Quote:
Originally Posted by Paul Vusik
I don’t think that you can equate pray reading to some “Eastern mantras”, or some odd form of worship. Threre is a much deeper meaning and agendas behind that practice or process, that they try to achieve. So let compare apples to apples, and oranges to oranges. Saying “Christ has risen, yes indeed” doesn’t equal to mindless repetition and outright hypnosis of sorts, to achieve some kind of state of tranquillity, or presence of some being “as when it comes on calling on the lord a million times in the row”.
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I didn't mean to imply that either was simply an alternate form of Eastern mantra, but at the same time, even your descriptions of calling on the Lord imply that some of its variations appear more about a kind of clearing of the mind or the creation of an emotional state that is not consistent with the kind of clear-minded thinking that both Christ and Paul talked about.
My comments about pray-reading were more about the kind of practice of dicing a verse into single words, parts of phrases, etc., and interspersing them with other words and phrases (lots of "Oh Lord," "Amen," as well as other things) that seem unassailable because it seems impossible to use them incorrectly (but alas, I believe that we often did). The sum total is to derail the meaning of a verse or larger passage because it is almost never spoken as a unit, but as pieces divorced of context and even completeness of sentence (not to mention the loss of grammar). I do not believe that Christ intended man to learn of Him by repeating disjointed words in a manner that causes them to be almost meaningless. Much like when Paul took the Corinthians to task for using so much tongues in their meetings. He said he would rather speak 5 intelligible words to them than 10,000 in a tongue.
Having come from a background of Pentecostalism, I can attest that tongues are not really worth a lot unless they are made to be useful to a native hearer. Oddly, I believe that the way that pray-reading was so often practiced in the LC was not much different that trying to get something of lasting value out of hearing someone always talking to you in German. I am not saying anything against German. And I am not saying that it would be useful to a German because to them it would be the same as having someone speaking to them in Swedish. And so on.
I still will say that some aspects of "calling on the Lord" as the LC practices — especially in a corporate way — are more of an exercise in emotional release and mind centering than in making any kind of real call to the Creator and Savior.