. And now when you look at Venus, and this has been very helpful to me, you're no longer just seeing that beautiful bright spot in the sky that happens to be a planet that I know is one ring closer to the sun than us. It's also, it infuses reality with meaning where now you say, oh, it's a sign of hope. So just as the light of Arendelle was a sign of hope within the story, now when I look at Venus, I'm immediately hopefully taken, and I am in fact taken to saying, oh wow, God did that. And in the words of Samwise Gamgee to Frodo, you know, there's, there's a symbol out there that shows us that outside of the structures of the world that may be overbearing, there's a light that can't be clouded. And that's, that's, that's God coming from the outside and, and entering into our presence, right? And that's, how can that enter into my prayer? Well, my prayer in those moments was so rich because, um, you're in the middle of spilling out your, you know, your list of wants. Please, Lord, do this. Please Lord. And all of a sudden you stop and say, wow, God, that's incredibly brilliant. Thank you that this isn't just some abstract, distant nature. This is your work infused with hope. Yeah. You know, I was just on the, uh, I was on the men's Alliance podcast here not too long ago. I don't think it's actually aired yet, but, um, the host of that program, whose nickname was Goose, um, he, he and I talked a little bit about this, like getting out into nature. And I talked about, you know, Kim and I have started taking walks in the mornings and, you know, it's still dark out where I'm at. And so you can look up and see the stars in the moon and it's still out. Like it's like you're walking it before twilight. And, uh, I just said, you know, it's, it's been nice to get outside. I work from home. I don't really commute that much. Even when I do commute, I'm just kind of taking the kids one place to another and you're still in a car. Right. And so that walk in the morning has just been a real refreshing. And he made the comment. He said, yeah, it's funny how most of our problems are actually indoor problems. And I was like, dude, I love that. I love that idea of, you know, yeah, most of our problems are indoor problems. And when we get outside, a lot of those indoor problems start to feel smaller. Um, and I think that it connects with what you're saying. Um, you know, when you get out into creation, you get outside the four walls that we normally sit within, you get outside of, you know, um, the air conditioned rooms and the heated rooms and all the technology. And you actually stop filtering God's world through a cell phone or a camera or whatever. Right. And you're actually seeing it in all its vividness and all its reality. You're, you're seeing it, you're feeling it, you're, you're smelling it, you're hearing it. All the senses engaged. Um, it does make a difference. It really and truly does make a difference. And

Release our imaginations and help us to recognize all that God has created when we do it actually in the world that God has given us, as opposed to in the homes we've constructed or in the churches we've constructed or what have you. Is that kind of my summarizing kind of where you're at? Yeah, that's great. And what I guess what I'd want to emphasize too within that is that it shows a level of interconnectivity and that, you know, what I wanted to emphasize towards the end of the essay is that when I pray for food, that's a good thing. But when I pray for food, I'm also presuming a structure for how that food gets to me that may not be so good for that person over there, right? The person who works the banana plantation or the pineapple plantation. It may not be good for the earth. You know, you think about, we have this tradition of Saturday morning documentary and we were watching this piece, the kids and us, this this weekend where it was talking about the ancient land of Cush that's now fully desert, but we have plenty of good both textual and archaeological reasons to accept that it was not always desert. It's a desert, yeah. Yeah. And we have pretty good mechanisms for being able to decipher how we got from A to B, right? To lush land that was the center of an empire to a desert. And one of the, simple really, one of them was that their way of life was predicated upon knocking down all their trees. Yeah. Well, speaking of pulling things in for theology, right, these trees, this tree that God put in the center of the garden and surrounded with a whole bunch of other trees that Richard Bauckham, who you mentioned earlier, says maybe I think the garden was actually a forest. Yeah. They're temperature controllers. They prevent the roots from dying in the winter because of their cover and the leaves cover that falls to the ground. They create cooler temperatures when it's hot. It keeps it warmer when it's cold. It creates breezes that allow fresh air to move in and out. It creates an environment in which, you know, the water that evaporates from the oceans and forms clouds is all emptied of its content within 400 miles of the coast. Well, here in the Chicago area where I live, it's in the area where you live. That's about what? Yeah. 1200 miles from the coast. Yeah. How do we get rain? Well, we get rain actually from the vast majority of our