Prayer often has angry tears in its eyes. “Nobody understands me at all.” Prayer feels neglected and ignored, as well as misunderstood. It tries to explain itself all the time in jokes or groans or both and ends up slinking back to the corner of the calendar, awaiting a bid that rarely comes. Until.
Something happens like a broken arm or a hammer on a finger or a betrayal by a friend or news of a test result gone bad. Then, we hear the slogans that precede prayer. OMG. God damn it. What the hell? My favorite: Jesus F ing Christ!
These exclamations matter as preludes. They are religious without being religious, spiritual without being spiritual. They ache and moan and express intense emotions about important things, without much else. They come from the bottom of the bottom, as in “Oh, damn.”
All the while prayer stands around, waiting if somebody would like to invite it to the dance.
Prayer is not a repair shop. It is not a card game. It is not a game. It doesn’t fix things or gamble things or win things.
Prayer is pause. It is exasperation followed by inspiration. Usually, prayer goes to the end of what we imagine prayer to be, refuses to say amen, and releases its misunderstandings to the universe. Oh, my God, we whisper. God damn it, we say, with no punishment left in our voice. What the hell joins a smile in our voice. And Jesus F ing Christ is said with surrender, after a long deep breath.
Prayer pauses long enough to surrender. It knows better than to try to fix stuff. It has respect for what can’t be known by either hammer or nail.
Prayer is also trust. It pauses to trust. Prayer acknowledges that we are powerless, at least for the early part of its process. Prayer knows that change comes at the speed of trust and even respects that most obnoxious virtue of all, patience. Prayer pauses and after pausing, finds the patience to wake up the next day. Prayer often pauses after anger to try to understand what just happened.
Prayer comes to the experience wearing a tent. It is tentative. It pays attention to the tentative and regards it with respect. When we don’t know what to do or say or think next, we agree to reality’s visit to our lives. We consent to interruption, even disruption. Sometimes we even change.
Often, when really praying we have no idea what even to pray for. Better test results? A release from the drug that holds us captive? A plea to get through the months we know the broken limb is going to take to heal? Will we lose our job?
Will we have to have help going to the bathroom or getting off the toilet?
Sometimes prayer has the body language of folding our hands or getting down on our knees. Sometimes prayer is something we sneak on the bus while other people think we are reading an important novel.
Prayer, says Walter Brueggeman, is psalmic. It begins in disorientation, then it reorients, then it orients. You can stay in prayer for weeks or months, or years, if something big enough happens to you. Interestinglly, something big is always happening but we rarely pause long enough to notice.
Your partner may say they are having an affair. Your son may say he doesn’t ever want to see you again or let you see your grandchildren. Your cancer may refuse diagnosis. You may realize that you absolutely hate your job or the people with whom you work. You may have been there when George Floyd was murdered and know you will never be the same. You start to pray. You bow down. You take a knee. You notice.
During these times of waiting, you pray for patience. You pray not to lose all your friends to your obsession with yourself. You pray to wake up one day and feel the pain gone. Prayer tempts us with the idea that, eventually, everything is going to be ok. Our head doesn’t pray; our heart does.
Prayer is decisively NOT just about the bad stuff. Joy can also disorient a person, as when an unbidden gladness arrives out of nowhere. Prayer can come on tiptoes, as a sneaky joy. The men on the street return home at 4:30, making jokes about their day. While sitting through a boring meeting, you start a game of numbers or chess or draw a picture which almost makes you laugh outloud. You are careful and smart enough not to. Joy comes unannouced, wearing a costume, holding an orange, asking if you’d rather have the Tres Leches for dessert. The music the morning show chooses has your name on it and you find yourself singing while dancing and dancing while singing. You forget all the other stuff and ask for both the orange and the Tres Leches.
These prayers of joy and sorrow are way too individualistic to comprehend one of prayer’s great virtues, which is the capacity to stand by hopelessly for a long time doing nothing effective for the world or a fellow human.
