Now we come to what is probably the most perilous moment in a lament. You might think that there’s peril in complaint, but it’s petition that is spiritually dangerous. Evelyn Underhill compared it with magic, the practice of a kind of wish-fulfillment that can easily disappoint if the things we pray for don’t appear in our lives. People often lose their faith because they feel that a petition went unanswered. “What good is God,” they say, “if my brother still died?”
Because of this tendency in myself and others, I used to make reference to free will when defending God’s apparent lack of action. If God is truly controlling every moment and every decision that we make, then we don’t actually have free will. In order for us to have it, God has to withdraw from our choices, and from their aftereffects. God does not create war and sickness and accident as necessary ingredients of some inscrutable cosmic recipe. We make choices, and those choices reverberate, and people die and suffer. God remains present in our suffering, urging us to clean up the messes we’ve made.
Within this schema, petitionary prayer becomes a kind of training in compassion. It comes to resemble metta, the Buddhist “Mother as Other” meditation. In that meditation, you send loving-kindness outward in concentric circles, starting with those you love the most and who occupy the inner circle of your attention and then moving outward through rings of acquaintances and strangers until your meditation comes to encompass the whole world. It’s a beautiful practice, and I recommend it to anyone, and it worked as long as my main hope was to let God off the hook.
But it doesn’t fit well with what we’ve been saying about God’s activity in the world throughout this study of lament. If lament is based on the presumption that God can and does act in history, such an assumption complicates free will. Preparing to teach about lament made me face those complications squarely, and what I offer below can be only a temporary stopping point on the way to greater understanding.
Opening Prompt
Before we get to the main teaching of our session together, I offer you the same prompt that I offered to our study group:
What relationship or situation is weighing on you the most? What are you most anxious about or heartbroken over?
This is a very tender and vulnerable question, and no one was obligated to answer it. Yet we did, slowly, people taking their time to face the question and then answering haltingly, trying to find words for their heartbreak. It was a good way to begin, because we would struggle in a similar way as we tried to find words for our petitions that fit with all of the complications and clarifications that we worked through as we discussed petitionary prayer.
Richard Beck’s Teaching on Petition
As I was engaged in research and trying to come to a new understanding of petitionary prayer, I was very fortunate to stumble upon a series of Substack posts written by the theologian and professor Richard Beck. The entire series is well-worth reading. I offer only a summary here, and if I’ve gotten anything wrong, I hope that Professor Beck will correct my mistakes. Anything quoted below is from Beck’s posts.
Beck says that our normal understanding of petitionary prayer operates within a “magic domino” theory, wherein we ask God to intervene in a chain of causation by either inserting a new factor (a magic domino) into the chain, or magically preventing the next domino from falling. Beck points out that this mechanistic view assumes that God is not present in the world, and therefore every action that God takes must be a form of intervening in the “natural order.”
But healthy petitionary prayer doesn’t operate within the assumption of causality that we’ve been taught in the Western world. Instead, it asserts that:
- “Creation isn’t ticking along autonomously, like a machine. Creation is alive and exists in an ongoing radical dependence upon God. We are continuously bathed in God’s sustaining light and love, and should God ever look away from us, we would cease to be.”
- “In petitionary prayer, we are not asking God to insert divinity into our world as a magic domino. We are, rather, asking the Origin and Source of Being to ‘bloom’ or ‘birth’ new realities into existence…Each petitionary prayer is our groaning ‘Push!’ through the pain that is birthing the world.”
- We pray in two moments of time. The eschatological moment, when Christ has come again and death is defeated for all of creation, and the present moment, when pain, suffering, and death remain tragic and commonplace.
- An eschatological vision is an assertion that justice will come, that love will reign supreme, that evil will be vanquished. Because we hold this vision, we can work towards it even in our current circumstances. This is proleptic prayer, in which we ask a vision of future reality to shape our understanding of the present.
- There is a “petition behind all of our petitions” which is best summed up with the word maranatha, roughly translated as “Come, Lord.” It is “a simultaneous expression of both lament and hope. Lament for the fact that the Lord has not yet returned, that here in the penultimate, the powers of death and evil remain at large. But also hope in the knowledge that our prayers against death and evil have been heard and will be answered in God’s reconciliation of all things.”
As we talked about these ideas, we explored some of the birthing metaphors that Beck suggests. We talked about how a healthy birth is brought about both by the action of the mother and the child – the baby in the womb cues the mother’s body, announcing that it’s ready to be born. So if God is birthing creation at every moment, we, the creation that is being born, are cooperating in God’s labor, subtly cuing divinity, announcing our readiness through a spiritual release of metaphorical chemical signals and proteins. We spent some time talking through such metaphors, as they are odd within the scope of normative theological language, even though the Apostle Paul used a birthing metaphor right at the beginning of the Christian tradition. When we started to write the petitionary part of our laments, we also got somewhat tangled by language right at the start. Here’s what I asked us to do:
Writing a Petitionary Prayer
- Make a request to God, using non-mechanistic metaphors. (Birth this reality…bloom within this anguish…emanate into this situation…be present in this moment.)
- Describe the pain and grief that is being experienced.
- Articulate a vision of a perfected cosmos. (Describe the healing, succor, result that you would like to see, for the person or situation that you’re praying for.)
- Name how God is already present within the situation, and ask God to remain present.
