That ubiquitous internet phrase (at least among certain groups that I'm part of), when asking others for their prayers, "Please storm heaven...," rubs me precisely the wrong way. Like prayer is just a list of wishes or worse--we just beg and beg and beg God for stuff. As a parent of a whiny child, the idea of being a whiny child to God is really off putting.
It seems obvious to me that some of the different things we ask God about may not in fact be His will--and the truth of the situation may be that we need to change our wishes. And prayer may be an excellent opportunity to open ourselves up to lining our will up with God's. And there's no guarantee that we will discover someday that God's way (as opposed to our wishes) was all for the best. It might be just difficult, for no apparent reason.
My test case--is this bad?--is the worst case scenario: The Holocaust. Did people pray for it to stop? Yes. Did God stop it? Not for a long while. Is there any easily accessible meaning to the Holocaust? No! It's just evil. (I'm not saying that God can't redeem even the worst evil--I'm just saying there's no easy pretty nice thing that makes it all better.)
All in all--we're certainly supposed to pray for the things we need--"Give us this day our daily bread"--but even before this, we're supposed to pray that "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done." It's much more about bending ourselves to God's plan than bending Him to ours.
12 comments:
I like this. I agree. I read a book about a Chinese missionary - at one point he comes to America and everyone says, "I will pray for the persecution to end in China!" and he would respond, "No! Don't do that! We are growing the kingdom!" Such an incredible perspective. I like to ask for comfort and release from trials....and then pray to accept His will :-)
Wait...YOUR kid is whiney too?!?!?!
That makes sense--a lot like Christ's prayer--Take this cup from me, yet not my will but yours be done.
I've been listening to this song recently and thought of your previous post in this series about the use of #blessed, and was wondering if you think it has a correct (in your estimation) view of blessedness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZtgOz5zvSs ?
Yeah, something like this. I didn't know if in the chorus if he was saying, "I've been blessed" like it was something in the past or if it was the present or more likely intentional ambiguity.
I took it to mean both - that he has been and presently is blessed, b/c the most important things were spared (his family, and his rifle!) and he has the fortitude to survive hardship ("I can make more out of less" etc). Or so he is trying to convince himself, with his wife's help, to help him overcome his uncertainty about the future. But it was the assertion of blessedness in the face of tragedy rather than accomplishment and comfort that reminded me of your post. Also it is a good song.
Yes. Agreed. Is it too dark of me to like this conception of being blessed?
No, I liked your post on blessedness and this one on prayer. I mean, I haven't given extensive thought to either of these, but when you pointed it out, I could see how a lot of the social media instances in which people describe themselves as #blessed are efforts to translate the purely secular but potentially braggy "fortunate" into something more humble and suitably Christian. But they're also the kinds of good things which get "rewarded in full" in this life and don't require any dependence on or intervention from God. Unless maybe all these people are unwitting Calvinists, and take their prosperous situations to be a sign of election from God. In which case, they could change that hashtag to #LivingSaint, which I'm sure would go over really well in our current climate.
I don't know if blessedness on your understanding always has to be dark. Saying, for example, "God blessed me with a beautiful child" seems like it could be humblebragging or an acknowledgement of your dependence, that your child is a gift from God and not just a demonstration of your evolutionary fitness that you called into being at will. But saying that your comfort and prosperity and tight abs are gifts from God, while maybe in some distant sense technically true, might be to emphasis the wrong things about God.
Ha. This made me laugh a lot, which I appreciate. As I do the sense of dependence that is articulated by seeing a child as a gift from God. But I'm even a little big skeptical about the "God blessed me with a beautiful child." Unless you're also willing to say "God blessed me with this beautiful child" about a child with serious health issues, disabilities, or even just who isn't the cutest ever. Because I think it only makes sense to see the nice things we have as blessings if we're also willing to be thankful for the stuff that we often experience as difficult and which inevitably occurs. As the guy in the song does. I guess maybe it boils down to I'm uncomfortable declaring, from my earthly vantage point, that some of the things that happen to me are blessing and that some are "the devil," which is sometimes the corresponding evangelical articulation of that bad stuff. I'm pretty sure we're supposed to be somehow grateful for it all. If that makes any sense. Ok. Back to class prep for a bit:(
I think you should expand these thoughts somewhere. Because it seems to me that part of what makes #blessed more sympathetic to me than to you is that I see it primarily as an alternative to attributing all the good things in your life to your own virtues (and all your misfortunes to bad luck), and relative to such declarations of autonomy, thanking God for your good fortune is at least a step towards modesty. It would never occur to my almost totally secular mind to think that the alternative to attributing good things to God is to attribute misfortunes to the devil. But in that light, it doesn't look modest anymore.
I just used the adjective beautiful b/c it's how people praise babies. I wasn't thinking of a particularly attractive or healthy baby, just the sense of gratitude to God for a baby vs. the relief and pride (like I BUILT THAT, only I have no idea how) I felt about giving birth. But on social media at least, a lot of people do refer to children with disabilities as "blessings," though I'm not entirely certain what they mean by that. It sometimes comes across as defensive and overcompensating to me, like people are trying hard to say something encouraging and kind though they don't really believe it, but as demonstrated, I am not great at reading into these things.
Yes to your first paragraph. It really isn't modest, right, because you are the attributor and diviner of goodness and badness. When really, the Bible says, in all things give thanks. Because it's all coming from God, unless it's evil in which case it's still being used for good by God. There's a short story in a children's book I highly recommend, Zen Shorts, about this. So I guess it's Buddhist or Taoist, but how are we really supposed to know till the end of the story whether something that happened to us is good or bed. ALSO, the things that people thank God for--like comfort--are things we value as Americans, not really, really good stuff--like virtue. Or I guess to put this in Socratic terms, they're thankful that they avoided having injustice done to them, not thankful that they avoided doing evil.
Yeah, I didn't mean that as a critique of you, at all. I'm glad you see people referring to children with disabilities as blessings on social media. I don't always see that. I suspect the truth is that their existence, like the existence of any child, is both wonderful and so so hard for their parents. And this comes back to our discussions about the limits of social media. I have a friend, who I think might read this blog, who has gone through serious health issues with her child. She is both honest about the good and honest about the bad or I should say hard. It's great--and of course, highly unusual.
So maybe there are two levels of humility--one is recognizing that you don't really deserve your luck. And the second--that we aren't really able to judge our luck accurately right now.
That makes sense, though only the first level is intuitive to me. The second level makes sense when you explain it, but without a strong faith in divine providence, a person is inclined to believe he can, and even must, know the difference between what's good and bad for him at any point. Otherwise how can he plan and control his life? (Obviously one answer is he can't anyway, but one doesn't easily move from seeing the truth of that to accepting providence.) One thing this leads me to suspect (which I suspect anyway) is that a lot of Americans who claim to be (and are) religious actually have deeply ingrained secular habits of mind, and their understanding of blessedness at your first level might be one example of that.
Yes--clearly we have to make the best distinctions we can between bad and good. And you're right--it's probably the masking of secular ideas about the good life as divine gifts that's bugging me. And also the lack of humility--we make the best choices we can with the information we have, and for the most part we aren't going to choose difficult circumstances for ourselves (although medieval hair shirt wearers did).
But pretending God's plan for us is middle class comfort just plain old rubs me the wrong way.
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