As a pastor, I spend a lot of time bedside. “Do you mind if I just stand by here helplessly for a while?” At the end of my stay, I may ask if my companion would like me to pray. “If it helps you, Pastor, go right ahead.” In genuine prayer, we understand the game theory of prayer. Go ahead and try. Nothing else helps either.
Barbara Taylor, the amazing priest who wrote Leaving Church, likens prayer to hanging clothes on the line, remembering who wore the clothes and glad that the wind blows them and their garments around. The fancy name for this kind of prayer that hangs clothes is intercessory prayer. We intercess. We get in between one matter and God. We know that suffering joins joy in making theologians of us all.
Prayer is not so much misunderstood as under-used. It helps the helpless. It is a conversation with that which we call God, which may have the name groan or sigh or giggle more than anything biblical or fancy. It moves us out of the driver’s seat and asks us to be driven. Not driven in the bad way, as in not stopping to notice our partner before she breaks up with us or driven by drugs or alcohol or the next shiny thing.
Prayer is not an addiction. It is a habit. It is letting ourselves be driven by a driver larger than ourselves. That driver is sometimes awe and sometimes it is the awe that follows suffering. When we pause to trust, when we trust enough to pause, the unbidden invites us to something some folk call the peace that passes understanding.
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PRAYER AS HARM REDUCTION
Everybody knows that overdose deaths are up by 28.5% in the United States. Why those numbers were published I’ll never know. The answer is that during the pandemic the death rate from overdose topped 100,000, just as Covid walked through one door with all those zeroes after another. Deaths from overdose increased during the pandemic, topping 100,00. The chemical reason was fentanyl, which was cheaper and more available. Now a new drug, called Tranq, is competing with the former high rates of death and destruction from overdose.
The real reason, why so many more people put good money after bad, was that Covid alerted us to just how scary life really is. One response to that fact is to cuddle up with existential meaninglessness and stay there. Others just go to bed. Still others go bleak. I love that retranslation of the King James Version of John 1:1
“And the light shined in the bleakness and the bleakness did not overcome it.”
I often advocate prayer as the highest form of harm reduction. It reduces the harm of drugs. It reduces the bleakness. Prayer is a flashlight that’s not out of batteries.
Let me define a few terms. Harm reduction is the best language we have for the spiritual matters involved with addiction. Addiction is often seen as narrative deficit disorder or the loss of a personal path or the loss of a sense of transcendence. We just feel flat all the time. You start to stop having a name for your story. You can’t really name the story of you as a tragedy or a comedy, forgetting that it can be both at different times. You want to get high. You want ecstasy. You want to be above it all. You want an experience of transcendence, even if you have to pay for it. So does most people. They want to reduce the harm done to them by not being “high” or able to get “high.”
Prayer and meditation are the slow boat to being high. We get a little bit above it all whenever we want to. From that pause, we don’t have to take the risks of overdose or bad drugs on the street so much. We know transcendence by name. We may be underdosed, instead of overdosed.
Prayer doesn’t try to fix people. Prayer is not a repairman. Prayer knows that the bleakness doesn’t have a fix. It likes to show up and bother us. Prayer cares for us, after everybody else has quit on us. Care is different than fixing. It is mightily different than fixing. Care is engagement with the story as it is, not the story as you want it. Spiritual care is something you do because you want to do it and you may do it, not because you must do it. Care that you must do is contractual care. Spiritual care is covenantal care. You choose its love and its participation in your suffering. Suffering is not an option, not even for people who are afraid of drugs or moralistic about drugs or just stupid about drugs.
Heartbreak, unfortunately, is normal. Children are always going to break our heart, even if they do nothing but move out of the house and go to college. Why? Because we love them and we never want to let them go – even though love always involves letting the beloved go. You may disappoint those who tried to love you as well as them disappointing you. Disappointment is normal. Nobody really knows how to love well, except that which prayer has as its purpose. “God” is a word most of us can’t say without a little shiver of embarrassment. What could we possible know about God? Nothing. But that doesn’t mean you can’t pause to try to pray so you get high or at least point to the high.
