John Milton (1608-1674) was nearing the end of his eventful life. He felt as if he had one last poem in him. He rose each morning at 5:00 a.m., meditated on his Hebrew Bible for an hour and offered the day in prayer. (John had learned ancient Hebrew as a child and as a fifteen-year-old, he had translated Psalm 114 from Hebrew to English). After breakfast, he worked until noon on the poem “Paradise Lost.” He took a break for lunch and played the organ and viola for recreation. He then resumed labors on his epic poem until the evening meal.
I didn’t know until recently that Milton didn’t actually write “Paradise Lost.” He dictated it. He was blind by this time, so he spoke his text to scribes, primarily his daughters. He spoke nearly eleven thousand lines of Paradise Lost, then followed it with the sequel, Paradise Regained. What drove John to do this? Undoubtedly, part of his motivation was self-serving. He wrote his magnum opus to be remembered. It was his way of coping with the loss of sight and his growing disenchantment with British politics. But he also sought, in his own words, “to justify the ways of God to men.”
Milton was a flawed man. He was difficult to live with and hard on Roman Catholics. He was a restless Puritan, trying to make sense of essential Biblical themes yet also sought to live as a committed follower of Christ. Today’s prayer is adapted from the opening stanza of Paradise Lost: