A friend asked me the other day to disclose the prayer that I needed praying.
We were walking along the path, sharing, and reflecting on the twists and turns of our respective journeys. The air was damp with the previous day's rain, and the gently gurgling river nearby filled the gaps in our silence.
It was a good question. What is my prayer? What is the prayer I needed help praying?
It's tempting to sanitize our prayers. We think the raw truth that we harbor may be best-suited for our souls' hidden places. Fearful of what may happen if we admit our worries, our sorrows, and our ragings, we deny these realities and offer a prayer that is both disingenuous and innocuous. Trafficking in safe prayers is like stuffing monopoly money in our wallets. Our billfolds will fill up, but our spiritual economy will be bankrupt and good for nothing.
Christian theologian, Richard Rohr, describes the prayer of lament as the honest, hard-forged words of sadness and despair that the suffering of our world elicits. Although lamentations make up a sizeable portion of the Psalms, the Old Testament (think: Jeremiah), and the prayer life of Jesus, we rarely go near them. Doing so, we believe, would redden our faces and stir up coals in our hearts that we'd rather not rekindle.
As one minister, Aaron Graham, reminds us about prayers of lament, "We need to be reminded that our cries are not too much for God. [God] laments with us. In fact, [God] wants us to come to the [Divine Presence] in our anger, in our fear, in our loneliness, in our hurt, and in our confusion."
Prayers of lament, Graham points out, has a structure that invites honesty and transparency with God. A lament begins with a complaint—"that things are not as they should be." Second, a lament begs God to do something: "to rescue, heal, and restore." Lastly, a lament ends with an expression of trust, "a reminder that God is setting things right even though it often seems so slow."
If we need a primer for our prayers of lament, we only have to look at Jesus and his cry to God while he suffered on the cross. Our crucified Lord was praying Psalm 22 when he said:
"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?
O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer;
and by night, but find no rest.
Yet you are holy,
enthroned on the praises of Israel.
In you our ancestors trusted;
they trusted, and you delivered them.
To you they cried, and were saved;
in you they trusted, and were not put to shame.
Prayers of lament are not simply therapeutic exercises that help us process our grief and our inner torments. Prayers of lament are faithful expressions of our absolute dependency on our Maker.
My friend filled the silence between us by asking again: "Jeff, what's your prayer right now?"
"I pray that the waves will stop crashing upon our shore. A relentless tide is pounding the beach and eroding that which we used to stand firmly upon and walk along with confidence. I pray that the waves of hate, illness, fear, violence, and death will cease so that what we are trying to build on the beach won't be reduced to a collapsing heap of sand. I pray that God will provide us protection from the foaming surf so that we can build expressions of love, grace, and Christ-fueled action within the Church. Just as our sandcastles need sand damp enough to mold and form, I pray that God will situate us in that sweet spot between the surge of the tide and a bone-dry, desert retreat. God alone can position us in such a place, so I pray that God will honor my plea and bring Sabbath to our hearts and the work of the Church."
Amen.
I'm curious. What is your prayer, and have you dared to pray it?