Books in Brief: Prayer: The Divine Dialogue

Prayer: The Divine Dialogue, by Carroll E. Simcox (Inter Varsity Press, 114 pp., $3.95, paper)

My wife fell in love with Carroll Simcox many years ago when he assured her that she would be reunited with her beloved dogs in heaven. In his new book on prayer he restates this assurance, only with the qualification that if it is not so, God will surely have a good explanation. Now, if this strikes you as too frivolous to appear in a serious (very serious) book about prayer, you just don’t know your Simcox. A good share of his charm lies in his ability to dig into often-difficult concepts in a sunny-natured way, bringing in side issues that aren’t really side issues at all, then uniting them as strands of his basic thesis. Dr. Simcox has been called the American C. S. Lewis, and with good reason. Their crystalline, simple styles, with an absence of ecclesiastical jargon and pomposity, are similar. Both have been prolific writers, exhaustive in their examinations of Christian values, and they have suffered similar fates. Lewis, although never an ordained priest, was the virtually unchallenged voice of Anglicanism until the church’s hard swing to the left. Dr. Simcox’s influence in the American branch was paramount during his years as editor of The Living Church, when he was as well known for his brilliant preaching as for his writings, but then he too fell afoul of the liberal bishops who legitimized their dominance in the great changes of 1979. Both Lewis and Simcox became anathema to the establishment, while retaining the affectionate loyalties of the doctrinally conservative both in and outside their own churches. Dr. Simcox is today a priest in the American Episcopal Church, a splinter denomination, president of the Foundation for Christian Theology, a regular columnist in the Christian Challenge, and writer of articles for other religious periodicals. Prayer is his 16th published book. Another meaningful parallel: Both Lewis (in his Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer) and Simcox (in Prayer: The Divine Dialogue) tackle the meaning and nature of prayer only after a lifetime of Christian exploration, and their findings are virtually the same. After having a little fun with the kind of praying most of us do, because we do not know how else to go about it, they see prayer as a kind of extended meditation, mostly unverbalized, in which there takes place a dialogue directed by the voice of God within us. “The right function of faith,” Dr. Simcox says, “in prayer as in life, is to open us up to God and to deliver us over to God.” He stresses the difficulties in arriving, by slow steps, at the state where this openness to divine dialogue can be achieved.

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H. N. Kelley

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Prayer: The Divine Dialogue, by Carroll E. Simcox (Inter Varsity Press, 114 pp., $3.95, paper)

My wife fell in love with Carroll Simcox many years ago when he assured her that she would be reunited with her beloved dogs in heaven. In his new book on prayer he restates this assurance, only with the qualification that if it is not so, God will surely have a good explanation. Now, if this strikes you as too frivolous to appear in a serious (very serious) book about prayer, you just don’t know your Simcox. A good share of his charm lies in his ability to dig into often-difficult concepts in a sunny-natured way, bringing in side issues that aren’t really side issues at all, then uniting them as strands of his basic thesis. Dr. Simcox has been called the American C. S. Lewis, and with good reason. Their crystalline, simple styles, with an absence of ecclesiastical jargon and pomposity, are similar. Both have been prolific writers, exhaustive in their examinations of Christian values, and they have suffered similar fates. Lewis, although never an ordained priest, was the virtually unchallenged voice of Anglicanism until the church’s hard swing to the left. Dr. Simcox’s influence in the American branch was paramount during his years as editor of The Living Church, when he was as well known for his brilliant preaching as for his writings, but then he too fell afoul of the liberal bishops who legitimized their dominance in the great changes of 1979. Both Lewis and Simcox became anathema to the establishment, while retaining the affectionate loyalties of the doctrinally conservative both in and outside their own churches. Dr. Simcox is today a priest in the American Episcopal Church, a splinter denomination, president of the Foundation for Christian Theology, a regular columnist in the Christian Challenge, and writer of articles for other religious periodicals. Prayer is his 16th published book. Another meaningful parallel: Both Lewis (in his Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer) and Simcox (in Prayer: The Divine Dialogue) tackle the meaning and nature of prayer only after a lifetime of Christian exploration, and their findings are virtually the same. After having a little fun with the kind of praying most of us do, because we do not know how else to go about it, they see prayer as a kind of extended meditation, mostly unverbalized, in which there takes place a dialogue directed by the voice of God within us. “The right function of faith,” Dr. Simcox says, “in prayer as in life, is to open us up to God and to deliver us over to God.” He stresses the difficulties in arriving, by slow steps, at the state where this openness to divine dialogue can be achieved.