What is—or isn’t—so much baloney about prayer?
-lists of gripes—one or two is enough, one at a time
-asking God to do something you can do yourself—escapism
-blaming God for causing everything when some things are simply inherent to our humanity or genetically inherited
-expecting miracles and resenting outcomes as if God owed you something, or as if God interfered with the gift of human freedom
-always pray with total emotional honesty, and never condemn your true prayers
Prayer is most alive when it is in the context of your life—what matters most to you. Make prayer a constant conversation by which you keep in touch with your own longings and desires, then trust God enough to share them all as you would with a trusted friend. Divine power is relational not interventional. Really?
So how do I know this? Well, because God listened. I read about this amazing God in a kid’s book, plus my mother told me I came directly from God. This was baloney and not a particularly good thing to hear, since she’d told me I came from her and Daddy, like spontaneous combustion or something called “making love.” Not until I got to church, sang in the children’s choir, and actually knew I really was an angel of sorts, did I discover that God made rules, stood up high looking down on everyone, gave lectures and had great expectations for us all, all of which my mother ignored in favor of thinking I was already perfect. More baloney. Still, I chose the impossibly imperfect route, obeyed most rules, got married, had four children, divorced, remarried, and eventually got the Episcopal Church to ordain me against traditional rules, which, it turned out, were baloney.
So how midst all this baloney did I learn to truly love myself, no baloney?
-my mother lived through her own baloney and forgave me mine
-my dad followed me to church
-my second husband listened to me and waited for me to catch up or share the lead
-all my children listened to me, laughed with me, cried with me, foolishly followed me, still love—my baloney and theirs
-my therapist told me it was damn good to be a raging bull
-my spiritual directors confronted my baloney with Jesus and some of his living life as a prayer
-my younger sister shared her baloney and still does
-my youngest sister once asked me if I too felt guilty after I hung up from a conversation with our mother
-my consistently listening women friends
-my teachers taught me I was smart, baloney aside
-my Bible revealed its own baloney—slowly and gently
-my own reading and writing which cherished all my baloney—except arithmetic
-my publishers published my baloney
And finally, in ancient news, the oddest no-baloney teacher of all: the official Preface to The Book of Common Prayer, according to the use of The Episcopal Church, ratified in 1789: “. . . thanks to “the liberty with which Christ has made us free . . . this book may be altered, abridged, enlarged, amended and otherwise disposed of as may seem most convenient for the edification of the people, according to the various exigency of times and occasions.”
