Abracadabra, Let Us Pray
If you’re like me you have told some other person, perhaps at a most difficult moment in their lives, that you were praying for them. We say this out of our empathy for them as they struggle with a health crisis, wrestle with a difficult decision, or shoulder the burden of some sadness when life has laid them low. We offer our prayers to others in the hope that our words may make things better, or bring them comfort, or buoy their troubled, fearful spirits. Praying seems to be our fallback when there is little else we can say or do. Whether prayer changes anything, it at least provides support to those for whom we are praying, even as it gives us who pray a measure of solace.
Prayer has been part of my life since I was a very young child. My mother and father made it a ritual in our family’s daily routines. With hands folded and eyes closed I mouthed their words as they trained me to speak to God before every meal-—excepting breakfast. We thank Thee, Lord, for this our food, but more because of Jesus’ blood. Amen. The words of our table “grace” or “blessing” changed over time, reflecting the new people who joined us in breaking bread. God is great, God is good… and, respecting our Catholic family additions, “Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts which we are about to receive…”
During my two decades as Chaplain at Wyoming Seminary College Prep Schools, I was charged with offering prayers at our evening meals, four nights a week. To add some variety I decided to make our Thursday blessing a musical one, singing John Wesley’s words to the familiar “Old 100th” doxology tune: “Be present at our table, Lord; be here and everywhere adored, Thy mercies bless and grant that we may feast in fellowship with Thee.” Though written by an 18th Century Englishman, Wesley’s words became an easily understood and memorable prayer in our international, multi-religious school community.
Bedtime became another prayer opportunity to enlist God’s blessing, and my parents made sure I said this oft-used verse before I entered the never-never land of childhood slumber: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep; If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” I wonder if the prayer’s intimation of death, a relic of those days when our ancestors feared the all-too common mortality of their children, now gives this sentiment a morbidity that is too sobering for today’s parents and children to want to repeat each night.
Praying took on a public face for me when I started going to church. Our ministers said prayers out loud, many that we recited in ensemble or in responsive litanies. Some of our prayers were praises to God, and at least once during each service we were invited to confess our sins. Many times we were asked to join our hearts in intercessory concern for those, near and far, famous and anonymous, living and dead, about whom we were encouraged to care.
You might say I became a “professional” pray-er when I decided to pursue a ministerial career right after college, ushering me into a world in which I was expected to pray, sometimes on cue, in all manner of circumstances. Some of these I uttered were part of our collective memory, the congregation adding their voices to mine once I began saying Our Father, who art in heaven. While often spoken mindlessly—or so it seemed to me—those prayers, scripture verses and hymns memorized in our youth provide us with a spiritual umbilical that neither time, nor disuse, nor even senility seems able to diminish. This was brought home to me as I led worship in a skilled nursing care home years ago. Otherwise comatose residents came to life, their lips moving in synchronicity with mine as we spoke those familiar verses they had learned as children. Apparently prayer has the power to awaken the minds and hearts of even those enfeebled by age or disability.
People praying, or promising to pray for others, is a universal part of human life as we know it. Christians have no corner on that market. Orthodox Jews pray as a minyan (10 adult males) three times each day, and Moslems answer the call to prayer five times daily. Hindus and Buddhists pray too, during sacred festivals in large temples or in private meditative enclaves set aside in homes or monastic sanctuaries. Praying may be the most identifiable of religious rituals, from ancient times to the present, suggesting both piety and faith among those who participate. That may be why even our most secular political, entertainment, and sports figures are willing to be seen indulging in prayer during times of community grief, outrage or triumph. In a year in which our lives have been so shaken by viral deaths, police and gang killings, mob violence, burning cities and forests, tornadoes and floods destroying, the images and voices of people praying, whether sincere or staged, has been ubiquitous.
My own experience and understanding of prayer have changed significantly from those days when I knelt by my bed and asked God for the things I wanted Him to do for me or my family. A Santa Claus theology may work for a child with parents willing to indulge his requests. But growing up forces all of us, like Paul, to put away childish things. Adolescence serves up for us many frustrations and setbacks, and our awareness of human tragedy, undeserved suffering and untimely death usually alters the innocent and naïve perspectives we once had as children. Growing up spares none of us from having to deal with life as it is, and those who pray enjoy no special immunity from the heartaches, pains and disappointments that visit all of us whether we are religious or not.
As a person who has written and presented prayers in worship, baptisms, weddings, funerals, before banquets, fund raisers, scout installations, ball games, and building dedications, I have thought a lot about what I am really doing when I pray. Am I offering supplications to a God to urge the deity to do what I think needs to be done, be it a healing, a change of someone’s mind or heart, or a victory for a cause I believe deserves divine intervention? If this is what I am seeking, then how are my prayers different from the incantations of a shaman or magician who uses words to summon powers beyond our control? Prayer with that intent strikes me as an exercise in magical thinking, in an inside-out monologue that seeks to convince God to change things for me or mine. If it is, then its efficacy would seem to depend on how correctly I articulate my spiritual abracadabras or how convincingly I can move the deity to sympathy for me in my sorrowful condition.
Wasn’t this the complaint of biblical prophets like Amos who railed against those who pronounced prayers and performed sacrifices for Israel in an effort to enlist God’s protection from the enemies that were assailing them? Wasn’t this what Jesus was trying to get us to understand when he called out those who made a show of their prayers in public in order to garner God’s favor? Wasn’t it to correct our magical ideas about prayer when he said: But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you. When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. (Mt. 6:6-8 NRSV).
These words grabbed me when I first read them as a teenager. They started me on a life-long journey that is transforming my prayers from magical petitions to gut-wrenching confessions, opening the door to help me realize who I really am and who God may be urging me to become. As I’ve come to understand it, prayer is really an inside-in dialogue that each of us may have wherein all of spiritual baggage, our pretenses, masks, mistakes, deceits, and posturing can be unpacked and laid bare. I’ve come to believe that prayer “happens” in those honest-to-God moments, in those rarest of occasions when we drop our public masquerades and present ourselves, as we really are, before our maker. When we do we step into a very sacred space unlike most others, a sanctuary where the whisper of God’s still small voice may be heard.
Prayer can be powerful. Prayer can change those who dare seek God’s presence, and who allow themselves to be remade by Divine Grace. Magic is powerful too. Magic can change us by directing our attention from what is real to what we can be tricked into believing is so. Like blinders we put on a horse, magical thinking channels our vision to see things only as we would wish them to be. It may be comforting, but it is rarely true, and as such it cannot set us free.
I believe prayer is real, but it is not magical. Nor does it marshal powers or ensure deliverances that lie beyond the will of God as revealed in the laws of nature and the goodness of the human spirit. Prayer is nothing more or nothing less than the Grace of God breathing with our breath, pulsing through our hearts, and speaking, sometimes in sighs too deep for words, in our minds.
