Thoughts and Prayers (and why they aren't the same thing)

 

There was yet another school shooting this week, this time in Minnesota.  It has become reflexive lately for certain portions of our society to mock the concept of offering prayer at this time, usually in the form of the now-cliche "thoughts and prayers" phrase.  Without naming names (because the who doesn't matter, only the what), one such person said:

Prayer is not freaking enough. Prayers does not end school shootings. prayers do not make parents feel safe sending their kids to school. Prayer does not bring these kids back. Enough with the thoughts and prayers.

Another said, less politely:

These children were probably praying when they were shot to death at Catholic school. Don't give us your f------ thoughts and prayers.

Now, there is certainly a case to be made that more should be done, legislatively, or societally, or within institutions such as schools, to help reduce school shootings.  There is an equally valid case to be made that hard problems do not find easy solutions and using tragedy as a hobby horse for your policy preferences is dishonest (usually stated by people with opposing policy preferences).  I tend to think this is a cultural sickness, and the way out of it is to begin to cleanse the culture of the sickness, but I'm in the vast minority -- most folks seem to favor some or another policy preference.  And if we can stop mocking one another, we can sort all of that out in civil dialogue and civic engagement.  Policy isn't what I came here to discuss.  What I would like to address is this clearly faulty view of what prayer is, why we do it, and the false equivalence of "prayer" with "thoughts."

In the Orthodox Christian tradition, prayer is not merely asking for things so that God will give us what we want.  Prayer is not, that is, the same as asking mommy for a crayon or daddy for a new bike.  Additionally, prayer is not only efficacious if we receive that for which we pray.  Christians know this, because often we do not have our prayers answered in the way we would like.  We are not toddlers, and God is not a doting parent looking to spoil us by granting our every wish.

Most simply, prayer is baring our soul before God, standing in His presence and being known by Him.  In this way, as God interacts with us, we can begin to know Him.  Fr. Thomas Hopko famously said "you cannot know God, but you have to know Him to know that."  Prayer, then, is our feeble attempt, as created beings, to encounter the living God, our creator, to be known by Him, and to be loved by Him.  In that light, and only in that light, prayer then becomes the requesting of things from God in alignment with His will. That is why Our Lord taught us to pray "Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven."  Often, we ask God for things He knows will not benefit us. Those prayers are still answered, only not in the way we would like.  As I have told many a catechumen over the years, "no is still an answer."

The quotes above reveal both a worldview and a conclusion.  The worldview is that prayer is designed to get us what we ask for.  The conclusion is it is incapable of doing that.  "Prayers does (sic) not end school shootings."  It's a very direct line.  1) We pray for God to end school shootings.  2) God does not end school shootings.  Ergo, 3) prayer is not effective.

But here is the thing -- it matters who prays, and who does not.  If the shooter had prayed, perhaps he would not have felt compelled to carry out this cowardly act. If others had prayed for the shooter, perhaps his heart would have been softened.  My mother likes to say "you can't stay mad at someone if you're praying for them."  You also won't wish to bully them or try to psychologically abuse or harm them.  More prayer -- not merely in the aftermath of a tragedy, but among society in general -- would do more to stop school shootings than any law on the planet or any policy you can think of.  Standing before God, baring your soul and asking Him to heal you, is a very different posture than baring your soul to the world online, "dunking" on people and "pwning" them.  It is obviously different than baring your soul in an act of violence and hatred that changes the lives of others forever.  Prayer softens the very hearts we tend to harden. And since prayer causes me to treat you better, it doesn't just soften my heart, it has the power to soften yours too, even if you don't pray.

Prayer is effective and efficacious and good for the soul, and that is why there is no such thing as "thoughts and prayers."  The phrase began as sort of a nod to civic pluralism.  Not everyone is a religious believer, so you can still send good thoughts or good vibes or whatever to someone who is suffering.  True enough, but that does not make "prayer" the equivalent of "thoughts."  Especially now that "thoughts and prayers" is basically a phrase used to mock people who disfavor certain policy positions.  

But it's obvious there is a difference.  Good thoughts ARE empty and inefficacious.  They are impotent.  They cannot accomplish anything other than making the other person feel better knowing you are thinking about them.  And that is enough in times of trouble -- by all means continue communicating good thoughts.  They are kind and helpful and loving.  But they are impotent, and the inclusion of them together with "prayers," in a pluralistic catchphrase, doesn't mean prayer is equally impotent.  

Part of the problem with people misunderstanding prayer is society has long since mainstreamed some popular, but faulty, views of religion in general and Christianity in particular.  The problem of evil is one example.  God being more like Santa Claus than -- God -- is another.  Prayer being something fools do in order to make themselves feel better about things is yet another.  Equating Christianity writ large with pop-American psych-Christianity is another.  We believe God is Santa Claus and a real God wouldn't allow such things to occur.  We believe that because that's how the dominant culture treats God.  He is a fiction, a nice thought, your invisible buddy to lean on when people are mean or times are hard.  We have mainstreamed the New Atheist version of God.

