Chaplaincy series: a new kind of praying

A.Hanson, Boulder, CO 2010

A long time ago, probably when I was a teenager or something. I read a magazine article that stated that it was cruel to say that you were going to pray for someone and then not actually do that. At the time, prayer to me was a very specific practice.  It was undoubtedly shaped by the Bible, and probably a few zealous sunday school teachers, and my own family that insisted that if your eyes were not closed during the prayer said before a meal, it didn't count.  In my mind, prayer was kneeling down, folding your hands, closing your eyes and bowing your head.  You could pray your prayer silently, but it was better if you prayed out loud.  I also had a particularly formative experience regarding prayer at Bible camp.  There as a well-meaning (if probably wrong) pastor who did a sermon illustration.  He held the end of a long rope and the other end was being held by someone on top of a tall rock at the side of the outdoor chapel. He would wave the rope up and down, and the person playing God, on top of the rock, would wave the rope back.  He implied that prayer was a transactional communication process and you had to put something in to get something out.  And that is how most of us think of prayer.  We put in some intercessory effort and God gives us an answer.

I am the witness to thousands of unanswered prayers. Fervent, pained, hoping against hope kind of prayers for something, anything, to be different. Prayer as a transaction just doesn't stand up to the rigor of a trauma center.  I need a different understanding.

About seven or eight years ago, when I was in the midst of one of the myriad faith crises of my twenties, I told a friend that I would "keep her in the forefront of my consciousness."  This was the closest that I could get to saying that I would pray for her. I didn't think that my humble words to some far off deity would change anything, but somehow I instinctively knew that I could hold her and her pain together with something greater than myself. As I got more involved in the church in recent years, this kind of hippy-trippy sort of prayer was shoved to the back burner in favor of liturgical prayers and ancient words that felt more meaningful to me. Many of the prayers that I heard being offered and even spoke myself in church were offered in earnest, but were without any real teeth.  Prayers like "courage", "wisdom", "understanding", and "acceptance."  These sort of blasé prayers happen without really putting God's feet to the fire.  They are general enough that it is possible to interpret any variety of outcomes as God's answering prayer.

The trauma ICU doesn't have time for well-intentioned prayers for understanding. Part of what I adore (and simultaneously abhor) about my work in the ICU is that all extraneous stuff is stripped away. There is literally no time for small talk or euphemism.  Life and death are so real that you can smell them. The prayers that are offered in the ICU are for life in the midst of death, relief in the midst of unimaginable suffering, and merciful and quick deaths.

I can no longer see prayer as a transactional form of communication with God.  Because most of the time, medical conditions in the ICU are more comparable to a runaway train than they are to a polite conversational exchange. Everything chaotic seems to happen at once, and time seems to stop and pile up on itself.  I, along with my patients, need a more comprehensive understanding of prayer.

I will continue to speak the intercessory words, because that alone is an act of pastoral care.  But I will hold them, and you, with a spirit of consciousness, along with the God of the universe. My tears are a prayer. That I carry you home with me and think about you when I am not at the hospital is a prayer.  When I hold your hand, careful not to disrupt your IV, that is a prayer. Prayer doesn't require wearing out the knees of your jeans, but it does require getting your hands dirty.

God sits with us in our excruciating expectation…a sermon on Psalm 70

A.Hanson, 2009. The Netherlands.

A sermon preached at House for All Sinners and Saints on Sunday, November 9, 2014. 

Grace, peace and mercy are yours from the Triune God.  Amen.

I love the psalms. I love that I can borrow their words when I am too tired or too broken to come up with words on my own. Like Psalm 70,

Be pleased, O God, to deliver me.
 O Lord, make haste to help me! 
Let those be put to shame and confusion
who seek my life.
Let those be turned back and brought to dishonor who desire to hurt me. 
Let those who say, ‘Aha, Aha!’ turn back because of their shame. Let all who seek you
rejoice and be glad in you.
Let those who love your salvation
say evermore, ‘God is great!’ 
But I am poor and needy;
hasten to me, O God!
You are my help and my deliverer;
 O Lord, do not delay!

Academically speaking, the form of this psalm is called something ridiculous like “a prayer of an individual for divine assistance” but I prefer to call it the kind of prayer that I usually end up praying.  Short bursts of pleading, begging, and asking God to show up because I feel alone, frightened, mad, or otherwise confused and in need of guidance. This is the gift of the psalms to us. They are not the flowery sayings of Jesus in the parables and they are not the rhetorical works of Paul in his many letters to various Christian communities. They are real prayers from real people who know what it is like to be stuck in the trenches of a terrible day.