rain comes from evaporation of water from trees. So just as quick observations there. Yeah. Realizing that this kind of lifestyle that meant wiping out all the trees in their area also radically changed their environment, put them in the midst of a desert and that changes the ability of an empire to thrive, right? Yeah. Now, the politics of empire are what they are, and that's not what I'm getting at here, but just that it's fascinating to be able to notice those sorts of things and realize that affects life. That affects other people. So the decisions that a few might make to do whatever affect a whole bunch of other people who are the ones who are doing the labor, right? Yeah. And so I wanted to at least make nods at those sorts of realities that when we pray, we're not really praying in this isolated way, even if our communication is direct to God. We're not isolated nodes, right? Like computers on an internet network. Right. No, I think it's a really good point. I mean, as believers, we believe that we are a part of a nexus between God, creation, and the rest of humanity, and that that, you know, sort of forms this interesting triangle in which we exist. And so we're never isolated in the sense that we can make a decision that isn't also probably having some sort of implication for, you know, our relationship with God and our relationship with creation. And it's just really important for us to identify that. So, yeah, I mean, bro, I mean, I love the essay. Tolkien, I think I learned more about Tolkien reading it than I did reading The Lord of the Rings trilogy and all that other kind of stuff. So I really appreciate that aspect that you bring to it. And I know we're coming in on the end of the time here, but any final words you want to kind of give people, some thought that you have lingering with regard to prayer to leave with the listeners? Yeah, I'd say that I think I can speak for everyone who contributed this volume insofar as saying one of the most interesting things about writing this was saying, in fact, one person who I reached out to to contribute ultimately said no. He said, I don't know that I'm the right person to write about prayer because I'm still trying to figure out what it is. I think we're all trying to figure out what it is, right? It's one thing to be able to say, I think this is a valuable insight to this angle. And yet when we're in the midst of needing prayer, I find myself frequently just stopping in the middle of prayer, especially of late, just saying, Lord, I don't even know what it is I'm praying, but you know, you know what I'm trying to say and what I need and what's going on. So for whatever the words are worth, help is all I can say. And in the moment, it feels a little sheepish to be able to admit that, even if it's just a prayer by oneself. But I don't think that anyone who wrote for this volume would say otherwise, right? I think we've all had those sorts of things. So I don't hope that this is received as essays on prayer from the experts in prayer. I hope it's received as the essays on prayer from those who are wrestling with it because we really ourselves are trying to grasp this wonderful, beautiful thing of talking to God. I know I definitely would not say I'm an expert on prayer. And I think part of what motivated me to write for the book and edit it with you was just that I really felt like it's an area where I want to grow. And so the best way that I know how to grow is to study and think and just try through trial and error and grow that way. And so, yeah, I think everybody who contributed would echo that. And for the folks who are listening, all I would say is don't feel bad if you don't quite understand how to pray. I don't know that there are a lot of people who have mastered that. And if you're one of those folks who just feels like at home in prayer, kudos to you. Help the rest of us because it is definitely a foreign language to me in a lot of ways. So I definitely echo that sentiment. Well, thanks, Ashish, for being on. Thanks for talking through this and just thanks for your work editing the volume and writing the essay you did. And yeah, we'll post in the show notes some ways that if you want to read Ashish's essays in the Barth Center magazine, we'll get those posted in the show notes. And I'd encourage you all to check it out because it sounds really cool. I'm going to go out and check it out as well. And outside of that, we will see you next time again. Ashish, thanks for being on and we'll catch up with you all later. Thank you. Sounds good. Thanks for having me. Want to take just a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio.com, you will find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more. Life Audio. Are you seeking a deeper connection with God but just can't seem to find time to make prayer a priority? Introducing Mindful Christian Prayers. Whether starting your day or winding down at night, this show is your resource for spiritual renewal. Each episode features short guided prayers, scripture readings, and moments of silence to help you reflect and connect with the Lord no matter how busy your schedule might be. Tune in now at lifeaudio.com or your favorite podcasting app to embrace the power of prayer and deepen your faith with Mindful Christian Prayers.