Help, Thanks, Wow: a Guide to Prayer for Newtown

(Photo: Laura Petrecca, USA TODAY)

Immediately the requests were sounded, “Pray for Newtown.”  But what should we pray, exactly?  I think the first prayer we pray is something we might not think of as a prayer at all: “O God.”  Although “O God” is a reflexive exclamation when we hear bad news, it’s also a form of reaching out to something more powerful than we.

At first we don’t even have words to supplement the “O God.” We sit in stunned silence, our minds reeling, imagining horrors, yearning for more detail, an explanation that will help make sense of it. “O God” hangs in the air---and ascends to God.  Romans 8 talks about the Spirit interceding for us “with sighs too deep for words” when we don’t know how to pray. Sighing with the Spirit may be as honest and gentle of a prayer as we can muster.

I found Anne Lamott’s latest book HelpThanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers to be a wonderful guide to filling in some of the content for my prayers Newtown. She gives us three simple one word prayers that enable deep prayer.

Help. Lamott claims that’s the prayer that comes from deep inside when we feel the most broken, when we know that we don’t have the solutions, that we cannot control very much in this whole world.  To pray, “Help” is to surrender any illusions of control, of security and immunity to suffering to a power greater than one’s self.

So, we pray: Help.  Help God.

• Help the moms and dads, brothers and sisters, grandparents, aunts, uncles and friends who have lost someone precious to them, who will be haunted by this week forever. 
• Help them as they endure the site of little caskets and hear the words “earth to earth. . .” 
• Help them to get through, help them know your identification with their pain and sorrow. Help them to find what they need and who they need in their darkest moments.
• Help the responders and faculty and parents who have witnessed the awful scene.
• Help our country figure out how to better protect our children and teachers.
• Help us when we don’t feel much like lighting the candle of joy to light it anyway.
• Help us not to become so used to these stories that our hearts become hardened.
• Help us to pay attention and care for all children who suffer from violence and terror and abuse.

Help.

The second great prayer is Thanks.  There is sort of the selfish-thanks. Thank you that it didn’t happen to my family, my community. But Anne says thanks also develops gratitude for what awful events can reveal–even if they are unpleasant.

• Thanks that we are reminded of how precious and fragile life really is, and how we take should never take one moment or person in our lives for granted.
• Thanks that we have a moment to pause and figure out how to do better and care for the most vulnerable.
• Thanks that a window may have opened for our nation to have a more mature conversation about a culture of violence and guns and access to mental health services.
• Thanks the opportunity to renew our commitment to be of service, to make the world less volatile by being people who follow the ways of peace, truth and justice, who do not give in to darkness.

Wow is the prayer of paying attention and seeing the good in the world. In spite of the tragic, there are still dimensions of life that take our breath away.

• Wow–it takes our breath away to realize the heroism of the principal and teachers who sacrificed their own lives for the children.
• I see law enforcement officers who rush into the unknown putting themselves in harm’s way. Wow. 
• I’m blown away by the care medical examiners and others who do sign up to look at awful things so that the truth might be revealed.
• Wow–even though our hearts are broken, we have a chance to act, to not let the darkness of the world to overwhelm and overtake us.
• Wow–we are amazed at the children that we see at this time of year especially filled with a sense of trust, wonder, and love for life.
• Wow–even though the worst has happened, there is still more good than evil in the world, there is still a chance to push the darkness out of our hearts and embrace the light.

If you are looking for a model to improve your prayer life and earnestly pray for Newtown, three little words feel just about right. Help. Thanks. Wow.

Nattering Nabobs of Negativism

Sounding distinctly above the jet-engine-like roar of the cappuccino machine was the booming voice of a silver-haired man who wore a large chrome cross around his neck.  Although his companion signaled (repeatedly) for him to lower the decibels and use his “inside-a-small-coffee shop voice” instead of his “outside drill sergeant voice” he paid no attention and transformed the cozy atmosphere into a torture chamber. Instead of whips and chains, this guy used words, lots of negative, vitriolic words and attitudes on everything from fellow church members to the government to society in general.

All the other customers left after it was apparent he wouldn’t shut up and it seemed no one thought it worth the effort to engage him and ask him to pipe down. I was stuck there, waiting for a ride thinking about what an awful witness for faith he was as he said “everything is going to hell in a hand-basket.”  I wished that he would at least have the decency to remove the cross from his neck.