Today’s psalm is from someone who is waiting impatiently for God to bring justice after feeling abused, persecuted, and alone. It could be the words of the queer kid who has been disowned by their parents.  It could be the words of the addict who is trying to stay sober.  It could be the words of the middle-aged child who is trying to navigate a bureaucracy of healthcare and benefits for their aging and ailing parents. It is a very real expression of lament and grief while waiting for God to show up and make this injustice right.

Somewhere Christianity started perpetuating the idea that we are supposed to be gentle and pious and patient in our prayers. The sort of Precious Moments or Hallmark brand of faith where we sit quietly and offer our prayers in a hushed and appropriately reverent tone of voice.  Then according to this model of faith, we wait for God to answer and we accept that answer and settle peacefully into whatever happens because it is God’s Plan with a capital “P” and it is wrong to argue with God.  Or something. Because if we don’t act the way we are supposed to, and wait patiently and act appropriately, we risk angering God or driving God away from us.

But I need a stronger God than that.  I need a God that doesn’t risk getting offended or wounded.  I need a God that can take my biggest questions and loudest laments.  And I suspect that you do too.  In my work as an ICU chaplain, I have lots of “What the hell are you thinking?!” kinds of questions for God.  Like “Why does someone dying of cancer anyway get hit by a car and die in the ICU instead of at home?” or “Why does someone’s family leave her alone to die?”  Where is the justice? We need a God that can take our laments and our pleading and our impatient waiting. And in the psalms we hear people just like us asking God these same tough questions and demanding that God make Godself known in a broken world. This is Gospel to our aching hearts.

The psalmist obliterates that Hallmark brand of religion by crying out in the midst of this excruciating waiting. “Hasten to me O, God!”  “O, Lord do not delay!”  We need to have a God who sits with us while we are waiting for the promise of everything being made new. This psalm is an earnest plea for help, and is rooted in in the psalmist’s trust in God’s listening and redemptive power. I think we get self-conscious sometimes about not wanting our prayers to seem too desperate, because that makes us vulnerable.  If we pray for something broad like “happiness” or “greater understanding” or “peace” we can find some way to make whatever happens fit into our experience. I do this too in the prayers that I pray with my patients. And I have been thinking about it a lot lately and wondering if I am protecting God and my idea of God what God does. What would happen if we all prayed with the same urgent cries of the person in today’s psalm?  Our prayers don’t need to be logical, beautiful or presentable, but simply the honest, messy and ugly cries of our deepest selves.

Woven into our experience as people of faith is that damn platitude, “Good things come to those who wait,” which is entirely non-biblical by the way, and implies that if we wait patiently enough, we will get what we want. But sometimes our prayers are not answered in the way we want or think they should be. Sometimes no matter how earnestly we pray for healing or happiness or wholeness for ourselves or others, our waiting doesn’t necessarily bring about what we want or think we deserve.

But I wonder if that is actually the reason we pray.  What if prayer is less about persuading God to answer our prayers, and instead changes us, makes us new? This is a huge paradigm shift, and it seems to say more about God than it does about us. A lot of the time I am not able to make sense of what God is doing on a “micro” level in the world around me.  I see a lot of the absolute worst that the world can offer, and I need to cling to something bigger. I need to cling to the hope that God is making all things new and that life WILL win out and death DOES NOT have the final word. I am slowly learning to trust that prayer is not about making my world make sense, but making me a part of God’s unfolding world.

The other time that this particular psalm appears in the appointed readings for the liturgical year is during Holy Week.  A time where even Jesus cries out in lament, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  God WANTS to hear our prayers. God PROMISES to sit with us in our anguish. How liberating it is to know that God can take our anger, our laments, the deepest cries of our broken hearts.  God participates in all of this. And just as the psalmist declares “God is great!” and “You are my help and my deliverer!” even while waiting for justice, we too know that God sits with us in our most excruciating times of expectation.

Where God shows up

A.Hanson, NYC 2014

I am currently working as a hospital chaplain at a Level 1 Trauma Center.  There are thousands of moments that I think about writing about, and then inevitably the exhaustion wins out and I never actually do it.  So I have lots of half-baked thoughts rattling around in my head.

During my shift last night I was called in to support a patient who was being discharged soon and is homeless. These are the sorts of situations where I feel utterly helpless.

This patient has been homeless for 18 years, camping in barns and outbuildings. He is chronically ill after many years of hard living (drinking, lack of healthcare, and sleeping outdoors). He is quite possibly unable to survive "sleeping rough" anymore. He's been trying to get into homeless shelters, but is not having luck anywhere.  His nurses don't want to discharge him, but at the same time, there are people who are sicker who need the hospital bed.  And somehow in the midst of all that human misery, the chaplain shows up.

After we talked for awhile, this man asked if I would pray for him.  Before I begin a prayer with a patient, I always say a quick prayer that is something along the lines of "God, let my words be what you would have them be."  In my prayers with this patient last night I found that the words were not my own.  I prayed to a God who "knows what it means to be homeless because you were born in a stable in a land that was not your own."  It felt like a meager offering.

