Tag: prayer

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There Has To Be A Better Way To Pray

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This winter has been hard on my congregation. So many people are sick with COVID, respiratory viruses, and other diseases that it’s becoming difficult to keep up with everyone. When I combine my congregational concerns with my father’s recent lymphoma diagnosis, I start dropping the balls I’m supposed to juggle daily. I went so far as to create a spreadsheet of prayer concerns (versus a list). It didn’t help. Once I got them down on paper, isolated in illnesses, homebound and hospitalized, church members, family, and friends, adults and children, life-threatening and chronic conditions, humans and pets, Ukraine, and America, I was even more overwhelmed. Where do I start? At the top? With the sickest? With my dad? The sheer human misery before me is too difficult to describe. I’m at the point I don’t know what to say to God about these concerns because I don’t know what to say. I am literally out of words.

I gather with a small group of church members to pray through our concerns and celebrations each Thursday at 10 am. After a few moments of Lection Divina, we read through each name and concern on our church’s prayer list. There are nearly 100 names. I wonder why we are reminding an omniscient and omnipotent God of realities of this God is already fully aware of. The exercise feels pointless. If God requires the constant repetition of my father’s name and the fact that he has Leukemia to bring him daily healing and comfort, are we praying to a God? Or are we just talking to ourselves? Is prayer, in the means we’ve constructed it, little more than a supernatural protection racket? We keep giving God our best words in the hope of blessings and eternal security, so bad things don’t happen to us. There must be a better way to pray.

Is there a means of prayer that does more than make us feel better by acknowledging our helplessness in the face of illness and tragedy? Are there prayers where we partner with God to help those who pray create and become the answers to their prayers? It’s gotten to where I don’t look forward to asking for prayer concerns and celebrations in our worship services. These are the most soul-crushing minutes of our worship hour. I do not want to deny anyone the opportunity to share their concerns. Yet once we share our pain, the joy leaves our sanctuary like air from a punctured tire. Persons with blessings feel too ashamed to speak up because they feel their prayers aren’t worth mentioning considering the “serious” concerns previously shared. That’s wrong as well. We must rethink how we pray, for whose benefit we pray, and if we’re praying to be heard by God or each other.

The most honest and genuine prayer I’ve been able to offer recently is this: “Look!” “Help” hasn’t gotten me anywhere. I’ve settled on the model of the minor prophets. If I’m asking God anything, I’m asking God to do what I know God is already doing: see the mess we’re in and, if possible, relieve some of this interminable suffering. I’ll be glad to do anything. I’m just tired of repeating names and recounting suffering. Point me toward one person who needs something tangible. That’s a doable place to start. We can answer prayers together.

–Richard Bryant

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So Many Prayer Concerns

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It becomes harder to pray as I look around at near-daily mass shootings, the war in Ukraine, my family’s illness, and the deterioration of my denomination. I feel like I’m talking to myself. Prayer seems like the only thing I can do, my only option, and it doesn’t appear to have any impact on the carnage unfolding in Walmart breakrooms, at the Raleigh Christmas parade, in a Colorado Springs LGBTQI club, in my dad’s lymph nodes, or missile attacks on Kyiv’s elementary schools. People keep dying at the worst possible time of the year for people to die.

Tragic, unexpected death is never welcome, but it always seems worse when it happens at Christmas. For some reason, we want to be together at this time of year. Despite our petty differences, we feel drawn to the Thanksgiving and Christmas table. When a seat is made vacant, whether through cancer, murder, or war, it hurts in indescribable ways, that’s a pain you can’t put into words, let alone prayer that has any emotional or spiritual coherence.  Our prayers are more like self-soothing babble because that’s all we know how to do. If you can find eloquent words to match this societal hurt, you’ve not felt the punch in the gut brought by the cumulative pain of recent days.

When we pray on Sunday morning, the only people we know who are listening are those in the pews. It is a supreme act of faith to assume that God is listening, especially when our words appear to have little impact on reality. We pray for peace and see more war. We pray for love to see hate grow stronger. Something isn’t working. We’ll focus on a single miracle at the expense of hundreds of unanswered prayers. We sit, wait, speak, and hope God will act. Our prayers, while heartfelt, are inherently passive. Have we considered acting upon our prayers? What if we matched our words and our actions equally?  We become both prayer and an answer in-progress. Imagine prayer as a cooperative endeavor. We would call this liturgy “the work of the people.”

The immediate reality our prayers change is the reality we change ourselves. If we want to answer a prayer, we must become the answer. We prayerfully and actively invest in the kingdom of God, which is at hand. If we convince ourselves to wait for God (or others, like Congress, a President, public opinion, etc.) to act, more people will die. I believe God wants to hear our prayers and see them become tangible actions.

It is hard to pray. The world is in a difficult place. We shouldn’t shy away from naming our challenges. Are we content with being desperate observers, or do we want to be active participants in God’s ongoing kingdom? The answer to that question depends on how comfortable you are with being more than a passive prayer.