Many people of faith (conservatives and liberals) truly believe that the world and American culture is getting worse every day. They look for evidence that reinforces a fundamentally negative worldview. Some give up trying to make positive change and simply adopt an attitude of looking forward to the end when God will straighten everything out.

I’m reminded of the famous line written by William Safire and spoken by then vice-president Spiro Agnew in which he talked about the press. The same could be said of way too many church folk.

“In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism. They have formed their own 4-H Club… hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.”

Spiro Agnew

As I look around the American church today, I think it’s clear that the Nattering Nabobs have taken over and are killing the church because we all come across sounding like angry old grumps who don’t offer one bit of credible good news.

Many Things are Getting Better, not Worse

According to a recent CNN article by Steven Johnson:

Over the past two decades, what have the U.S. trends been for the following important measures of social health: high school dropout rates, college enrollment, juvenile crime, drunken driving, traffic deaths, infant mortality, life expectancy, per capita gasoline consumption, workplace injuries, air pollution, divorce, male-female wage equality, charitable giving, voter turnout, per capita GDP and teen pregnancy?

The answer for all of them is the same: The trend is positive. Almost all those varied metrics of social wellness have improved by more than 20% over the past two decades. And that's not counting the myriad small wonders of modern medicine that have improved our quality of life as well as our longevity: the anti-depressants and insulin pumps and quadruple bypasses.


Steven Johnson

Americans enjoy longer, healthier lives in more stable families and communities than we did 20 years ago. But other than the crime trends, these facts are rarely reported or shared via word-of-mouth channels.

There’s Never Been a Better Time to Live

There is not idyllic past where everything was perfect. Think about the past, torture, slavery, inequality, slaves, the horrors of child labor, the nonrecognition of human rights, mistreatment of those with mental and physical disabilities, etc. Things are not worse but our expectations are greater, for the very good reason that the seed that faithful people have planted which calling for more user-friendly world have taken root.  There have been famines and droughts; earthquakes and tsunamis; recessions and depressions; hurricanes and tornados but there has been so much goodwill and outpouring of support from across the globe whenever something likes this happens.

Mr Johnson says the media has to find ways of better telling the story of the good that is happening and find ways to accentuate it. I think the same is true for the church.

Positive People Doing God’s Work

Yes there is still much work to be done, there is much wrong with the world and it would be naive to think we are on a march of steady progress to utopia. It seems the first job of a person of faith is to focus on the positive action that can be accomplished instead of becoming just another Nattering Nabob.  (I don’t really know what a nabob is, but I’m fairly certain that it doesn’t have much to do with discipleship).   The mission statement of the church I serve was developed prior to my arrival and it helps us re-frame our thinking. Instead of believing that the world is falling apart, we can endeavor to be: Positive People Doing God's Work.  

The Walking Dead

Walking Dead

There’s just something about a good zombie show that forces me to think more deeply about culture, life, death and what we will do to survive. I cannot watch one of these shows without thinking of St. Irenaeus of Lyon who taught that a human being “fully alive” is “the glory of God.” Zombies remind me that being fully alive has to mean something more than shuffling through life uncritically, unaffected by what is happening around me, mechanically pursuing my own appetites at the expense of my neighbor. The classic zombie movie, Dawn of the Dead, effectively employed the metaphor of a shopping mall besieged by the undead as a way of reminding us that absorption into a purely consumerist culture is evidence of being something other than fully alive. What we seek for true life cannot be purchased at the mall.

It’s not the gore and violence in the genre that appeals to me—some directors are so over-the-top with grisly special-effects that they obscure the deeper issues at stake. What does it mean to be alive? AMC’s The Walking Dead is a show with excellent storytelling that embraces the requisite gruesomeness without making killing zombies the point of the show.

A recent episode had characters wondering if “an echo” of the person’s memory and identity might be trapped within the mind of a zombie, that he or she still has some consciousness in there somewhere. It set me to thinking about all the people I’ve loved who had Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia. Was there something of my grandfather still in that shell of his body when he no longer recognized his own name?

