A couple of days ago an article in America The Jesuit Review by Torey Lightcap was shared to the Episcopalian subreddit. The article is about making room for unfiltered pain at church. The cover image is a bunch of hands reaching out to a beam of light. There are clear lighting rigs visible so I don’t know if the picture is of a megachurch or a rock concert.
The article describes the Assembly of God services he went to in small town Kansas, where he describes the service as people begging–openly–for God to fix things in their lives. I was bothered by the premise. The Episcopal church is not one of raw, unfiltered begging. I view this kind of expressive prayer as a sign of a weak faith, a faith borne out of fear and powerlessness. If I were to pray like this, even under the direst of circumstances, I would probably walk away thinking I had failed to use the gifts God has given me, just as those who pray like this fail to use their gifts.
This sounds heartless even to me. I am privileged. Not greatly so, but enough to prevent me from living in great fear. Even in my darkest years I felt safe and protected by those around me. This sense of security is foundational. Many years ago at a men’s retreat the facilitator had a theory that how we lived at age 10 set up our basic assumptions about the world. We shared our stories across multiple decades (I was in my 30s, the oldest in his 90s) and the theory seemed to hold true. My life at age 10 was one of stability. I had never moved in my conscious life (we bought the house my mother still lives in when I was 14 months old. As far as I’m concerned, I lived in one house from birth to 18). My parents were married and never quarreled in front of my brother and I. There was never talk of “not enough money to buy that” and “fiscal responsibility” meant dropping a nickel from my $0.50 weekly allowance into an envelope to drop in the plate on Sunday mornings.
Even when going through a divorce at age 22 I didn’t cry out in anguish like this. Even when I was kicked out of my Master’s program and cut off from my chosen career I didn’t cry out in anguish like this.
But still, this kind of prayer discomforts me. This is the correct word. Unfortunately these days “discomfort” is a euphemism for “don’t call me a racist, just lie there and take the beatings”. So that word made me dive deeper.
The first thing the philosopher must learn is to discern the internal causes from external causes. How people pray is a purely an external. My reasoned choice is in how I react to it.
My first heartless reaction stems from a belief that “giving it up to God” like this is a sign of weak faith. That’s a mask for something else. What is it about this external cause that reflects how I see myself?
What witnessing this kind of prayer does is show me that I am not equipped to help people in desperation. I have no tools that come naturally nor do I have any that I have practiced so they feel genuine. One time my wife joined a ministry to make meals for a recently widowed woman of our congregation, but for various reasons I had to take the meal without her help. This seems to be how my kind of Christians help each other. I had no words for this woman, or her friends who were there. My awkwardness was so extreme they had to reassure me that I was doing fine and they let me leave to save me from my own embarrassment.
The funny thing, now that I reflect on this and try to find a close, is that the grief I think about is the grief over death, which isn’t something we handle as a culture all that well. The sample in the article isn’t about death, but an everyday struggle that seem too much to bear: a husband who drinks too much. (That’s it. I thought there were more examples but that’s the only one.) I can’t even imagine what other things might by prayed about in times like this without relying on stand-up comedians mocking them: Lord, let the tires on the Chevy last until payday.
One of the reasons I find Stoicism attractive as a philosophy is that the Episcopal tradition seems to lead up to it. One of the practices of Stoicism is to rid your life of passions. Passions are impulsive, excessive and contrary to reason. Some ways of classifying passions include distress, fear, appetite, and pleasure. One of the ways to live as an Episcopalian is to do so with quiet confidence. It’s one of my favorite prayers from the BCP. It is fair to say we live with restraint; it is also fair to say we are stable. In life we don’t sweat the small stuff. At least my family and church made it seem so (except for the liturgy where the small stuff mattered). Expressive prayer is, to me, literally sweating over small stuff by people who have chosen to be a victim of fate and cede control of their lives to others. This goes against my faith and my philosophy. “Give it up to God” is a technique to relieve yourself of worry, not responsibility.
So, in some form of closure, I still have work to do in being able to help people in grief, and I need to dismiss my judgements about those who pray in this style.