As I've written before, once upon a time I was a praying fool. Even though I pray no more I pretty much know where the impulse to pray comes from…and where the satisfaction from prayer comes from, which I think makes me a fairly reliable neutral observer whenever all-out war breaks out between the pro-prayer empire and the anti-prayer rebellion as it did last week. The casus belli was this provocative New York Daily News front page following the terrorist attack in San Bernardino.
A number of liberal politicians and pundits joined forces with the Daily News in criticizing Republican politicians for responding to the mass killing with calls to prayer rather than action. Within minutes it seemed the entire Internet was ablaze with the usual sound and fury signifying nothing but our hopeless addiction to cultural friction. I followed the battle from the ramparts overlooking Charles Pierce's Political Blog onEsquire where it raged for days over a scorched thread hammered by an incessant volley of comments between believers and non-believers. For those with normal lives to live who couldn't take the time to observe the carnage, let me draw upon my reportorial skills to sum up the debate this way:
Believer: You're going to burn in hell!
Non-believer: Fuck you!!
If I can add a little badly-needed nuance to the debate, I'd say that people on one side of it revere the act of prayer and regard it as the best…sometimes only...way they have to express sympathy with those they see suffering; people on the other side hold prayer in the same low regard as magic incantations like hocus-pocus or fairy tale spells like bibbity-bobbity-boo and see the offering of prayer in the face of tragedy as insulting. In other words, we're talking about some deeply held views that are unlikely to ever be changed in an Internet poo fight. Nonetheless, in my self-proclaimed role as arbiter here, allow me to begin by granting the non-believers a victory on the merits in this latest outbreak of hostilities. The pro-prayer forces either didn't understand the point the New York Daily News was making or willfully misread it in order to cast themselves--as many of them are prone to do--as victims of religious persecution. The message clearly was not an attack on prayer per se, but an attack on politicians who substitute a call for prayer for doing the job they were elected to do. We do not go to doctors in time of pain and expect them to dismiss our pain with a call for prayer. We do not go to police in time of fear and expect them to dismiss our fear with a call to prayer. And we don't need political leaders to sidestep their responsibilities as civic servants by assuming the role of pastor. This dodge is particularly aggravating because it has become routine for politicians in the pocket of the NRA to use it again and again as a sop to voters in response to our incessant gun violence.
Thomas Moore, former monk and one of my favorite spiritual writers and thinkers, preordained this cowardliness in his masterly book Dark Nights of the Soul when he wrote:
Religion, too, often avoids the dark by hiding behind platitudes and false assurances. Nothing is more irrelevant than feeble religious piousness in the face of stark, life-threatening darkness…Religion easily becomes defense and avoidance.
Here's a story I tell on myself for the possible benefit of others: I went to college on a full scholarship, which was dependent upon my maintaining a 3.0 average, which should've been doable except I was in over my head with Intermediate Spanish. I prayed a lot in those days to El Grande Padre for help in passing the class…too much time spent on my knees which would've been better spent in the language lab cost me my scholarship. The lesson: prayer--whatever emotional or spiritual comfort it may provide--is not a substitute for hard work and clear thinking.
The vacuous, dead end calls for prayer by the politicians cited by the New York Daily News contrasted with the call for prayer by James Ramos, Chairman of the San Bernardino Board of Supervisors, during the Board's press conference after the mass killing. Ramos made his request for "thoughts and prayers" for the victims and their families in the context of a report on the shooting and the steps the Board would be taking to protect county employees in the future. The Board had dutifully stepped up to its responsibilities, and the call to prayer was supplementary. Had the Board done nothing more than appear before the public to link hands and offer prayer, there would've been justifiable citizen outrage.
It's also significant that Ramos called for thoughts and prayers. The inclusion of thoughts there (and Ramos is not the first politician to be so deft) is a tacit acknowledgement that prayers aren't for everybody. And herein should lie the common ground where both the Prayer Empire and the No Prayer Rebellion find their peace. As much as prayer is a poor substitute for policy, it can be and often is a reasonable facsimile of contemplation and reflection. This is a truth about prayer that sinks beneath the mighty wisdom of non-believers who too often dismiss prayer as wishful thinking and mock the prayerful when their prayers don't come true. They don't seem to get that what many people call prayer is what other people call introspection. The anti-prayer argument that if prayer worked why didn't it prevent the tragedy in the first place holds only if you view prayer narrowly--and childishly--as a preventative. Prayer for many is reflective…a time to put themselves…even if momentarily...in the place of the sufferer. No one should begrudge anyone else such a moment because such moments are one of the ways we build a compassionate community.
This seems a good juncture to again reference that most grossly ignored teaching of Jesus:
5 And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. 6 But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.
In reflecting upon my own experience among the prayerful, I realize that my prayers were much like Stephen Colbert's confrontations on his old show with what he called "a formidable opponent." Because I understood the complex "supreme being" I was praying to (God/Jesus) to be all-knowing, it was incumbent upon me to speak clearly and honestly. Fortuitously, the inner voice I developed in my piety helped me to eventually evolve a writer's voice that stressed clarity and candor...which is not to imply that writers who emerge from non-pious backgrounds cannot achieve such literary virtues. All I'm saying is that was my path, so I'm not all that quick to dismiss prayer…certainly not quiet, private prayer…as a good. The thing about ostentatious, public prayer, however--whether at the dinner table, a political event or (God help us) in a restaurant--is that the audience is not God or conscience, but other people. The motivation for what I call performance prayer is vanity--an attempt to show off one's piety to others.
The New York Daily News got it exactly right--God isn't going to fix our national epidemic of gun violence. But if we take our respective thoughts and prayers into a private sanctuary…a closet or otherwise…and contemplate the trouble we're in, God or intellect may guide us in choosing leaders with the courage and will to fix it…and that would be a win-win for believers and non-believers alike.