I love the concept of “an echo” because I get the sense that sometimes I hear an echo of who I once was rambling around in my head. The adolescent, inappropriate, silly, insecure self of long ago makes his voice heard in my head and I have to remember that he will always be a part of my life, but he doesn’t get to control my life.
The notion of an echo reminded of the funeral poem Afterglow that makes me wonder how my spirit will echo around for a while after I’m dead.

Afterglow
I’d like the memory of me
to be a happy one.
I’d like to leave an afterglow
of smiles when life is done,
I’d like to leave an echo
whispering softly down the ways,
Of happy times and laughing
times and bright and
summer days.
I’d like the tears of those who
grieve, to dry before the sun,
Of happy memories that I leave
When life is done.
~Helen Lowrie Marshall
(From her book of poetry, Close to the Heart )

Of course the trick is to be fully alive while you are still breathing so that there can be something to echo after your gone. Live well my friends, there is a lot of life to be enjoyed.

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Spirituality of Terroir

Two years ago three colleagues and I were awarded a grant from the College of Pastoral Leaders to study the spirituality of terrioir. Not terror, terroir. The term comes from a french wine-making concept that means "taste of place." Terroir helps explain how wine produced in one location tastes different than one that comes from a different place. Both wines can come from the exact same type of grape, but they have radical differences in flavor. The type of soil and other environmental factors play a significant role. The concept of terroir is expanding across the foodie movement. Many top chefs try to find local foods and their desire is to let the flavors emerge. Chefs, organic farmers and winemakers are all speaking the same language. They say humbly, "My job is to get out of the way and let food do it's thing."

The problem with most food that is produced today is similar to the problems ruining the church. Today most of our foods are over-processed. The goal is not to let local flavors burst forth from different regions. Rather the goal is to create a substance that can be standardized and easily transportable. One cannot say, "The 2009 Velveeta produced a earthy undertones that we haven't tasted since the 1999 Cheez Whiz." The result of all of this processing is that most of our diets are based on foods cannot nourish or delight us. For example, you've probably noticed that one cannot purchase a decent tomato from a grocery store. In order to ship the fruit, it needs to have a thick skin and the thicker the skin, the less flavorful. In effect, we are over-fed and under-nourished. We crave for more than our food is providing so we eat more and are less satisfied.

Is the analogy apt for what is happening in the church? Many churches are losing their local flavor and beginning to look like every other church. Drive around town and you will see churches using the same Vacation Bible School curriculum. The church has simply become a consumer of pre-packaged programs for evangelism, small groups, stewardship, contemporary worship formats, you name it. We are forever looking for a magic bullet. We don't want to spend time creating something ourselves if something already exists and was written by professionals who had more time to devote to the project. With so many pre-packaged programs, are congregations in danger of becoming like local franchises of larger chains? Increasingly, denominational affiliation has less to do with the flavor of a church than the publishing houses of the programs that churches purchase.

Most successful church programs are not successful because they were purchased from somewhere else. They were successful because they grew out of a need in a local setting and lay people in the church decided to act. The really satisfying stuff grows out of local people sensing what is needed in their neighborhoods, their communities, their members. The good stuff has a terroir that cannot be duplicated and mass produced. Wine producers know that each variety of grape grows best in specific kinds of soil and climate conditions. You can't grow a world-class Pinot Noir in Iowa because the climate is too warm and the soil is too rich. But in Oregon the conditions are perfect. On the other hand, there are some varieties you dare not try in Oregon. If an Iowa farmer looked at the Pinot Soil, he'd say it's no good. Corn would never grow in it. However, the poor soil in Oregon makes the vines sink its roots deeper into the bedrock. The result is that the stress on the vine makes it go deep enough to pull out the minerals that give the wine a complex and satisfying taste.

It seems to me that any congregation that wants to produce a high quality ministry should ask terroir kinds of questions. Who is in our neighborhood? What are the cultural conditions around us? What grows well here? What are the gifts of our congregation? When we are stressed by lack of participation, funds, originality or conflict, do we let our roots sink deeper or do we throw up our hands in despair? Most of the answers our churches are seeking come not from a publishing house, but from the neighborhood and congregation itself. Taste and see.

Rev. Tim Diebel and I will lead a workshop on this subject at the School for Congregational Learners at West Des Moines Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) on Saturday, August 27.