Do you have a weakness? One of those weaknesses that you have tried and tried and tried to overcome? One of those weaknesses that you should have down cold because of your profession, or your calling, or the role you play in your community? For instance, if you were a quarterback, perhaps you should know how to throw a football!?!?
Well, I do. And to be honest, it’s kind of embarrassing, so I might as well come out and just say it: I don’t really know how to pray! There I said it. I got it out in the open. So go ahead and poke fun at me if you want. Go ahead and whisper behind my back, as if I haven’t heard it all before, “Can you believe it?! I mean he’s a pastor! I mean he’s an ordained member of the clergy and he doesn’t even know how to pray. Why what kind of a minister is he, anyway!?!?”
It’s not like I haven’t heard all this before. I mean these kinds of conversations have been going on in my head for years. But here’s the deal. And I don’t think I’m totally off here. I don’t think I’m alone. There are a lot of pastors, bishops, district superintendents, and members of the Christian faith that don’t know how to pray!
And that’s why I do the next best thing: I read a ton of books about prayer!!! I mean if you can’t do it, why not read books written by people who somehow have the guts to write about it, right?
This Lenten season I’m reading a book by Tish Harrison Warren called “Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep”. And guess what? It turns out that Tish can’t pray either! Her answer is to pray the prayers of the church. Listen to what she writes about an experience of being in the hospital, amid a miscarriage. By the way, she’s an Episcopalian priest!
Why did I suddenly and desperately want to pray the prayers of the church underneath the fluorescent lights of a hospital room? Because I wanted to pray but couldn’t drum up words.
It isn’t that “Help! Make the bleeding stop!” wasn’t holy or sophisticated enough. I was in a paper-thin hospital gown soaked with blood. This was not the time for formality. I wanted healing—but I needed more than just healing. I needed this moment of crisis to find its place in something greater: the prayers of the church, yes, but more, the vast mystery of God, the surety of God’s power, the reassurance of God’s goodness.
I had to decide again, in that moment, when I didn’t know how things would turn out, with my baby dead and my body broken, whether these things I preached about God loving me and being for me were true. Yet I was bone-weary. I was heartbroken. I could not conjure up spontaneous and ardent faith.
My decision about whether to trust God wasn’t merely an exercise of cognition. I wasn’t trying to pass some Sunday School pop quiz. I was trying to enter into a truth that was large enough to hold my own frailty, vulnerability, and weak faith---a truth as deniable as it is definite. But how, worn out with tears and blood, in a place without words and without certainty, could I reach for that truth? That night, I held to the reality of God’s goodness and love by taking up the practices of the church. Specifically, by taking up prayer, the liturgy of the hours.
As I read this, an amazing sense of relief came over me! You mean I don’t need to make up my own prayers? You mean I can just pray by reading the prayers of others? Cool! Well, maybe I do pray then! Well, maybe I can pray after all!
The second thing that came to my mind when reading this is this is a great explanation of why I go to church! I don’t go to church because I know my place in this world. Let’s be honest! Much of the time I have no clue of what I’m doing! I go to church to find my place in something greater, in the community of the church for sure, but more than that. In the vast mystery of God. In the surety of God’s power. In the reassurance of God’s goodness.
I don’t really go to church always knowing that God loves me. There are times that I don’t have a clue on whether the fact that God loves me is even remotely true! But I go to church to be reassured of that truth. In my unbelief (which is my normal state of being), I need someone to whisper in my ear that it is true! I need to sing a song that not only says it but enters my broken heart in such a way that I am empowered to say and sing and believe that, counter to my unbelief, God truly does loves me!
I belong to a church community not only because I need healing, but even more so because I want and need to enter a truth that is large enough to hold my own frailty, vulnerability, and weak faith. I don’t go to church because I’m so sure of all this, I go to church to be reassured of it. I go to church because I need to be reminded repeatedly that this much is true: that I matter and am loved. Because out in this world, when the x#$%# hits the fan, I tend to let go and lose my grasp on that story…and if there’s anything I need more right now, it is a grasp of that story…my story…our story. I need to hold onto the one story that teaches me that I’m not alone. That I live in world created by a loving God. A story that tells me that I am undeniably a beautiful and sacred gift that deserves to matter in this world.
Dear God, thank you for the gift of the church: a place that reminds and reassures me that I am loved and that I matter. A community that you created in order to remind and reassure all of us that all are loved and that every single person on this earth matters.
Your friend and pastor, reassured and reminded that in order to prayer I don’t have make up a new ones all the time, Brook