Your petitions—though they continue to bear
just the one signature—have been duly recorded.
Your anxieties—despite their constant,
relatively narrow scope and inadvertent
entertainment value—nonetheless serve
to bring your person vividly to mind.
Your repentance—all but obscured beneath
a burgeoning, yellow fog of frankly more
conspicuous resentment—is sufficient.
Your intermittent concern for the sick,
the suffering, the needy poor is sometimes
recognizable to me, if not to them.
Your angers, your zeal, your lipsmackingly
righteous indignation toward the many
whose habits and sympathies offend you—
these must burn away before you’ll apprehend
how near I am, with what fervor I adore
precisely these, the several who rouse your passions.
It is possible to pray badly. When the disciples ask Jesus, “Teach us to pray,” they seem to be aware that prayer involves practice—even a learning curve—and some serious retraining in habits of the heart. “Possible Answers to Prayer,” which Cairns, an Orthodox poet, published in 2002, offers a wry, timely look at a few of the varieties of self-deception that those who pray are prey to. (Forgive the pun—or muse upon it—as you wish.) These delusions are common among pious folk and are identified here by a compassionate God persona whose response to the misguided prayers of his wayward flock is a little like Jesus’s response to a disciple’s moments of cluelessness: “Have I been with you so long, Philip, and still you do not know me?”
The God-speaker in the poem begins by commenting on petitions that “bear just the one signature”—prayers for purely personal concerns that focus narrowly on those to the evident exclusion of the broader implications, social contexts, and consequences for others of what one prays for. Even these, some of which might rightly be recognized as drivel, are “duly recorded.” They are heard and remembered. They are, more often than we deserve, generously answered. But they underestimate and underutilize the power of prayer to widen the heart and the scope of compassion by connecting one’s own immediate needs with those of the world. These are the prayers that C. S. Lewis may have in mind when he writes in his 1942 sermon “Weight of glory,”
It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
Just as a holiday at the sea widens the eye and deepens the breath, so the scope and power of prayer may achieve greater things when the one who prays begins to connect private with public concerns—the personal with the political, one’s own desires with others’ needs. As I pray for my children and grandchildren, I can learn to widen the nets and lift up others’ children, and all the children in a rising generation that is facing a world with new and unprecedented problems. In this way, legitimate but unimaginative and self-focused petitions may grow into broad visions of hope and energy directed toward needed healing and transformation.
The anxieties we bring before the throne of grace likewise often reflect our insularity and our imperviousness to the divine messages, delivered again and again in Scripture and story: “Be not afraid.” “Be anxious about nothing.” “Peace be with you.” The God who speaks in this poem hears the petitioner’s anxious pleas with tolerance and even amusement, knowing how needless are the nervous ditherings of a child being held safely in a thunderstorm. The anxieties barely need attention, but the anxious person does, and receives it despite persisting in such “little faith.”
And as God accepts anxious prayers where trust would be so much better, so he also accepts as “sufficient” even grudging repentance still polluted with lingering resentments. I think here of how hard it is to pray open-heartedly for leaders who abuse power and privilege, or for those I think have hurt me, and how easily the poison of self-righteousness seeps into those prayers. To repent of that self-righteousness is also hard without some of it tainting contrition with a residue of contempt.
Even prayer for the needy without the almsgiving that would put it into action is received at the throne of limitless grace, despite James’s fair warning that “faith without works is dead.” Nowhere is the disconnection between faith and works clearer, perhaps, than in those prayers we lift up every day at mealtime that we remain “mindful of the needs of others” before we turn to our own abundant meal of organic foods we can afford to buy from the local farmers’ market. The speaker’s observation that the sick and suffering would barely recognize our concern in the rote intercessions softens quickly into an assurance that God accepts even our slight attempts, our small, perfunctory gestures of compassion, willing to wait for our slow learning and, in the meantime, supplement our deficiencies.
But the poem ends with a warning: all our unjust judgments, our self-satisfactions, self-exonerations, self-justifications, must “burn away” before we can begin to “apprehend” the love of God that searches out not only us and our kind, but the whole struggling, sorry, stumbling lot of humankind on this earthly journey. It is a love, as one hymn puts it, that is “broader than the measures of the mind”—certainly broader than most of our minds, confined as they are to particular political, theological, and social bandwidths, hemmed in by the limits of custom and conditioning.
Each triad in this amusing, convicting poem offers both accusation and assurance, and offers a little glimpse of how judgment and mercy co-exist. As we have learned, if we’ve been listening, God passes no judgment without mercy, and offers no mercy without judgment. In the spirit of O’Connor’s preacher who insists that “God’s mercy burns!,” we realize that it does, but the adverb matters: it “burns away” what has to be cleared for new growth to happen. “Teach us to pray” is a prayer that takes courage: it invites God’s scrutiny, judgment, correction, redirection. It subjects dearly held habits to change. But we can, I think, trust that strenuous and sometimes painful growth in faith and wisdom takes place in safe and secure relationship to a God who loves us so much that he can afford to laugh.