Monthly Archives: August 2014

Who Wants to Pray?

Posted on by
Reply

People in my profession get asked to pray a lot.  Many times, there isn’t even any asking going on – it’s simply assumed the pastor is the one who prays.  When one of us pastor types goes off script and cheerfully offers for one of the other Christians in the group to have the honor, uncomfortable silence ensues.  “Who feels called to offer a blessing for this meal?”   Crickets.

photo

I can’t blame the non-pastor types.  It can be intimidating to be The One who announces through prayer – through what gets prayed for and what does not – where our collective focus lies and where we especially hope for the signs and wonders of God’s presence.  Since, in many faith communities, pastors are the only ones who ever have the opportunity to pray, it can send the message that you need special training or voice intonation or secret knowledge about the “right” things to say.

A couple of weekends ago I got to be one of the listeners as a group prayed together.  We took my stepson to a wonderful surf camp offered by Surfer’s Healing.  I’ve written about them before and the overwhelming nature of standing on a beach together watching our children go out to sea without us.  This year I was teary and moved again.  I found myself standing at the shoreline with gripped hands at my chest – almost in a prayer position – holding my breath, watching him work on trusting the surfers enough to go where they led.

It was breathtaking and comforting again to move through this “one perfect day” together, rehearsing the hard letting go of parents.  But what struck me this time was the ritual of beginning the day.

Once the surfboards are unpacked and lined up at the shore, the beach area roped off, and the registration tables up and running, the event organizers gather everyone.  Logistical announcements and thank you’s are issued and then Izzy Paskowitz, the founder of Surfer’s Healing (along with his wife, Danielle), says a few words.

He and the other surfers all wear wetsuits and stand together in a line at the front of the gathering.  Izzy talks about the “club none of us wanted to be in” as parents of autistic children and he talks about the generosity of sponsors and volunteers.  Then he calls on one of the other surfers to come offer the first of several prayers before embarking on the day.  We hear a prayer in English then a second surfer takes the mic and offers one in Spanish.  Then a third surfer comes forward and sings a traditional Hawaiian prayer to the tune of the doxology.

When we first got to the beach I saw the surfers in wetsuits and felt some competing combination of being a geeky teenager around the cool kids and being an old mom.  Each of them is young, many are tattooed, and they look sleek and muscular in their second skins.  If I let my own high school experiences or movies clichés take over my thinking, they appear to me as a group of untouchably cool dudes.

But I look at them as we are praying.  Every last one of them is holding hands with the surfers next to him, heads bowed.  No one looks impatient, bored, or uncomfortable.  I don’t get the feeling from any of them or from the crowd at large that this part of the day is imposed or strange or old-fashioned or constricting.

They do this every day of camp all season long.  Before heading into rough waters with autistic children they’ve never seen before this moment, they pause and pray.  As they gather their strength, stamina, patience, and hopes for a rough and rewarding day, they recognize their intentions and ask for God’s blessings on the camp.  There was nothing showy about any of the prayers or the fact of praying together before beginning.  I only consciously understood the words of the English prayer but I’ll go out on a limb and say none of the prayers were self-conscious or full of buzzwords.  They were simple, short, in and of the moment, heartfelt.

I was completely taken aback and had to wipe tears from my eyes during the prayers.  The sight of the cool dudes, long hair flying in the wind, holding hands and praying on the beach got me choked up.  It was the opposite of what many of us experience in church – or what we are afraid will happen when we pray together in church, especially if one of the “non-professionals” offers the prayer.

That day on the beach, I began wondering about how we are teaching people to pray in context.  For those of us who are asked/assumed to pray, how can we model praying so it’s an invitation to others to do the same?  It seems to me that many times in the church we gather to offer prayers and ask God’s blessings on a meal or a service trip but our humility is hidden under slick phrasing or a tone-of-voice assumption that the prayer is a “lock on it” rather than the start of it.

What I experienced on the beach was a group of consummate professionals vulnerable enough to hold hands and remember the One who makes all days gifts.  How can we professional pray-ers model this spirit and invite the non-professionals to the mic?  What would this look like at tax time in an accountant’s office?  In a writer’s room?  Before surgery in an operating room?

I need to hear more prayers from the trenches, raised up from wherever by whomever, stating the simple but obvious truth and need of our lives.  This matters and we give it to you – the success and the difficulty of it – and ask your blessing.  We know you’re here.  Thank God.

