Faith Works 3-3-18

Faith Works 3-3-18

Jeff Gill

 

Stress, prayer, and worship

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When the non-affiliated ask me about what it is about participation in religion that I find meaningful and helpful, my first answer is almost always "it helps me cope."

Jesse Ventura famously declared that religion was "a crutch." Guilty, Jesse. It is. I am broken (see last week's column!) and it's happened before and will happen again. I am a limited, finite, breakable human creature, and I often need crutches.

On the most basic level, I need corporate regular worship to help me re-set and prepare for a new week. The stores and products and retail landscape all conspire to make my days and hours and life all blur together in an endless cycle of consumption: Sunday is a pause, a halt in fact, and a chance to put myself in a place of review and renewal. God says "take a day each week to do this, don't just let your life be a blur" and that's what church services do for me.

Nowhere in the Bible does it say "dress up, come to a big building, and sit there at 10:30 every Sunday," but the net effect is to point us to a regular committed presence in a worshiping community. If yours is on Saturday, or another day, in a very different setting, fine, but if there aren't other people involved, it doesn't pull you out of yourself quite the same way.

Now, every time I get stressed out, I can't go to church. Actually, the buildings and worship centers are often available other days, and ducking in isn't a bad idea when you can – but it's also a training ground, your spiritual gym, your "box" in which you gain skills you can carry out into the challenges of everyday non-Sunday life.

So we have those familiar prayers: the Lord's Prayer said, the Doxology or Gloria as often sung, the verses and responses which ground us in a deeper, wider tradition. We use them in corporate worship, but they're there in our heads, and we can call them up, recall and whisper or sing or hum them when the world presses in all too close. Anywhere, we can do this.

Just as in church we bow our heads, simply to shut out the distractions and also as a sign of humility – so that when in the rest of the week, we adopt the same posture, that angle of neck and chin and of our thoughts, the calm from worship can come into almost any moment.

And our own disciplines of prayer and worship we carry in our bodies, just as those Bible verses memorized or familiar prayers are held in our minds. When I am doing my own personal prayers, I often sit and bow my head and hold my right hand cupped fingers in the cradle of the left, my thumbs just touching. It's just a part of how I sit and center.

As noted last week, I recently went through an . . . extremely unpleasant procedure. For which I needed to hold myself very still, even as the doctor muttered just off my right ear "hmmm, this usually goes easier." Four, five tries. Through the throat.

I could not sing a hymn. And in the moment, I'm not sure I could have come up with the entirety of John 3:16 if I had to. But it came to me that I could simply put my hands together as I did in regular prayer, and as easily as that, my whole body relaxed. And if you'd asked me, I would have given you Colossians 3, verses 15, 16, and 17. Because that practiced pose put me back into a place of peace.

For Christians, there is also a way to hold onto a bit of that peace in any circumstance, whatever the turmoil or trouble that's trying to throw us down into despair, however much distraction is pushing into our field of view. Even if our hands aren't free, or our hearts burdened, there is a name.

Jesus is two syllables. We don't say it as they do in Mexico or Argentina, and none of us are saying his name the way it would have sounded in Aramaic when Mary called him for dinner. But the idea that, when all else fails, we have been given a personal connection to just say that name, which goes back into Hebrew meaning "God saves," which connects to Joshua and Yahweh and that first whispering hope Noah listened to over the waters.

Jesus isn't a magic word. Saying his name comes to have meaning when we've practiced our prayer and worship and faith in community, but if we lay that foundation of relationship, the name of Jesus can be the simplest prayer for any occasion, and the reliever of stress to any of us, always.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him about your practices for peace in your life and for others at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.