From the Introduction (pre-publication version):
My idea of prayer changed when I realized it would no longer be offered to God up there, but to God here; it was to be natural and real, not phony or contrived; it was not about other things—as a rationalized fantasy or escape—but these things, however unattractive, jarring, or even socially outcast they might sometimes appear to be.
Prayer, I realized, can be voting, making love, just standing there, being angry, being quiet, cooking spaghetti sauce, marching in a peace or justice demonstration, watering a garden, attending an office meeting, listening, lying on a sick bed, dancing, swimming, starting a new job, walking on a crowded street. Prayer can be filled with color and fun, vitality and pain, hopelessness and starting over again. I like to look out at life as I see it, and pray about it.
An exciting aspect of prayer, for me, is that the old patriarchy is dead. God is not, I discovered, a hierarchical, autocratic, macho “Lord” of a clublike “holy of holies,” nor is God an impersonal machine computing sins in a celestial corporate office above the clouds. It came to me that God is loving, even vulnerable, in a terribly unsentimental and profound way, demonstrating the depth, complexity, and holy simplicity of an extraordinary relationship with people.
I came to understand that many prayers are uttered or felt without prescribed forms of piety, sometimes in language imagery that censors might label as profane. If you listen, you can hear sacred thoughts and reflections in the novels, songs, plays, and films of a wide range of contemporary artists. Authentic prayer bridges a heretical gulf between the sacred and secular, the holy and profane. Of course, to hear some genuine prayers, verbal or nonverbal, you must sense what is not said.
In 1965, a book of prayers I wrote was published. Langston Hughes called them, simply, poems. The book emerged in silence, with virtually no attention given it. Although Time published three of the prayers, it made no comment about them.
Then, five months after publication, The New York Times ran a major review praising the book. Soon, nearly everybody was reviewing it. Are You Running with Me, Jesus? became a national best-seller with one million copies in print. As the title became familiar, an outpouring of affection for the book took the form of thousands of letters from readers. Its name even began to appear on banners in peace demonstrations. U.S. Senator (and presidential aspirant) Eugene J. McCarthy referred to the book’s title in a poem in The New Republic. He went on to describe himself as an “existential runner.”
What had happened? The spirit of the times had a lot to do with the book’s growing reception. There was excitement and a positive thrust in religion that could not be separated from a comparable secular mood, with its Peace Corps imagery of hope, the civil rights struggle, a strong public consciousness of a potential to effect significant changes in society, and a near universal yearning for peace.
I wrote most of the book during the summer and fall of 1964 in Detroit, where I lived in the inner city. The meditation that begins, “Look up at that old window where the old guy is sitting,” was based, for example, on a street scene just five blocks from my lodgings near Wayne State University, where I was a chaplain. “The old house is nearly all torn down, Jesus,” was a view directly across the street. “The kids are smiling, Jesus, on the tenement stoop” was six blocks away.
The impulse to write the book sprang from my increasing inability to pray. I had always assumed that prayer was necessarily verbal. I forced myself to use the archaic language of liturgical prayer, battling my growing disillusionment and boredom. Wasn’t God supposed to be up there? When this neat system collapsed for me, I virtually stopped praying, except for using the Lord’s Prayer.
In the spring of 1964, a group of Roman Catholic laity and clergy invited me to visit Israel and Rome with them. At one point in the trip we visited the island of Cyprus for a day or so; afterward we proceeded by ship to Haifa. On Cyprus, the men lived dormitory-style in a hostel. One afternoon everybody was taking a nap, despite the sounds of distant gunfire being exchanged by Greek and Turkish Cypriots.
I lay on my cot trying to pray. Then I picked up a ballpoint pen and a notebook. “It’s morning, Jesus,” I wrote, “and here’s that light and sound all over again.” The time of day was wrong, but I wasn’t being literalistic.
The book was begun. Of course, I didn’t know it at the time. I had no idea of writing a book at all. I was grappling with prayer and meditation, trying to get started in a new way. After the tour, I put my notes aside. But that summer I again started thinking about and writing my sacred thoughts.
