February 28, 2018 - Wednesday Evening Service Lent 2 - Prayer Around the Cross

Second week of Lent this year but this was our first Wednesday worship since last week's service was called off on account of weather. Creator offered tonight's contemplative service as a time to slow down and quiet our souls in the midst of Lent. Tonight started appropriately with those gathered singing Kelly Carlisle's Quiet Our Souls, then we listened to and offered prayers around the cross.

Richard Rohr once predicted, "When the church is no longer teaching the people how to pray, we could almost say it will have lost its reason for existence," Tonight there were our traditional spoken prayers (starting off with, Let us pray and addressing God verbally). There were also readings, songs, silence, meditation and contemplation. Tonight my deepest encounter with what I hungered for spiritually was an outward communal silence while I wrestled with an inner turmoil.

Turmoil over the power of prayer.

Pastor Ray invited us to bring to the cross the hearts we had within us. Since Ash Wednesday my heart has been troubled with the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting and the two weeks of subsequent national response.

Young people from the school are calling for action and have told the nation that they would keep being as loud and annoying as they had to be until the usual “thoughts and prayers” response becomes a response of “policy and change.”

These teenagers have touched many hearts as they have plunged into an ongoing debate. Besides the Parkland shooting, the students and their families, I was reminded last week how many shootings the nation has recently endured.

A few Creator members attended the film 101 Seconds premier at the Portland International Film Festival. The film focused on surviving family members of the two victims of the 2014 Clackamas Mall shooting. Paul Kemp, one of those featured in the film, has devoted himself to challenging the current status quo reactions that have settled in over the U.S. after decades of mass shootings. His brother-in-law, Steve Forsyth, was killed at work in the mall by a 22 year old with a stolen AR-15.

The Clackamas Mall shooting was followed quickly by Sandy Hook. We all experienced the disappointment of nothing substantial being done to address the violence except, perhaps, an increase in security personnel and protection at certain schools. People also bought more guns to protect themselves. 

I brought all these experiences, memories, and my ruminations into the service. A turbulent, cross-current conflict within myself regarding the either / or or both / and choices between responses of prayer and action; civility and prophetic anger; complacency and advocacy; patience and immediacy.

A 20th century Jesuit theologian, Karl Rahner, once wrote “the Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not exist.”  Today's Christians need more than just moral guidance and instruction in the proper way to think about God, Christ, and salvation. I think this can move beyond purely a Christian perspective as well. My wife recently showed me a video of Ronald Arrington and Rocco Deluca performing together on a piece called Build Better People.

Building better people. To be a Christian this should mean transfiguration from the inside out. This is a consequence of grace, not something we achieve on our own efforts. We do, however, consent to the healing action of the Spirit in our lives, and one way we can consent is through silent, contemplative prayer.

Many in the congregation and pastors supporting the Parkland student's current call (like me), have been dissatisfied with the "thoughts and prayers" response alone like the student. Still, at the heart of our service tonight, our focus remained on "thoughts and prayers". The “policy and change” was left to us as individuals rather than as a congregation.

So we do not challenge the efficacy of a "thoughts and prayers" response. We do not perceive prayer as inconsequential. Yet, by professing our dissatisfaction with a prayers alone response, some may think this is valuing "action" more highly than prayer and, by inference, that prayer is not action.

I bring this up together with another piece of current news to explore this current "thoughts and prayers" response more deeply. Hope Hicks, the White House communications director, resigned today. Her resignation came a day after she testified for eight hours before the House Intelligence Committee, telling the panel that in her job, she had occasionally been required to tell white lies.

White lies. Yes, the familiar phrase "thoughts and prayers" may simply be a white lie many of us tell. After all, no one is held accountable to prove, keep or maintain this statement nor should they be. Perhaps "my thoughts and prayers are with you" is our automatic, stock response to any tragic news and tumbles out because we don't have anything else to say. It may be a simple standard expression of collective sympathy.  Or we may not understand what prayer truly means in these circumstances.

I have been guilty of all of these at various times when I offered thoughts and prayers as consolation. I'm concerned, however, that if any of these are better describe how a current individual who says "my thoughts and prayers are with you" feels and not they are insincere in some way, that all "thought and prayer" responses are tainted, no matter how heartfelt. Prayer should not be summarily dismissed as inadequate or an improper response to our mass shooting victims and their families.

My conflicted response may be how I keep the incidents, the families and how to move forward in my true "thoughts and prayers". Outwardly, my body may have "slowed down" during the service and my soul may have appeared to be quiet as I lit a candle and prayed at the cross tonight, but inwardly my heart was ablaze with all the certainties and doubts about what to do next.

I confess my soul was hardly quiet. I felt lost in the darkness and candlelight within the sanctuary. I felt our nation is currently in its own time of darkness. I wasn't sure if a quiet soul was what God, as Holy Spirit, required of me tonight for our Prayer Around the Cross.

Did I pray or did I participate in our community prayer in a different way tonight?

Our collective Lenten journey continues.