You don't have to do a survey to figure this out.  Just look at modern architecture.  Beauty is subordinated to utilitarianism.  Where might you find beautiful things?  Not at the Soviet-style courthouse with its concrete walls and very modern appointments.  Not at the government building with its austere brown walls and cheap metal furniture.  Certainly not at Wal-Mart or Home Depot.  Even Taco Bell and Pizza Hut have gone to the hyper-modern "shipping container" model of architecture for their new stores.  

But you will find beauty in a church.  You will find it on most things in the Church -- the lampstands, the icons -- even the books are ornate.  Why do we do this?  Because beauty is a recognition of the Creator.  Beauty exists because He desires it.  Beauty is a reflection of Him.  We beautify things because we wish to act as the crown of God's creation that He has appointed us to be.

You cannot recognize the full magnitude of this simply by walking into an Orthodox Church, or a Catholic Church, or even one of the old Baptist or Methodist or Episcopalian churches with their wood floors and stained glass.  You can begin to, simply by drawing a contrast between what you see in church versus what you see in the world.  But in order to appreciate true beauty, you have to pray.  Not mockingly.  Not sardonically.  You have to pray as one with a desire to know Him, and by extension to know those He has created in His image.  In Him, we are all one.  As Fr. Thomas Hopko also, less famously, said:  

Jesus didn't say, "love the image of God in that person." He didn't say "love Me in that person." He said: "Love that person, and you will be loving Me. Because I have identified with every human being on the face of the earth."

So yes, you cannot know God, but you have to know Him to know that. And one of the ways we know God is through prayer.  By opening our hearts and souls to Him in the simple acts of asking, speaking, trusting, relating.  It is not that God is impotent to help you if you don't pray. He already knows our every need.  Prayer, like most things of God, is important because of what it does for us.  It connects us to Him, and thus to each other, in a way that cannot be replicated by good thoughts or good intentions.  Prayer is not the same as well-wishes.  Prayer is an encounter with the living God.

To reduce prayer to the ineffective and vain level of "thoughts" is a failure to recognize that basic truth.  To mock it is to mock everything it stands for, including the idea that we are all one in Him.  That basic recognition, that the little children praying in Catholic school are the same as me, that we are of the same "stuff" and God loves us all equally, tempers anger, diffuses prejudice, and opens the heart to love others. 

I understand the reasoning behind the mocking.  I don't mean to demean anyone who has engaged in it -- I recognize your sincerity. But do understand that your policy preferences do not dictate our spiritual lives.  We will pray.  Those of us who share your policy preferences and those of us who have other ideas.  We will all pray, and we will always pray.  Because as Christians, there is nothing better we can do.  

What is love (baby don't hurt me)?

A discussion on an internet forum got me thinking about this topic.  The discussion on the internet forum is between Lutherans, mostly.  It began when one of them, a pastor, began bemoaning some issues they've had with homeless people.  This pastor believes that the homeless were being maliciously sent by people in his church body to mess with him, sort of a gaslighting exercise that he refers to as "mobbing."

In any event, I commented that I thought it was a shame that he let others cause him to treat the homeless poorly (he was asking them to leave the property and then throwing away their property when they were gone).  The responses surprised me.  They started along familiar lines.  Left-leaning people, politically speaking, spoke of the need for more government programs and assistance.  Right-leaning people, politically speaking, took another tack, and one I still haven't quite wrapped my head around.

What the more right-leaning people were arguing is 1) you do not need more public assistance for the homeless, because 2) private charity is sufficient to meet the need, and (here's the interesting part) 3) they shouldn't be expected to cater to the immediate material needs of the homeless because it "creates dependency" and makes them worse off instead of better off.

So if you're keeping score:

1) the government should not help the homeless

2) private charity is sufficient to help the homeless

3) private charity to help the homeless is bad because it creates dependency

This is not intended in any way to be a political post.  Mostly, I want to focus on the discordant views espoused above, not as a partisan statement, but on the merits of the claims themselves. Maybe another day we can discuss how isolated public charity is a Utopian and Pollyanaish panacea floated by people who want to claim they are helping but don't want to get their hands dirty.

Some of the homeless in Grant Park, Atlanta,
at the food barrel collected by
St. John the Wonderworker Orthodox Church

Anyway, my family and I have never been members at St. John the Wonderworker Orthodox Church in
Atlanta, but we have spent quite a lot of time there.  We have friends who were members and clergy there.  Through our attendance at the mission, we got to know their priest, Fr. Gabe, very well.  He is the rector at St. John and the priest-in-charge of our mission.  It is downtown Atlanta, right across from the Atlanta Zoo. It has been, for years, somewhat of a transitional neighborhood.  Homeless people are a constant presence there.

