Private prayer, public prayer

Tim Woodcock writes:  There was a very interesting guest essay in the New York Times by Anne Lamott headlined “I Don’t Want to See a High School Football Coach Praying at the 50-Yard Line” responding to the recent Supreme Court Case.

Hopefully you can read it here, but that depends on whether you have subscription and/or how many other NY Times articles you’d read this month:

Lamott doesn’t get too caught up in the specifics of the Kennedy v. Bremerton School District court case, in which a good deal of showboating and posturing in the media somewhat disguised the real question at hand of whether a sports coach in Washington State public school was inappropriately using religion to exercise his power and influence over his players. Lamott’s strategy is to sidestep the news story almost entirely and instead critique it by cataloguing the small private prayers that punctuate her daily life. And of course, being Lamott, she writes in an idiosyncratic and entertaining style, both mystical and low-brow, making her case for the value of private prayer very persuasively.

Some highlights:

“It offends me to see sanctimonious public prayer in any circumstance — but a coach holding his players hostage while an audience watches his piety makes my skin crawl.”

And:

“We are fighting furiously for women’s rights and the planet, and we mean business. We believers march, rally and agitate, putting feet to our prayers. And in our private lives, we pray.”

I especially like that phrase “putting feet to our prayers”

Lamott explores how prayer connects us to something bigger than us, incrementally correcting our impulses and challenging us to give up pettiness and prejudice: “Some days go better than others. I pray to remember that God loves Marjorie Taylor Greene exactly the same as God loves my grandson, because God loves, period.”

And she posits her ideas how prayer - when it is sincere rather than a performance that is - actually works.

“I do not understand much about string theory,” she writes, “but I do know we are vibrations, all the time. Between the tiny strings is space in which change can happen. The strings are infinitesimal; the space between nearly limitless. Prayer says to that space, I am tiny, helpless, needy, worried, but there’s nothing I can do except send my love into that which is so much bigger than me.”

Reading this guest essay reminded me of what an unusual and insightful writer Lamott is and prompted me to track down her 2015 book that echoes these themes: Help Thanks, Wow. Perhaps that will spur further reflections on this blog.

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