On Being Asked to Pray for a Van
My evangelical brethren have let me know,
via the quarterly fundraising letter,
that they can’t get the gospel around
because their van has given up the ghost.
God in the machine, help them.
I lift up their carburetor and their transaxle.
Bless them with meshed gears and a greased cam shaft.
Free their lifters.
Deliver their differential
and anoint their valves and their pistons.
Unblock their engine block
and give them deep treaded tires.
Their brakes cry out to You. Hear them, O Lord.
Drive out the demons from their steering column
and come in to the transmission
that they may know the peace of passing.
Minister even unto the turn indicator.
Creator Spirit, Holy Maker of the Universe,
give them gas.
This edgy poem by Michael Chitwood, professor and editor at Southern Cultures, was written in 2007. It’s possible to read this work as a wry comment on prayers that seem to trivialize communion with God. I’ve been party to occasional good-natured arguments about whether it’s appropriate to pray to find a parking space or misplaced glasses. Or, worse, to get a table at a restaurant that takes no reservations. The Creator, some insist, is not likely to take an interest in self-imposed First World problems.
That point of view, which deserves recurrent consideration, might be countered by Anne Lamott’s simple typology of prayer: all prayers, she suggests, are elaborations of three words: “Help, Thanks, Wow!” Prayers for help, she and others insist, may be uttered in all times and places, because we always need help, sometimes in ways we don’t know enough to ask for. And we can trust the One who promised that not a sparrow would fall without the loving witness of God, who cares for all creatures and who numbered the hairs of our heads.
In this vein, I remember being touched on various occasions by a story my mother told about a surprise check that came to the mission school in South India where she and my father worked for a number of years. It covered to the penny the amount needed on that day to repair the Jeep that enabled a medical team to bring much-needed care to the villages in the area. In fact, she had several stories about “coincidences” far too precisely timed and tuned to be accidents. Later, I was similarly touched by the declaration just mentioned: the rabbi’s confident assurance to the young tailor seeking a blessing for his new sewing machine: “There is a blessing for everything.”
In that spirit, whatever the intentions of the poet, one may read Chitwood’s prayer for a van as a model for a kind of prayer it’s good to keep in our repertoire. It’s a prayer to the God, as Arundhati Roy put it, “of small things.” Its specificity may be taken as a measure of intimacy and trust that God is very near.
Scott Cairns’s lovely poem “Draw Near” opens with a paradox that lies at the heart of faith: “For near is where you’ll meet what you have wandered / far to find.” Chitwood seems to suggest that “near” may be in the very guts of an exhausted van—the carburetor, the valves and pistons, the engine block. One answer to the question often asked in desperation or exasperation—“Where is God?”—is always and simply, “Here.”
To specify further—here under the hood, in the machine, in the very pipes and rods human hands have made—is to reinforce the radical, even scandalous claim that God does, in fact, enter into the smallest human affairs—that divine energy whirls in every atom, and that all things lie in the Spirit’s unpredictable path. I’ve spent many years in writing courses urging for specificity. Specificity is a measure of commitment, of attention, of the depth of knowledge one brings to the naming of objects and incidents and needs. We may, and should, pray for peace in the world in our time, but there is something more vigorous and daring about praying for peace in Aleppo or Kabul as we see on the evening news an anguished mother clutching a ragged child in the rubble. Specificity honors the ambiguities and the complexities of what is at stake. It requires of us some awareness of our own complicity in and responsibility for what we pray about.
So, to return to the broken van. The prayer responds to the invitation to ask for what we need by considering closely and thoughtfully what the need might be. The gears might need adjustment, the cam shaft grease, the tires new treads or replacements. When we pause to name our needs more carefully, we may find ourselves understanding our needs more clearly, and our role in creating them and in addressing them. Prayer is partly a practice of paying attention to what is, and partly a practice of participation. When we pray, we engage our own energies as well as inviting God’s. Good prayer is rooted in good noticing. Good prayer requires its own kind of intelligent imagination.
When we bring intelligence and imagination to prayer, our relationship with God becomes richer, more interesting, and more active. Abstractions kill the spirit. Specifics demand that we enter into life and look closely at its particulars. Reformed theologians recognize that Christian faith is rooted in a “scandal of particularity,” reminding us that the Incarnation itself can seem absurd to those of us whose God is too elevated for our own good. It is, of course, impossible to overestimate the magnitude and magnanimity of divine being, but it’s also impossible to imagine the infinitesimal detail of the Creator’s attention—to protons and electrons and sub-atomic particles, to light waves and neutrinos and nanoseconds. And, when need be, to carburetors and transaxles.