–Richard Bryant

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Crypto-Mourning

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To grieve with any level of authenticity, we must not be selective in who (or how) we mourn. To name a loss worthy of memory, sorrow, and joy (in a life well lived) is an act of supreme defiance in a world where we store our wealth in a currency named for the Greek word “hidden” or “secret.” We live hidden and transient lives. Everything we value about life, even its inevitable ending, is obscured with each new mass shooting, virus, disease, and missile attack. Those who die remain unseen, off-camera, and hidden beyond well-word catchphrases and slick camera angles. Even before the pandemic, the affluent west invested heavily in crypto-mourning. This is the process of continually moving our thoughts, prayers, and concerns from one tragedy to another (as one would move money to offshore accounts) but never asking, “Do these prayers have any real value unless we transfer them as hard spiritual currency into our lives and act upon them?”

While all death is death, the world values the memories of some deceased differently. Thus, we grieve some victims longer and more viscerally than others. We invest in acts of community and corporate sorrow. Candlelight vigils and community gatherings have done what I once thought impossible: made grief cliché, predictable, and ephemeral. Our grief becomes public, or so we claim, and then we move on. We wait for the next tragedy, and the cycle repeats. The problem isn’t too many people sending meaningless thoughts and prayers. Instead, we’ve made grieving a public media-driven production. Persons whose trauma and grief are too immense to step into this spotlight are largely forgotten. For so many, the vast majority of those in hospitals and homes worldwide, there are no witnesses to the realities of grief preparing to be confronted at this time we force each other to call “joyful.” Their grief isn’t sensational, but it is real.

–Richard Bryant

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The Cold

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The cold slows me down. I’m not used to my bones aching, and it is difficult to move in the mornings. Since my shoulder surgery last summer, there have been pains in my arms that keep coming back despite the physical therapy regimen I’ve done for 18 months. Yes, when you step outside, the wind hits your face and reminds us that you are alive; the temperature tells our bodies to tell us we are mortal, and we reach for the hot chocolate, soup recipes, and warm blankets as we turn up the Christmas music. We’ll do just about anything to stay warm.

As it becomes cold outside, we physically slow down, and all we can do is layer up. You can wear gloves, a hat, a scarf, and a heavy coat. All those items will keep you warm on the outside. However, don’t let yourself and your spirit grow cold on the inside. There is a spark of divinity within each of us, and I always worry in the winter that we’ll let that holy fire, the spark of creation that rests in our souls, grow cold. 

We can’t allow cold weather, illness, distance, travel, and holiday obligations to turn us into cold, unfeeling people. It’s easy to fall into the holiday rat race; we put on our blinders, block out the world, and focus on the superficialities of warmth. We too easily neglect our inner spiritual fire. Just as I sit down with a hot bowl of soup to keep my body functioning, I need to do the same with my soul. A cold soul leads to a cold heart. If I have a cold heart, my feet may be warm and my stomach full, but my soul also needs to be fed. If I go spiritually hungry, the grief and fear will gnaw away at my spirit until the sun never rises again.

–Richard Bryant

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Separation

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It is impossible to separate the cancers in our souls from those in our vital organs and bloodstreams. Toxic physical environments lead to cancer. Toxic churches lead to toxic theology and spiritual cancer. We have treatments for the former. I’ve met no one serious about undergoing spiritual chemotherapy. It’s too hard on our cherished assumptions, theological preconceptions, and well-defined notions of God.

–Richard Bryant

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Who Prays for Whom?

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I almost saw him cry. It was at lunch yesterday afternoon. A local civic group was hosting a fundraiser on the grounds of the farmer’s market. A few minutes earlier, dad remembered he’d purchased two tickets for BBQ chicken lunch plates. He couldn’t eat until after his surgery, which was still a couple of hours away.  We weren’t scheduled to check in until 1:45. He thought my mother, my wife, and I might want some lunch, and the food was already paid for. Why not try and eat? I didn’t have much of an appetite. It seemed like a good time to take a break and breathe fresh air. The ride might give us a chance to talk.

The farmer’s market is less than ten minutes from their house.  We pulled up alongside the long row of tables where volunteers were preparing the to-go plates and rolled down our window. Three of his old friends and colleagues greeted us and took our tickets, two men and one woman. Two of them are members of his church community. They had only recently heard of his diagnosis. As one touched his arm and said, “We are praying for you,” another held back tears. At that instant, my dad turned his head away from me, and he, too, did the same. I had never witnessed this level of emotion in my father. The old man choked up. This was uncharted territory. We were picking up BBQ chicken lunches, at a farmers’ market, under a water tower, a place I’d been to hundreds of times before, and I saw a person I’d never met. To paraphrase the words of God at Jesus’ baptism: this is my beloved father in whom I am briefly amazed and well-pleased.

The moment ended as quickly as it came. He composed himself.  I took the two plates of food, and he told me about the importance of supporting local civic organizations.  

I spend a great deal of time writing prayers and praying for others. I’m glad people are praying for my dad. He even mentioned that the surgeon prayed with him before his procedure. He didn’t ask me to pray with him. I tried to say something just as they were taking him back to be prepped. I couldn’t quite get the words out. They, like me, were jumbled. All I managed to utter was, “Go with God.” I hope somehow, someway, he and the deity I intended to hear them knew what I meant.

–Richard Bryant

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