Suffering & Prayer

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A natural response to suffering in church settings is: “I’ll pray for you.” Which is great! But it can also lead to disappointment, or even (dare we say it) embarrassment. How can prayer to alleviate suffering be an important and deep part of our lives and communities? Are there popular beliefs about prayer we need to unlearn?

SPEAKER NOTES

Suffering & Prayer

Intro

• Series: Dialectic of alleviate and embrace
  • Jesus as synthesis
• Today: Prayer as an effort to alleviate suffering
  • Setting aside lots of other reasons to pray (including the other side of our dialectic, embrace — which was our topic last week)
  • It’s so important to us to talk about those, BUT, in the spirit of a dialectic, let’s lean into the other side today: alleviate
  • This is the most instinctive concept of prayer when we use the word — “I will pray for you”, or “I will pray for that”
    • Praying for some suffering to be alleviated
  • This is one of the practices of love and care and empathy that knit a faith community like ours together
  • A community in which people are regularly, earnestly praying for one another is a healthy community
  • We always want this to be deeply true of BLC!
• BUT… Challenges and disappointments abound when we encourage that
  • Because, of course, reality shows us: not every effort of prayer becomes reality
  • Just like ALL efforts to alleviate suffering
  • Not unique to prayer!
  • Ask any activist or medical professional or therapist or volunteer
• So how do we stay with it?
  • That’s the first question we want to bat around today —
  • How do we not succumb to cynicism or apathy?
• AND YET, there is also a difference with prayer, compared to other efforts to alleviate suffering
  • Because we’re talking about the unseen, the spiritual, there is mystery
  • Which presents unique challenges for people like us in the Modern West, where we trust above all we can observe and measure
  • And into that space of mystery can flood all sorts of interpretations and assumptions
  • And we want to be clear today that: not all popular interpretations and assumptions about prayer are good or helpful.
  • Some of them we would do best unlearning
• So how do we make sense of it?
  • That’s the second question we want to bat around today —
  • How do we not succumb to embarrassment when there are popular images of prayer that we may not want to be associated with?
• Again, those two questions:
  • How do we stick with prayer?
  • How do we make sense of prayer?
• Want to acknowledge that prayer can be deeply personal. So our goal isn’t to tear down conceptions of prayer— what is sustaining to someone else may not feel sustaining to me. But I don’t need everyone to pray the same way I do!
  • We do want to offer some reflections to present prayer in a helpful and approachable way
• We're going to present a few framings that have been helpful to the two of us in answering those questions,
  • hopefully they feel helpful to you all
  • take what does, feel free to leave what doesn’t

Prayer as influence, not an attempt at control

• An underlying need for control fuels a lot of prayer
  • not a bad thing, just a natural inclination
  • We long for control, uncertainty can make us uncomfortable
  • Feeling like there is no answer, no way to alleviate present suffering pushes us to long for divine control as well
• This view that God is in control — God has some solution that is beyond my understanding that is being withheld unless I pray the right prayers and live the right way
• In Cognitive behavioral therapy, this is one of the classic “cognitive distortions” we are all prone to -- “magical thinking”
  • A lot of teachings in church settings reinforce this
  • We have to perform the right incantation or pray the right words the right way in order to get our desired outcomes
• Many of us may feel very disenchanted by such teachings, and a very common conclusion on prayer I hear
  • Is that it is great for connecting people together because it’s an intimate, vulnerable thing
  • But nothing spiritual beyond connection is happening
  • That feels too much like magical thinking
  • And that’s a very fair conclusion if you’ve prayed all the ways you were taught to and a supposedly all-controlling God still won’t answer your prayer
  • But I do wonder sometimes if that’s enough to keep me sticking with it? That’s worth further discussion.
• Yes, And then things can escalate from “nothing beyond connection is happening”, to “why even pray?”
• when we are dissatisfied with a God that is withholding justice and alleviation from us, we can come to the conclusion that prayer is worthless. It doesn’t accomplish anything if it’s not rooted in control -
• The flip side is not that we give up all hope in praying, that we fall into apathy-we just need a more hopeful picture of God’s influence in the world to ground our prayers in
• This is where our church encourages people toward what’s called an open and relational view of life and God
  • Open — not pre-determined future
    • Life is not a book already written by God, but an in-process document, and God is the cursor moving with the text as life is written
  • And Relational — what happens in life is not just “God’s will”
    • What happens in life is because of an interrelatedness between God and the world — all of the always-in-flux processes that make up our world, including all of us, with varying degrees of free will, all interrelated with each other, as well as God, in an impossibly complex unfolding
• So suffering, in this view, is not necessarily God’s will (or even necessarily allowed by God)
  • Because God is not the only cause for why things happen
  • That can sound controversial in some Christian settings, because of that natural longing for control / certainty
  • And the fear is that this view is saying God or prayer doesn’t have power
  • But that’s not the case at all.
• God, in this view, is the most powerful force in the world,
  • present to everything in every moment,
  • Influencing the world toward healing, hope, justice, beauty
• Prayer, in this view, is very powerful. It’s one of the ways we can join God in influencing all the interrelated causes for what happens in the world
  • For the more scientifically minded among us, this coheres well with modern scientific suggestions like quantum physics,
  • about how at the lowest level everything is interrelated (even entangled), even at very long distances,
  • So if talk of the power of prayer (beyond just connection) ever feels to you like just a religious version of “magical thinking”, this is a much more science friendly view