But somehow it was comforting to this gentle man.  He remarked, "You know, I lived in a barn too.  I know that God is with me."

And that is where God shows up.

Your sighs and groans and mumbled prayers are heard by God in heaven…a sermon on Romans 8:26-39

A. Hanson, NYC 2014

Grace, peace, and mercy are yours from the Triune God who promises to hear our prayers.  Amen. 

Let’s listen one more time to today’s reading from Romans, chapter 8, verses 26-39:

 Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

 We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn within a large family. And those whom he predestined he also called; and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified.

 What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written,
‘For your sake we are being killed all day long;
   we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.’ 
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

            This portion of Paul’s Letter to the Romans was written as a sort of encouragement to followers of Jesus. Paul is acknowledging that the road that believers walk is difficult, and that even in their present suffering, God bears with them. Paul is NOT equating suffering with what it means to be a Christian or saying that suffering now will pay off with salvation in the future.  Paul is saying that suffering is part of what it means to live in a broken world.

            While we do not live under the oppression of the Roman Empire, we certainly know what it means to live in a broken world.  And while we are eavesdropping on a letter written to another people in another time and place, Paul’s letter to the Romans provides hope for us even now. We need to hear that in the midst of what feels like a broken God-forsaken world, with immigrant and refugee children being detained in unimaginable and inhuman conditions in our own country, passenger planes being shot out of the sky in Ukraine, and land strikes on children and families in Gaza, we need to hear that God is present and knows that our weeping and our groans and our sighs are prayers. 

It is easy to become discouraged with all the suffering in the world.  It is understandable to ask, “where is God in all this mess?” and believe that suffering points to God’s absence rather than God’s presence.  I don’t have some theological rationale for why suffering exists.  I don’t have a neat answer for you.  It would be a mistake to look at this text from Romans and parse out sound bites that would attempt to explain suffering in this broken world, such as, “ We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.”  This sounds suspiciously like it could be manipulated into the baseless platitudes of “Everything happens for a reason” or “God never gives you more than you can handle.”  Sometimes suffering is just suffering.  Life is hard.  Suffering is not part of the roadmap of how to be a Christian, but unfortunately, it is part of what it means to be human.

So is there any good news? It’s good news to me that the Holy Spirit helps us pray when we are too weak to do so on our own.  When we cannot even form words, just sighs. And that same Spirit intercedes for us with God who promises to hear our prayers. Somewhere along the line, maybe in Sunday School, maybe as a result of memorized prayers before going to bed or table graces, many of us got the idea that a prayer is only a prayer if it makes sense and sounds good.  Anne Lamott writes in her book, Help, Thanks, Wow, “Prayer is taking a chance that against all odds and past history, we are loved and chosen, and do not have to get it together before we show up.” So your sighs and groans and tears and mumbled prayers are heard by God in heaven. 

I remember how liberated I felt when I learned that I could actually shout at God when I was angry because God can take it.  God does not want or need us to kneel quietly, fold our hands neatly and pray with the eloquence of Jesus himself.  God loves us just as we are and wants us to bring our whole selves to our prayers. God does not love us any less if we are not blessed with the gift of words or if we shout “God, where are you?!” or even if our prayer is something along the lines of “Whoever you are, I hope you are listening.” 

And while it is good news that the Spirit intercedes for us, the even better news is that nothing can separate us from the love of God.  Suffering is real.  Pain is real.  Sin is real. It can feel like God is absent from our lives, and yet, God became human and lived among us and lives in us, so we never have to be apart from God again.  Nothing will separate us from God.  Not hardship, distress, addiction, mental illness, divorce, abuse, persecution, famine, nakedness, poverty, wealth, peril, fear, doubt, certainty, sword, war, politics, violence or even we ourselves.  Nothing in all of creation, in this broken world, can separate us from God. Sin still exists in the world.  Brokenness still exists in the world.  But the hold that sin, death, and evil has on God’s beloved people, which is ALL people, has forever been broken.  Thanks be to God.

Praying the Psalms: A Sermon for Benedictine Living Community

A prayer of lament for the MN flooding
A.Hanson, St Peter 2014

 (A sermon preached at the Benedictine Living Community on June 19, 2014) 

For our homily today, I am going to try something a little different.  One of my favorite books of the Bible is the book of the Psalms.  There are many types of psalms.  There are psalms of praise, psalms of lament, psalms that are hymns or prayers.  The psalms give us words when sometimes we struggle to find those words on our own.  I am going to read a few psalms today and after each psalm I will offer a brief reflection and then give you an opportunity to reflect silently. 