As we wrote, we discovered how hard it is to switch from mechanistic metaphors (“O God, insert the magic domino”) to metaphors that assume that God is already present and that there is something other than mere causation affecting the events of our lives. The problem really lies within our habit of requesting things from God. We want to ask for something very specific, and the specific things we ask for often take the form of interventions. How do I pray for my friend’s sick mother without asking God to heal her? And if God is active in the world, shouldn’t I be asking God to heal her? Shouldn’t my prayer be something more than the metta meditation? How do I find good, solid, reassuring language for the idea that she is already living the reality of her healing in the eschaton even if she is still sick in the here and now?
We found that the theory is there but not the practice, and I think we all left knowing that we would have to try again, and again, because old, established habits are hard to break. Trying to pray in a new way is very challenging.
Here is my own attempt. In my lament so far I had been writing about the war in Iran, and my own sense of futility and uselessness in light of what is happening there. I continued this theme in my petition:
Send your breath through the dust of bombed-out places,
hum hope into ears that listen for the missile’s scream,
as eyes stare anxiously at the sky, and smoke stings,
and people cry, and children die.
Guide the hands that rebuild the houses,
let the grandmothers tell the stories of how they survived,
shield the children from memory and its terrors.
Someone is lifting up the ruined stone,
someone is bringing water, and bandages, is making food,
someone is humming sad, remembered songs,
and dreaming of a new house, its doors and windows.
In writing this petition, I asked for nothing but God’s presence to be known within the reality of death and despair. I wrote about that despair in a way that was all jumbled up with the request for God’s presence, but this felt right to me. I tried to articulate a vision of the future in which cities were rebuilt and those who are now suffering could share their wisdom and their stories. And I named God’s presence in those who give aid and those who hope.
Some More Examples
As I’ve written these posts, I’ve been sharing two laments that I wrote before I began teaching about lamentation. I’ll continue those laments here.
from a poem entitled “Lamentation, The Masked Men”
Doxed Divinity,
naked-faced agitator caught in a camera’s eye,
strip away the bully’s costume,
pull the mask down from his face,
send him reeling back in nakedness,
bring him to his knees.
We voted for our destruction,
gave away our liberties because of the price of eggs.
Now doors crack inwards, windows shatter,
the frigid day stalks in, the masked face of winter
squints through beady eyes.
Children weep as gloved hands grasp and hold their heads.
There is no tenderness.
Schools empty, children starve,
and pompous, apostate senators
clasp their hands upon their bellies and regard
our destruction as Your best wish.
Why don’t you haunt their nights and make them weep,
and make the cold stretch across their naked skin?
Why don’t you batter and berate them?
You, who, when the flood had ended,
sent a beam of sunlight
onto the post of a broken fence,
after everyone had fled,
and the long, sallow girl
who spoke in gangly sentences
played a song of hopefulness.
The stuffing had come out of the houses
and lay, gray on dirty streets,
and the ship that broke the levy
balanced on the neighborhood’s jagged edge.
But still, the light on the post, and the song,
and we agreed with each other
that even destruction welcomes the sun.
Warm the winter skies,
shine within the icicle’s shattering,
be a shard of collapse, cold’s downfall.
The people sit in cages
and all who love have worry in their eyes.
We cannot stop hearing children cry.
We must learn to live without our masks.
We must learn to see you face to face,
and each other, face to face, us.
Let children wave blessings in the air
when the summer world wakes the dead,
let them invite us into their care.
Grow like grass through cracked belief.
Be the animal that we thought was extinct
who returns to wander ruined streets.
from a poem entitled “Lamentation, Pharaoh’s Silos”
Grain of spirit milled for bread,
fill the children who hide inside,
sharpen their minds,
give freedom to their play,
remind them, through your buried taste,
that they will emerge into daylight,
that the world is always being remade.
This is the season of starvation,
the old season that our ancestors feared,
lean with empty cupboards, sacks emptied of grain.
Joseph built great silos and put them in Pharaoh’s hand.
Pharaoh still controls them, and there’s famine in the land.
The grocery stores are open,
the shelves are laden and the coolers softly glow.
But a glacier spans the city,
and the children live beyond it,
starving on ice flows.
Why aren’t you sunlight, hot and fierce?
Why don’t you drown the pharaohs and lead us into wilderness?
Once, in the desert, we built a house.
The sun made a cooking stone of the concrete slab,
and we built quickly, making shade,
and the family that would live there
lifted sheetrock with us, then retreated, in the heat,
to their shack of cardboard walls.
Power lines were slack in a street of dust,
and when our saws stopped working
children lifted cables, looking for the break,
ignoring the electricity that would kill them at a touch.
Sweat, a stinging in the eyes,
and the scratch of insulation
to keep the cold of the desert night outside.
And then, with dirty hands, we ate together in the dust,
bean burritos, and the taste of the hands that made them,
and of contentment, and our acceptance of Your love.
Allow us, now, to taste contentment,
that lovely taste of tiredness,
and work well done, and hard.
Create banquets for those who hide and starve.
The mind grows sluggish
and words are hard to find,
and anger, like dust, grows
in the corners of the rooms.
Let Your leaven fill the air,
let us taste it on our tongues.
Everyone will eat, everywhere, when You come,
when You arrive as a guest at the starving house,
the silos broken behind You,
the grain spilling from your tomb.
KPB Stevens 