For me, it’s helpful to take the phrase “God works in mysterious ways” and shift instead to “life works in mysterious ways”.

- The first is typically an attempt at comfort— God works in mysterious ways, there is some grand narrative beyond our understanding. Can fall short and leave us dissatisfied
 - In fact, God works in reliably loving ways, it’s life that is relentlessly complicated
 - Thinking of life unfolding in mysterious and unpredictable ways AND God being consistently loving and just, helps me in knowing there’s a trustworthy God I can connect with in prayer

• Yeah I personally find more plausible and attractive an influential God who is consistently trustworthy, than a controlling God who is inconsistent and possibly a tyrant
  • That squares much better with Jesus as an image of God -- whose love was self-emptying and incarnational
• But we’re well conditioned to believe "control" is the “higher” power, so the popular assumption is God's power must be "controlling”
  • That takes some unlearning

STORY: conversation around God being controlling- landed on God’s power is not a controlling power- and then getting up and immediately praying “God, you are in control”

Sometimes it takes a while for our brains to catch up with unlearning our well-worn language

Transition to next framing of prayer:

Our “why” for suffering determines our “how” for prayer

If we're taking an open and relational view of “why” suffering happens (because life is way more complex than just “God's will"), then our prayers shift from control-focused to influence-focused.

I have 3 ”away from control” → "toward influence” formulations for our prayers

• Away from “answered” prayer, toward “actualized” prayer
  • The issue is not whether God is answering or withholding.
  • Life is way more complex than that if we’re taking the open and relational view.
  • There are trillions upon trillions of other processes in our open and relational world that may or may not be in alignment with God’s will.
  • Our own choices are part of that complex picture of processes, so our actions and prayers matter
  • BUT again because life is SO unfathomably complex, this also protects against the magical thinking pitfall of “a bad thing is my fault because I didn’t pray enough”
  • Again, life works in mysterious ways feels helpful here. God’s influence of love and healing and justice is dependable AND life is messy.
    • So important to stress that our actions and prayers matter and contribute to bringing about love and healing and justice
• Away from “pleading”, toward “partnership”
  • The issue is not whether we have God’s attention or not, or whether God is feeling in the mood to respond to us or not.
  • God is always at work... what prayer does is not convince an aloof God to care or respond;
  • it engages us alongside the active God, in the unseen, spiritual side of our relational world — where everyone and everything influences everyone and everything else
  • From this view, God is not outside of time or up in the sky or out in the future, pulling strings…
  • God is the fellow experiencer of all in each moment
  • So prayer is: God we join you in your work to bring wholeness or health or peace... where are you at work now?
  • For me, partnership language has probably been the most helpful shift in my understanding of prayer
    • encourages us to trust our best picture of who God is
    • We’re not left reconciling our desire for a loving, involved God with a reality that God is aloof and removed
    • I love the language of fellow experiencer — this is who we see in Jesus as he walks and weeps and grieves and celebrates
• Away from “outcomes”, toward “possibilities”
  • There is not one future good that we have to decipher the clues to discover
  • There are myriad possibilities of future good,
  • and those possibilities are evolving in real time in ways impossible for us to grasp and follow, BUT God does grasp and follow!
  • That is why God’s guidance is the greatest thing we can open ourselves to.
  • We want to move from praying, “God show us the way” to, “God show us many ways”
  • Prayer expands creativity, not limits it
  • Takes away the transactional pressure of prayer
  • Empowers us to act in many possible ways and know confidently that God is with us in the possibilities. God’s presence isn’t narrowed to the one “right” choice

There’s an interpretation of a passage from the Bible that I think is helpful here.

Just to say: The Bible’s many writings are working out theology in real time,

• so many passages can be interpreted to talk about God as “all-controlling” and behind everything that ever happens like a puppet master,
• BUT many passages can also be interpreted in the open and relational way we're talking about.
• In the end, we have to choose which interpretation we want to live on.
• And I want the open and relational interpretation to live on
• because I think it better helps people stick with prayer and makes better sense of it.

