Tuesday, October 22, 2024

When We Forget How to Pray

Praying in the right way makes a difference.

This statement, to me, is a no-brainer.  Of course it makes a difference.

To others, it might come across as absurd, preposterous, utterly meaningless.  Prayer, or so our secular culture asserts, does nothing.  It's the lazy response of people unwilling to do the work, a willful distraction from dealing with an issue that requires effort on our part.  Offer up a thought or a prayer in the face of a crisis or a tragedy, and you're going to catch some shade.

I've pushed back a little bit on this, and will continue to do so.  Our thoughts guide our actions, eh?  Unless we're thoughtless, mindless automatons, who just do whatever the algorithms targeting us tell us to do.  Prayer, done rightly, grounds us in something greater.  It is thought, sacralized.  It calls for change where the capacity for change lies beyond us.  It orients us towards a deeper purpose.  As taught by Jesus of Nazareth, that deeper purpose is a radical compassion towards neighbor and enemy alike, and a casting aside of the temptations and brokenness of the world.  

Praying, for Christians, is in its most essential nature expressed in the Lord's Prayer, a short, simple call for right relationship with our Creator and a reorienting of our priorities.  Do we pray for wealth?  No.  Just our daily bread.  Do we pray for power over our enemies?  Nope.  We pray for forgiveness and justice.  I explore all of this in THE PRAYER OF UNWANTING, my upcoming devotional.  The Lord's Prayer is not a prayer meant to get us what we want, but a prayer meant to change how we want, and who we are.  

If, that is, we are paying attention to the meaning of those words, and haven't forgotten who taught us to use them, and why.  Because even that most fundamental prayer can be nothing more than self-absorbed chattering if our hearts are unchanged by it, or we've lied to ourselves about what Jesus demands of us.  We can pray it absently, oblivious of the demands it places upon us.  We remain unchanged.  We can utter the words, but they can become just a shell of their intention.

Or we can attempt to bend the prayer to our will.  Take, for instance, the invocation of that prayer by the crowd that gathered on the sixth of January in 2021.  Before marching on the Capitol in an effort to violently overthrow the results of an election, a pastor led those gathered in the Lord's Prayer.  It was an affirmation of group identity, a public display of piety, an effort to bless what was to follow with the imprimatur of Jesus.  What was to follow, as it turned out, was violence in the service of a lie.  It was, quite pointedly and in the most accurate use of the term, blasphemous.

The words were invoked, but the content of their character had been torn away.  On that day, those who prayed succumbed to temptation, to the self-serving lie of a brazen demagogue, and gave themselves over to the brokenness that comes when the desire for power rules.

Because it is so easy to forget the most essential nature of prayer.