I. Psalm 23 (a psalm of praise)

This is a very familiar psalm to most of us.  I will read it very slowly and have you think about the first time that you remember hearing it, or if there is a specific place that you associate with this psalm.  (read psalm 23)  I grew up in Bozeman, MT and attended Hope Lutheran church.  This was a very old building with stained glass windows that lined the south side of the sanctuary.  My family always sat in the back of the congregation, next to a window that depicted Jesus with a shepherd's crook with a flock of sheep surrounding him.  Whenever I heard this psalm, I am taken back to my childhood congregation.  I remember the comfort that I felt in that community of faith.  I remember how I felt cared for.  I remember that the people of Hope Lutheran church reflected God's love just as a shepherd cared for his sheep.  Who has cared for you?  Who has shown gentle love to you like the Lord cares for the smallest lamb? 

II.              Psalm 51:1-12 (a psalm of confession)

Portions of this psalm will be recognizable as part of the prayer of confession that we often pray together at the beginning of worship services.  I will read this psalm aloud, as a sort of communal confession of sins.  We will have a few moments of silence in which you can talk to God.  To confess the the ways that you need forgiveness.  (after a few moments of silence) 

As a baptized member of the Body of Christ, I declare to you that all your sins are forgiven, those sins that are known and unknown, in the name of the Father +, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. 

III.            Psalm 13 (A psalm of lament)

I find sometimes that it is very difficult to make a lament to God, or to cry out for help in the midst of trouble.  The psalms give us words when it seems like we do not know how to pray.  They also show us that God wants to hear our pleas for help.  I am going to read Psalm 13.  In the moments that follow, feel free to pray all the laments that you want to share with God. Are you in pain?  Are you grieving?  Do you feel lost?  Then I will close us in prayer. 

Gracious God, we know that you are present with us even in our darkest hours.  We know that you want to hear our laments just as you want to hear our praise.  We can cry out honestly with our pain and our needs and we know that you hear us.  I ask that your Spirit continue to be present with your beloved sons and daughters here at the Benedictine Community.  Let them know that they are loved and cared for and remembered as being created in your image.  We ask that you receive all our prayers and grant us your sustaining love.  Amen.

Prayer Series Part II: Centering Prayer

A. Hanson 2012

My first experience with centering prayer as a discipline was with HFASS at the Contemplative retreat in 2010 at St Malo's retreat center outside Lyons, CO.  It was an incredible, beautiful, life-giving time.  It was then that I fell in love with centering prayer.

I led an adult forum on centering prayer this past Sunday, so I decided to make this topic the next part of my series on prayer practices.

The Christian church has long had a contemplative tradition.  This has included the monastic practice of Lectio Divina, and the writings of such mystics as Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and Thomas Merton, among others.  The method of Centering Prayer, which is what we will be practicing today, has its roots in the Post Vatican II era, when three Trappist monks, Fathers William Meninger, Basil Pennington, and Thomas Keating, sought to develop a simple method of silent prayer for contemporary people.[1] 

Centering Prayer has its scriptural roots in the wisdom sayings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, from Matthew 6:6, “But when you pray, go to your inner room, close the door and pray to your father in secret.  And your father, who sees in secret, will reward you.” 

The theological grounding for centering prayer is in the Pentecost:  We affirm that the spirit of God dwells within us and bears witness to the resurrection by empowering us to experience and manifest the fruits of the Spirit and the Beatitudes. Centering Prayer is a time of fostering a connection with the Living God, and a discipline to foster that relationship.

How to engage Centering Prayer:

1.     We select a sacred word or phrase.  This is the symbol of our intention to consent to God’s presence and action within us. 

a.     Some examples are: Lord, Jesus, Father, Love, Peace, Stillness, Trust

b.     Some phrases that I use are: Come Holy Spirit/Veni Sancti Spiritus, or my favorite, “Lord Jesus Christ…Have mercy on me”

c.     After choosing a word, do not change it for this particular time of prayer.  You can change it the next time you choose to pray

d.     It is also possible to do centering prayer without a sacred word, but in my opinion, it is better to have the word or phrase to return to if your mind wanders than attempting to keep your mind empty. 

2.     We sit comfortably

a.     Have your back straight and against the chair

b.     Keep your feet comfortably on the floor or whatever position is most comfortable for you

c.     Rest your hands in your lap

d.     The key is to be comfortable enough that you are not distracted by any sort of discomfort, but not so comfortable that you fall asleep.

e.     If you do fall asleep, which does happen, just begin praying your sacred word again.

3.     We pray

a.     Gently introduce the sacred word by coordinating it with your breath.  Perhaps you pray the word on the inhale or the exhale. 

b.     Thoughts are a normal part of centering prayer.  When they arise, simply thank yourself for noticing, and let them float away. Return to your sacred word.

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[1] http://www.contemplativeoutreach.org/history-centering-prayer