Thoughts and Prayers
FROM THE RECTOR
After every mass shooting, every racist attack, every natural disaster, and every heartbreaking tragedy, people rush to offer their “thoughts and prayers.” Those words have become a refrain nearly as haunting as the repetitive losses they follow. You may have seen video mashups of politicians and celebrities repeating those words over and over until they sound ridiculous. Plenty of people have expressed frustration that, with no end in sight, “thoughts and prayers” are not enough, but I want to suggest that, in fact they are—that thoughts and prayers are, in fact, the best thing that we can offer because thoughts and prayers, by definition, are only a beginning.
When you pray for someone you love, what do you think happens? When you hold before God a heartfelt need, how do you think God receives that prayer? Prayer is not a way to remove a concern from our heart or mind. We do not utter a prayer so that we can excuse ourselves from the obligation of thinking about the individual or situation again. We pray so that we can take them with us throughout our day. Perhaps you have noticed that, when you start your day by praying for someone you love, you find yourself thinking about them all day long. A song on the radio or a songbird in the window is enough to flood your mind with the love that holds you together, and you pray for them all over again.
Although sometimes prayer asks God to take away a particular anxiety or concern that has been weighing us down, we pursue that peace of mind not by forgetting the thing that has bothered us but by going deeper into it—by asking God to confront it on our behalf so that we are not paralyzed by our incapacity but motivated to consider it with new God-breathed ability. When we ask God for a miraculous intervention in the terminal diagnosis, in the intractable situation, in the political gridlock, in the untamable addiction, we confess our inability to make everything better and turn the situation over to God, but, unless we ourselves are the barrier to healing, true prayer does not remove us from the issue but makes us more fully available to it. Whatever the outcome, we are more substantially invested in it because, through prayer, we have aligned ourselves with and offered ourselves to God’s work in the world.
Last week, my friend Clarke French, the Rector of the Church of the Holy Family in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, tweeted, “When I offer you my thoughts and prayers, here’s what I mean: I promise not to put your suffering out of my mind. I will not shrink away from your pain. I also promise to raise a cry of lament before the mercy seat of God on your behalf, asking, too, for strength to serve you.” When children are slaughtered, made unrecognizable even to their own parents in the carnage enacted by a teenager with an assault rifle, we are desperate to look away, but our thoughts and prayers compel us to behold their lifeless bodies and hear the bitter wailing of their families. To remember them and pray for them is to allow God to draw us more deeply into the agony of their loss until their pain becomes unbearable for us as well.
If your response to a tragedy like the ones in Buffalo or Uvalde is to pray in order that you can go on with your life, unburdened by the epidemic of gun violence in this country, you are not doing it right. We should pray. We absolutely need to pray. Our God is the one who makes all things new, turning death into life and bringing fresh possibility where no hope can be found. We pray in order that God’s resurrection power may come into the shattered, lifeless situations of this world and that God might use us as instruments of that resurrection life. We pray not to remove ourselves from the pain, suffering, and hopelessness of others but so that, with God’s help, we might inhabit them more fully. Prayer, therefore, is a risky endeavor, but, when we encounter the suffering of others, is there any other faithful response?
Yours Faithfully,
Evan D. Garner