Thoughts & Prayers
Prayer has run afoul of public opinion lately.
In the fatigue of dealing with tragedy after tragedy, the popular call of “#prayers” mixed with the tangible pain of evil and death has left a bitter taste, and has left many feeling empty:
Prayer, it seems to us, is not a deep and active cry of the heart as much as an easy deflection of responsibility, devoid of change or effect. You can read one of the myriad blog posts that boil down to “talk is cheap,” or engage in the heated online threads peppered with memes lampooning the insufficiency of prayer alone.
Or, if you’re really feeling it, you can hop on over to https://www.thoughtsandprayersthegame.com/ where you can offer thoughts and prayers to see how many lives you can save while not changing any concrete social policy (spoiler: it’s zero).
On the one hand, harsh as they may be, these critiques have a point: individual prayer, without outward action, is woefully incomplete. In the words of scripture, faith without works is dead (James 2).
It is possible for prayer to be warped into a self-righteous abdication of responsibility where we “give it all to God” and expect the challenges and wounds to be healed by some divine miracle devoid of human action.
The problem is, this isn’t how God has operated since the beginning of the story: as early as Genesis 1, God partners with creation and involves creation in the work, saying, “Let the earth bring forth,” and giving humankind real responsibility to steward creation. So wherever it is that prayer is personal, private, and the totality of our response, I want to challenge that dynamic alongside those pointing out the vapidity and even hypocrisy of such a stance.
However, what such a critique fails to realize is prayer was never intended to be a response devoid of action, and is much more than a wish and a hope akin to a coin in a well or a trending hashtag!
Prayer is the beginning of an embodied response that is so demanding & costly that we rely on others & God to do it.
As Soren Kierkegaard says, “the function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.” I tend to think prayer can influence God, but his point is right on! Prayer is a transformative act that opens us up to reflection, repentance, and action!
Time spent in prayer can lead to our focus and heart being opened up to others in ways they were not before, and can assist us in truly having the faith to radically reorienting our life to help others. We must arrive at this readiness, for, “action springs not from thought, but from a readiness of responsibility,” as Dietrich Bonhoeffer says. Often in our worship services, I will pray, “Lord, hold us accountable to the prayers we pray,” or, “keep the needs of our neighbors in our minds long after we say, ‘amen.’”
Beyond the individual, corporate prayer services, vigils, and informal gatherings help to bring these concerns into the public consciousness as things to be dealt with as a community, as well as help impress upon the community the virtue of taking care of one another and honoring others, in beautiful, creative ways.
I can hear the cries from the more pragmatic among us decrying the uselessness of such actions, but I appeal to the words of Balthasar in response, who understood the necessity of wonder:
“We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it. Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past — whether he admits it or not — can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.”
Balthasar says a lot there, but ultimately, I would like to see us be able to do two things:
1) Let us reject any definition of “prayer” that is trite, easy, and simply sentimental, devoid of embodiment or change.
2) Let us embrace the wonder and miracle of prayer that opens us up to one another, allowing us to question our convictions and ways of living, and trains our bodies and souls to better serve and love our neighbors, even at the sacrifice of ourselves.
If you’re searching for a good prayer to pray, here’s one from St. Francis of Assisi I’ve been praying a lot lately:
“Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love,
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
And where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved, as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive,
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.”