I had visited St. John ages ago, around 2011 or so, when Fr. Jacob Myers was the priest there.  Fr. Jacob was the sort of man who didn't follow conventions, and so he neither waited for government charity nor made excuses for not helping.  Fr. Jacob saw homeless people, so he fed them, invited them to come to liturgy, and prayed for them and asked them to pray for him.  This began by simply going to the local food bank and bringing food back to the parish to distribute.  But this could only be done once a month, so the parish began purchasing food, and the program eventually expanded to a pan-Orthodox effort, and eventually, in 2024, to one administered by a local charity organization.  From the smallest of beginnings, many have been blessed, just because Fr. Jacob and his people wanted to help.  Because they looked at the homeless and instead of seeing vagrants, or dangerous people, or people who had made mistakes and therefore brought it on themselves, they saw Jesus.  The Loaves and Fishes program feeds, clothes and assists countless members of our community today.

I happened to be at St. John the day the comments I reference above were made.  The occasion of my being there was a Mission Council meeting with the Council and Fr. Gabe, to discuss a lot of important details about our mission.  When I arrived, the doors to the parish were locked and there were several homeless men outside.  I spoke to them, asked how they were doing.  They tended to be reserved, not making eye contact, not saying much.  I would assume that long and painful experience taught them that avoidance is the safest path.  But one gentleman looked up at me briefly and said "you gotta knock," and then walked over and banged on the church door until someone came to let me inside.  That's not an isolated experience.  In probably 8 or 10 visits to St. John over the past couple of years, we usually stay for lunch, and we eat with these folks too.  They're damaged.  They're often mentally ill.  They are often drug addicted.  But they are people.  They are beloved of our Lord, God and Savior, Jesus Christ.  They are our brethren.

When Fr. Jacob passed away, and Fr. Tom took over for him, he did not stop the Loaves and Fishes program.  He did not stop them from attending services or sharing meals.  When Fr. Tom retired, Fr. Gabe did not stop those things either.  If anything, both of them leaned into the homeless ministry.  Here, people were doing good.  They ensured that continued, and Fr. Gabe continues it to the present day.

During the time where we were visiting St. John pretty frequently, my family and I were members at St. Basil Orthodox Mission in Marietta.  St. Basil helped St. John with the Loaves and Fishes ministry, and we created mercy bags for our people to put in their cars and give to the homeless and destitute.  St. Basil did not have homeless people camped out on the church steps.  Marietta is a suburb, and while she has her own homeless and destitute, the problem is not as dire as it is in the big city.  But her people nonetheless felt the need to minister to them.  Some of that starts with the priest.  Fr. Paul supported these efforts and encouraged them, telling us why it is important to help others who are in need.  Some of it starts before that, because St. Basil is a mission of St. John, and thus her people were formed also under Fr. Jacob.  And surely some of it starts at the diocesan and Archdiocesan levels.  But it isn't just that.

This duty to care for the poor is properly basic Christianity.  It has deep roots in Patristics and Scripture.  It was St. John Chrysostom who said "if you cannot find Christ in the beggar at the church door, you will not find Him in the chalice."  St. Basil the Great said this:

He who strips a man of his clothes is to be called a thief. Is not he who, when he is able, fails to clothe the naked, worthy of no other title? The bread which you do not use is the bread of the hungry; the garment hanging in your wardrobe is the garment of him who is naked; the shoes that you do not wear are the shoes of the one who is barefoot; the money that you keep locked away is the money of the poor; the acts of charity that you do not perform are so many injustices that you commit.

We do not care for the poor because we are ordered to, or because God punishes us if we do not. We care for the poor because, as St. Basil said in this same breath:

Tell me, what is your own? What did you bring into this life? From where did you receive it? It is as if someone were to take the first seat in the theater, then bar everyone else from attending, so that one person alone enjoys what is offered for the benefit of all-this is what the rich do. They first take possession of the common property, and then they keep it as their own because they were the first to take it. But if every man took only what sufficed for his own need, and left the rest to the needy, no one would be rich, no one would be poor, no one would be in need.

St. Basil is not some wild-eyed radical, out of touch with the rest of the Church.  St. Basil is on the exact same page as St. John Chrysostom.  So while the folks at our old parish were certainly following the loving lead of their priest, and the loving lead of their former priest, they were also following their patron.  We don't care for the poor out of obligation or duty, much less to seek reward.  We care for the poor because they are our poor.  These are our people.  Which is to say, they are Jesus's people.

On the website of our mission parish, we have this quote from Fr. Tom Hopko:

Jesus didn't say, "love the image of God in that person." He didn't say "love Me in that person." He said: "Love that person, and you will be loving Me. Because I have identified with every human being on the face of the earth."

This is our calling -- to love every person, because Christ loves every person. This is the lesson of the Sheep and the Goats.  It is the lesson of the Prodigal Son.  It is the lesson of the Rich Ruler.  It is the lesson that litters the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles.  Each and every homeless person you meet is an icon of the Lord.  Treat them as such.