Three rules apply to spiritual care, especially for those of us who love people who love drugs. They also can be self-applied, like a good Band-Aid that has a good shape and good glue.
Don’t use the word “should” on yourself or the beloved. May is a good substitute. “You may quit hurting yourself, “not “you must quit hurting yourself.”
Don’t try to fix people. You are not a repairman. You are also in need of repair. Relationship is better than repair. The old song says G-D loves us “Just as I am without one plea.”
Instead, say “tell me more.” And listen. Really listen. Don’t spend your time thinking about what you will say or do next. Just “tell me more.”
Prayer begins in the surrender the need to be right
You can get better at prayer, which is pausing and trusting. But you don’t have to. Some people do. Most people just keep running to nowhere and can’t remember where they put the batteries.
Some suffering is essential and useful and people like the great American democrat, Thomas Paine, know that.
The American Crisis that appeared in Philadelphia on December 19, 1776, gave hard things a good name as follows:
“Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered,” Paine wrote in that fraught moment, “yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives everything its value.”
Overdosing your way through something like Covid is a time-honored method of suffering. Prayer offers a trusting pause in a different way, allowing for the time for praise to show up. We look up and discover that we are grateful for beautiful well-made things, like the will to do the right thing every now and then, anyway.
We find our missing self-respect. We join an outdoor fire. We chat up the man who plows the driveway. We commiserate with a neighbor who saw a bobcat where a bobcat shouldn’t be.
We look at pictures of the hand-hewn stones of Machu Pichu and marvel at humans. Those stones have withstood earthquakes. They were designed to do that. Some people pick up a stone wherever they travel. They hold it in their hand and rub it while they pray. Sometimes we can reduce harm by “just” rubbing a stone. It gets clean and clear, just like we may do, if and when we want to.
Sample prayers for people who use and for people who love people who use:
Let Justice Flow Down Like a mighty water
Great flow, even larger than great waters, dividing and reuniting, place us in that gymnastic zone, the judgement free place, where our fat and our flaws matter less than our faith, our lollygagging and loneliness matter less than our love, and our own judgements and jealousies matter less than your justice.
THIS hymn is also available as a hum. “
“BREATHE ON ME BREATH OF GOD,
FILL ME WITH LIFE ANEW, THAT I MIGHT LOVE AS THOU HAST LOVED….AND DO WHAT THOU WOULDST DO.
HUMMING WHILE RUBBING A STONE IS DOUBLY USEFUL.
Holy Spirit, you who invoke so much shame in me, draw near and relieve me of my hammers, my nails, my thorns, my self-punishments. Breathe a new breath in me, let it be less dark, less in need of mouthwash, more fresh as a shower, more amusing than amazing. Let me strand strong on my own two feet – and let dependency be a story about my past. Let it become the foundation of my unconditional and non-judgmental experience of others. Amen
“Go and Sin No More”
Trustful One, let me be more like you, a dweller in the land of truth, a citizen of sanity, a resident of reality. No matter whether I use drugs or drugs use me or both on alternative days, grant me my truth, even if it is broken and even if it is whole and holy. Amen.
Daily Prayer while using
I don’t know where I am going or how I got here, I just know my lust and my desire for more of what I had yesterday. I also know that I am your child and beloved. I am not forgotten by you. Send me one sign today that I am still and all beloved. Just one. Amen.
Don’t try to fix me
Try to see me. Notice me. Recognize me. Like me.
Help me preserve what little privacy I have left. Help me be free of labels and labeling. Talk to me about the weather. Ask me how my Mom. Is doing today. Amen.
Rev Dr. Donna Schaper, AKA The Dolly Mama, is a rewired religious renegade who loves alliteration.
