The following is an excerpt from Eugene Peterson’s book, Reversed Thunder: Revelation and the Praying Imagination.

The real power of prayer in history is not a fusillade of praying units of whom Christ is the chief, but it is the corporate action of a Saviour-Intercessor and His community, a volume and energy of prayer organized in the Holy Spirit and in the church the Spirit creates.” P.T. Forsyth

I call upon thee, O Lord; make haste to me! Give ear to my voice, when I call to thee! Let my prayer be counted as incense before thee, and the lifting up of my hands as an evening sacrifice! Psalm 141:1-2

And another angel came and stood at the altar with a golden censer; and he was given much incense to mingle with the prayers of all the saints upon the golden altar before the throne; and the smoke of the incense rose with the prayers of the saints from the hand of the angel before God. Revelation 8:3-4

The book of Revelation is a fusion of vision and prayer. When the seventh seal is opened, there is silence in heaven for about half an hour. A climax has been reached. The silence prepares the imagination to receive an incredible truth. While conflicts raged between good and evil, prayers went up from devout bands of first century Christians all over the Roman empire. Massive engines of persecution and scorn were ranged against them. They had neither weapons nor votes. They had little money and no prestige. Why didn’t they have mental breakdowns? Why didn’t they cut and run? They prayed.

It was in order to hear those prayers that there was silence in heaven. Out of the silence, action developed: an angel came before the altar of God with a censer. He mixed the prayers of the Christians with incense (which cleansed them from impurities) and combined them with fire (God’s Spirit) from the altar. Then he put it all in the censer and threw it over heaven’s ramparts. The censer, plummeting through the air, landed on earth. On impact there were “peals of thunder, voices, flashes of lightning, and an earthquake” (Rev. 8:5). The prayers which had ascended, unremarked by the journalists of the day, returned with immense force – in George Herbert’s phrase, as “reversed thunder.” Prayer reenters history with incalculable effects. Our earth is shaken daily by it.

The vision convinces the Christian of the potencies of prayer. Prayer is access to an environment in which God is the pivotal center of action. All other persons, events, or circumstances are third parties. Existence is illuminated in direct relationship to God himself. Neither bane nor blessing distracts from this center. Persons who pray are misled by demons of size, influence, importance, or power. They turn their backs on the gaudy pantheons of Canaan and Assyria, Greece and Rome, and give themselves to the personal intensities that become awe before God and intimacy with God. And they change the world. St. John describes himself at the opening of the Revelation under two conditions: “on the island called Patmos” and “in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day.” “On the island called Patmos”

St. John was exiled. He was isolated. He was removed from help and solace. He was prisoner. A faceless bureaucracy to which he had no access spoke the determining words and carried out the orders that defined his environment and the conditions of his life. His freedom disappeared at the stroke of a magistrate’s pen. He was no longer permitted to do the work in which he was passionately involved. No more conversations with dear brothers and sisters over an Isaiah parchment; no more shared Eucharistic celebrations in the homes of his courageous companions in faith; no more visits to the sick and dying to comfort them with the words of their Lord; no more ladeling out cups of cold water to the thirsty traveler in faith’s way. Exile.

Exile is the experience of powerlessness, in extremis. Everything is determined by another. We are removed from where we want to be and whom we want to be with. We are isolated from place and persons. We are victims. The worst punishment possible in ancient Israel was banishment. To be separated from family and country, from community worship and family faith – that was the cruelest decree. The severest judgment that the nation experienced was exile to Babylonia. A person created for personal relationships of love cannot live adequately without them. Exile dehumanizes. It sentences us to death by bread alone. “On the island called Patmos” Rome showed St. John who was in charge. Every lonely hour on the barren rock was proof that Rome determined St. John’s destiny, that Rome’s word was the final word on his life, that Rome’s decree set the limits within which he was permitted to exist. St. John was alone, powerless, and bereft. “In the Spirit on the Lord’s Day” meant something quite different.

