Faith Works 8-21-21
Jeff Gill
Prayer, chickens, and eggs
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Prayer at home, prayer in church. They've been a mutually supporting pair for most of us for a very long time.
In regular worship, among many other benefits of the experience, you hear others pray, and are led in prayer which requires little of you, and I say that not as a bad thing. In some seasons of the spirit, we need to pray without effort. We need to be lifted and carried in prayer, and simply listening and affirming and experiencing prayer spoken by others can get us through times when we have no words, no creativity, no imagination, no memory, just pain and sorrow and hurt. Letting others pray and praying with them can be a blessing, and worship is a place that happens.
Obviously, many of us have gotten to maintain the experience of worship in our lives, even under the most restrictive circumstances (illness, age, mobility) with online tools. The pros and cons, pluses and minuses of streaming video worship have been debated sufficiently in many other places for me to step past that morass for now. But as encouraging as some of the numbers associated with that option are, it's clear to anyone in faith community leadership that it does not, has not reached everyone.
So I know many have sampled and in some cases just declined the whole video conference or social media platformed worship option, and are trying to maintain some personal ties at home. Through occasional personal contacts, whether by phone or appropriately handled visits. But it's much, much less than what many had as a part of their spiritual formation and maintenance than we had before. And even some who have embraced online options have found them wearying, and cut back, reduced, trimmed down their screen time as a two-edged sword for spiritual health versus wearing on the spirit.
Where all that leaves us is, at least in my circle of contacts and encounters, more online than elsewhere, quite a bit of confession around how prayer lives are stretching to a breaking point, how seasons of prayer have gotten shorter, how some have even paused their prayer life and are struggling to feel ready to pick it back up again. . . though they feel a call to do so.
Which leads me to a pastoral suggestion for some, which is a set of reminders and habits I've held onto that feed my prayerful moments, keep me in a spiritual harmony I believe I need, to get through the tensions and anxieties of the world we're all in.
It's a chicken or egg issue: do you pray in order to feel more deeply connected to God, the world God has made, the people God has put in this world with us? Certainly most believers, in most faith traditions as well as Christianity, would say yes. So here's my counsel: sometimes, you can open up your cramped and closed impulse to prayer by working towards it the other way. Reflect on your connections to God, consider this world God has made, and engage as best you can with the people who are God's children. You may feel right now like that last item is something you only know intellectually, but aren't feeling these days. God's children can be a raucous romper room of little hellions, can't they? But beloved children we all are.
But you're not feeling it? Okay. Walk up to a piece of art, open up a volume (or a screen if that's all you've got), and gaze into it. Enter that picture, notice the details, contemplate the experience the artist is trying to capture, Cassatt or O'Keeffe, Monet or your mother's pen and ink sketch. Use art to extend yourself out of yourself.
Poetry is a verbal method of the same. Read slowly. Re-read twice over, slow. Consider the words, what each means, how they come together. Get out of your own head and imagine the thoughts of the poet, of other readers.
Or service. You might be able to do something for another; you could simply pray for someone else, the old discipline of intercessory prayer. If you can't pray for yourself, that doesn't mean you can't pray. In all these ways, getting outside of our own selves is how we get closer to where prayer is likely to meet us.
Visual or literary arts, acts of compassion, anything you can find nearby to take you out of the endless racetrack of your own thoughts, and onto a different path. Let God meet you there.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's partial to Vermeer. Tell him how you get out of your own head at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