The example I have in mind is the story of Joseph in Genesis 37-50

• Joseph, of technicolor dream coat fame, is abused by his brothers and sold into slavery in Egypt, but then through a course of events becomes a government authority, and uses his authority to save many people from famine, including his estranged brothers

• The famous line in Genesis 50 Joseph speaks to his brothers is:

  “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives."

• We could read that as: God exerted some level of control over Joseph’s brothers and was the origin behind Joseph’s pain this whole time, because it was for a larger mysterious good - he just needed to wait to learn that God’s ways are higher than his ways — I don’t recommend that interpretation.

• The interpretation I prefer is: “God exerts an influential power over everything that ever happens, even those things that originate totally outside of God’s will, like Joseph’s brothers' choices to abuse him — this God’s all-powerfulness to “intend purpose” is not about how everything originates with God, it’s about how everything can be redeemed by God.

That interpretation helps me when I pray for people or for the world

• I'm not praying to the God who “intends purpose” as a book already written
• I'm praying to the God who "intends purpose" as our stories unfold, redeeming pain or injustice as we go

Transition to last framing:

Healing is not returning back but reimagining anew

• Prayers for healing - one of the most common reasons for praying
• In my experience, we have a pretty limited picture of what healing should be
• We have some ailment, someone we love is sick or hurt and we ask God to heal- typically there’s a longing for things to return back to how they used to be
• With a narrow picture of healing, there’s a wide possibility for disappointment
• Again, this doesn’t mean we abandon hope for healing or that God can’t offer healing
  • Instead of returning back, healing is reimagining anew. It propels us forward
  • And healing may not always look like what we expect
    • The possibilities are wide
    • We get to move beyond healing as an exchange
• Even if there is healing that removes an ailment completely, you don’t move forward living life in a way that disregards that experience
  • Our bodies and minds hold the experiences of going through suffering and it changes us
  • Audio book I listened to: What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo. Memoir about the authors journey with complex ptsd— depiction of how deeply her suffering has formed her but also her resilience in moving forward.
    • Our bodies hold on, we can’t go back, we move forward as inevitably changed people
  • Even when I am in a hopeful and happy place, I know the experience of being in a depressive episode. That has changed me
  • For healing to be returning back to how things were, we’d have to have suffering amnesia along with it
• I love that.
  • And important to the open and relational view of God is that the same is true for God, as our fellow experiencer
    • Bonhoeffer wrote: “Only the suffering God can help.”
    • A God who is above suffering or removed from suffering or can't remember suffering doesn't have a pull for me
  • I'm drawn to a God who, when we experience suffering, experiences suffering with us, and that affects God, changes God --
    • not changes God's nature, but changes God's experience --
    • expanding God's empathy and love --
    • not because God wasn't empathetic and loving enough before, but maybe because the amount of empathy and love in life are ever-expanding, just like our universe -- that's a powerful thought!
  • God incorporates the past, even suffering, into the possibilities God calls us to for the future
    • So we're not just called back
    • We're called to reimagine anew
• When we widen the possibility of what healing moving forward can be, we narrow the possibility for disappointment. There’s simply more options for what healing looks like
  • And we have a trustworthy God to help us if disappointment does come
  • Tiny bit of embrace here— Prayers for a peace that surpasses understanding — this peace is a practice (stories last week Vince told- how were they so at peace?
  • It’s redemptive to see God as a co-sufferer who is longing for healing right alongside us and who offers peace in the wide scope of what our healing may be
• We can ask God to help imagine a new future
  • Tricia Hersey talks about the power of dreaming and imagining in her book Rest is Resistance
    • We often discredit imagination as childish but how powerful to be able to reimagine the life you could live into
    • Not escapist but sustaining to think of how things could be (for our own suffering and suffering beyond us) and to imagine God longing with us.
      • Imagination fuels us as we keep moving forward
• Prayers of partnership and influence help with this — we get to be partners in our own healing

Prayer to close

• One of my favorite theologians, Tom Oord,
  • Says that what turns out to be one of the most comforting phrases to those who have been abused, or experienced genuine evil or meaningless / random tragedy, or any kind of longsuffering
    • and cried out “why didn't God stop this?!"
    • is unexpectedly the phrase: “God can't."
  • Because a God who can single-handedly, magically stop senseless pain but refuses to (because we didn't say the right magic words, or because it needs to be "allowed" for some “mysterious plan”) is not worthy of being prayed to!
    • People who pray and cry out in despair deserve a God worthy of being prayed to!
    • I remember hearing Oord say this for the first time and feeling so understood. Because I've lost a mother and a brother to senseless suffering -- cancer and a stroke.
• To say God can't magically snap a different reality into existence doesn't mean God is powerless
  • it just means God's power is influence, not control
  • I prefer the influential trustworthy God to the controlling God who is cold to my pain
  • Is praying to that God an option you have considered?