“In the Spirit” meant that St. John knew himself to be in touch and participant with all the energy of the Godhead. At the very time that he was on Patmos he was in the Spirit. “I came to be in spirit” is a more literal rendering. The man was praying. St. John was no longer, if in fact he ever was, thinking about God, or talking about God; he was attending to God. he “came to be in spirit.” He was now in that condition in which God’s word was a personal revelation to him. Praying is that act in the life of faith which consciously and deliberately enters into a speaking/listening attentiveness before God – his relationship with his creation and creatures and their relationship with him. Whenever we concentrate, focus, and attend, we pray. Prayer is the coming into awareness, the practicing of attention, the nurturing and development of personal intensity before God.

Throughout the Revelation (throughout the Bible!) God takes the initiative. He speaks. He shows. He commands. He blesses. If there is to be a completion to the process of communication, there must be someone to see and hear what God presents and speaks. there must be, in other words, a person who prays. St. John did not see and hear what he wrote in Revelation by sitting around on a Sunday without anything to do, waiting for something interesting to show up. He was praying. He was in a prepared posture of receptivity before God.

Prayer is language used to address God, not explain him or report on him. It is answering speech. The task of the gospel is to move us away from talking about God to talking to him. In this concluding installment of scripture the movement is accomplished: St. John is on his knees. In this position he is responsive in a quite different way to a much different word than the one that put him on Patmos: “I saw…I heard.”

Prayer combines the experience of being on “Patmos” and being “in the Spirit.” It is the realization of personal powerlessness and, at the same moment, participation in God’s power: I can do nothing, God can do anything. Until we come to the place of exile we are not minded to undergo the disciplined quietness and passionate waiting that brings us to the point of hearing, seeing, and receiving God’s fullness. The seeing and hearing that go into the Revelation only come to the person who prays. True knowledge of God is never knowledge about God; it is always relation with God. When the Revelation concludes, St. John is still praying: “Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!” (Rev. 22:20).

Then, silence in heaven “for about half an hour” (Rev. 8:1). We live in a noisy world. We are yelled at, promoted, called. Everyone has an urgent message for us. We are surrounded with noise: telephone, radio, television, stereo. Messages are amplified deafeningly. The world is a mob in which everyone is talking at once and no one is willing or able to listen. God listens. Everything we say, every groan, every murmur, every stammering attempt at prayer: all this is listened to. All heaven quiets down. The loud angel voices, the piercing trumpet messages, the thundering throne songs are stilled while God listens. “Hush, hush, whisper who dares? Christopher Robin is saying his prayers.” The prayers of the faithful must be heard: the spontaneous hallelujahs, the solemn amens, the desperate “Why hast thou forsaken me?” the agonized “Take this cup from me,” the tempered “Nevertheless not my will by your will,” the faithfully spoken “Our Father who art in heaven,” the joyful “Worthy art thou, our Lord and God to receive glory and honor and power, for thou didst create all things, and by thy will they existed and were created.” All the psalms, said and sung for centuries in voices boisterous, subdued, angry and serene are now heard – heard personally, carefully, accurately. God silences the elders and the angels. Not one of our words is lost in a wind tunnel of gossip or drowned in a cataract of the world’s noise. “The distinctive feature of early Christian prayer is the certainty of being heard” (Heinrich Greeven, TDNT). We are listened to. We realize dignity. Dramatic changes take place in these moments of silence. The world rights itself. We perceive reality from the vantage point of God’s saving work and not from the morass of the desperate muddle. We acquire hope.

Prayer orients us to God’s design. That which seems like sheer muddle in the helter-skelter of the day assumes the shape of design. If there is design, there is also hope. Our vertigo is cured. We discern direction, plot and purpose.

Out of the silence of heaven, actions are prepared. The prayers are not simply stored on the altar, they are mixed with the fire of God’s Spirit and returned to the earth. Prayer is as much outer as inner. It is the most practical thing anyone can do. It is not mystical escape, it is historical engagement. Prayer participates in God’s action. God gathers our cries and our praises, our petitions and intercessions, and uses them. The prayers that ascended to God now descend to earth. God uses our prayers for his work, “Prayer,” wrote Pascal, “is God’s way of providing man with the dignity of causality.”

“Turn your Bible into prayer,” wrote Robert Murray McCheyne to a young student. That is what St. John did on his knees on Patmos on the Lord’s Day.