 

Dogged and Wooed by God

Posted on by
Reply

lake george from the little dock_w.sherman.8.14

Sitting on a porch by a lake in New York last week, my brother-in-law offered me a section from The New York Times.  I declined and kept watching the boats go by, listening to the water lap the rocky shoreline.  He joked, “You don’t want to know what’s happening in the rest of the world?”  Nope.

Not that day anyway.  During my time away I didn’t spend time online or listening to the radio or reading papers or watching any TV except baseball.  It wasn’t hard.  It was satisfying, restful and rejuvenating.

Coming back to the world of 24-hour noise after a tech Sabbath can be disorienting.  Some news stories and have come and gone.  Others are into level three of their coverage and I have to go back and piece together how we got there.  Others, like the coverage of the Ebola virus outbreak in Africa and the Americans being treated at Emory Hospital in Atlanta, are simply puzzling.

I heard a snippet on NPR one morning this week during media re-entry.  Ebola in Africa, Americans transported.  I thought, I hope they’re OK.  By the time I got around to listening to a lengthier report or reading anything about this online, Ann Coulter and others had already chimed in and yet others had retorted.  Having been out of the media cycle and as relaxed as I’ve been in a year, it was hard to imagine what sort of left-right divide could have happened around this issue.

Silly me.  In the world some folks live in, everything is a left-right issue, if they want it to be.

I’m not going to thoroughly research this “debate” or try to catch up on each twist the “conversation” has taken.  I’m not even going to dwell on the hatefulness evident in Coulter’s article, though it will reach out and slap you in the face if you read it. (You can find her 8/6/14 article “Ebola Doc’s Condition Downgraded to ‘Idiotic’” on her website but I don’t even want to offer the hyperlink here.)  I’m simply going to point out one thing, in response to two questions she poses.

Talking about Americans who would be protected from this virus if we stayed put instead of traveling to Africa, she asks, “But why do we have to deal with this at all?”

(We deal with things – unpleasant, seemingly remote things – because we are all living on the same planet and because the far away people suffering a plague are our brothers and sisters.  We deal with it because to care for other humans – especially when we don’t “have to” by law or familial obligation – makes us more deeply human.)

Later she laments people going to Africa on mission trips and asks, “Can’t anyone serve Christ in America anymore?”

(Of course we can, and do.  But this question suggests we either serve Christ here or in other world locations.  It’s a false choice.)

Both questions reveal a lack of understanding about how and why Christians express their faith as action in the world.

Christians deal with the things we would not choose for ourselves and we go to unusual places far from home (literally, emotionally, spiritually) because we are called.  Pushed, nudged, prodded, dogged, and wooed by God.  Beckoned to a task or a place beyond what we would have chosen for ourselves, sometimes an illogical one by other standards.

We worship and follow the One who came in the vulnerable form of a human body, a body just like ours and just like our brothers’ and sisters’ bodies in Africa, susceptible to disease and hunger.  Jesus put his hands all over the scabbed contagious bodies of his neighbors and he sends us to offer healing, too (Matthew 8: 1-3, Matthew 9: 18-38, Acts 3: 1-10).  When we go, we are called to look for Christ in the “distressing disguise of the poor” he wears so often (Mother Teresa).

Medical missionary work in Africa is not how God calls everyone.  It’s OK if it’s not your calling or Coulter’s.  Don’t worry, there is plenty to do here in the States and right there on your street.  But don’t make her mistake.  Don’t assume that hiding out behind vitriol, fear, and an insulating we-take-care-of-our-own mentality will save you.  It might protect you from a virus, at least for a while, but none of that will protect you when God comes calling with another idea.

Though I don’t want to isolate myself in a protective bubble, I enjoyed the bubble of time I preserved for vacation and time out from this fray.  I appreciated the smaller circle of care and concern and I reveled in saying “no” to the newspaper.  I felt called to step back and out of the normal loop of work and responsibility, called into God-given Sabbath time (which is another way God operates that doesn’t make sense to the way the world operates).

The point is not whether you step forward or step back, whether God calls you to this or that at any given moment.  The point is that God is calling.  Always.  And each time we are called out of loops of our own making, into deeper relationship – with ourselves, one another, and God.  Are you listening?