The Rape of Prayer

The Rape of Prayer (#13)

Hear a just cause, O Lord, attend to my cry! Give ear to my prayer from lips free of deceit! (Psalm 17:1)

I was sitting in a church in Nashville last year when it came time for prayer requests from the laity. Along with the usual requests for the grieving, the sick, the hospitalized, the jobless, and the anonymous requests, I requested prayer about my potential adoption. The minister took my request and prayed to God that “if it was God’s will for him to adopt….” Regardless of its innocence, I felt horribly violated. I broke closed eye to look at her over rows of bowed heads thinking she’d lost her mind and if it was God’s will, I was the one to help her find it again.

Now many people reading this and beyond would find her prayer in my behalf quite innocent and usual. Not me. It was a desecration to all that I hold dear. I’d wanted to adopt a child some time before I put the wheels in motion and was amazed during the process of adoption classes how smoothly the whole thing was going. I just needed the community to give me that extra boost of support and prayer. I’ve a mantra, “You don’t sleep with everybody, you don’t pray with everybody.” This time, I let my guard down in a church that at times easily slipped into a holier than thou mentality. That should have been my first sign to be careful where I laid my prayer down.

I’ll never forget the aunt who when I was a child, pinched me because I wouldn’t go to the altar during altar call. I was furious, a child raised not to question elders, and I never forgot the dynamics of that sense of prayer by force and obligation. It was a psychic rape in the name of God that taught me a sense of God no child should come to know. I’ve been exposed to enough “good Christians” telling me they’d pray for me when they disagreed with me. It always sounded like a battle cry more than any kind of desire for right relationship with God or me. I learned to fire back with I’ll pray for you too. I realized how dangerous I’d become one day when my response was particularly acerbic: “Yeah I’ll pray for her alright, that she’s hit by an eighteen wheeler, one wheel at a time!” People laughed nervously, stunned. Deep down I was serious and that scared me, a little. Wars waged under guise of prayer were getting the best of me.

To hear the preacher throw God’s will into my prayer request when I never asked her for God’s will made me crazier than a road lizard. I see prayer as a private thing that when shared with the public is not something for another to sort through like a mother picking food for a baby off her own plate. God knows I’ve had my share of selfish prayers. But to snatch an honest heart felt prayer born out of the need to love a child was presumptuous on her part. This is the rape of prayer. A deeply troubled heart will make an honest prayer; I’m a living witness. I needed the blessing of a praying community. It wasn’t her heart, but mine, stepping into the human arena to love a stranger’s child. Silly me, I had assumed God’s will was already in play.

I saw a church marquee recently that read “Pray without giving God directions.” I wanted to throw a rock. Sometimes you really don’t know what to say to God without giving directions. Sometimes we can only step to the altar with what we know. It’s said that Abraham Lincoln was approached about praying to God for a misguided South in the Civil War as the North was assured victory because God was on their side. He’s said to have responded that no doubt the South was praying the same prayer feeling God was on their side. The true prayer is all about our response to a situation. Not just what you got on your knees and prayed, but what you got up off your knees to do if there was anything to be done. In authentic embodied prayer, actions don’t speak louder than words, actions are the words. When my mother was dying of cancer, I asked God to heal her and when it became evident to me that she would die, I did not pray to God to heal her nor did I pray to God not to heal her, nor did I pray, God not my will but thy will be done. None of that would have been proper prayer to me on my journey, so I stopped praying. My prayer was in tending to the needs of a dying woman. Not that I wouldn’t have rejoiced, cheered, did splits with pink pom poms in hand and turned cartwheels down the street over my mother being healed. It just wasn’t the issue any more. I simply felt the need of prayer in my actions that was a response to her suffering, keeping her clean, safe and comfortable until she passed over.

To adopt a child was my response to my own suffering in wanting a child to love and moving beyond the fear that I wasn’t capable of love and to eliminate my son’s suffering of believing that nobody wanted him, that he’d never be loved, and give him a sense of community and home. I never asked God if it was the deity’s will. I just felt the urge to adopt over time and one day moved with it. Yes, I prayed giving God as many directions as I could. And Spirit is seemingly following some of my directions. This isn’t blasphemous. This isn’t my equating myself with the mind of God. That’s stupid to me. It’s commingling two hearts, God’s and mine, with the same beautiful desire to heal. This is the work of God and people too. Have I directed God’s path? No, it’s impossible. I made the effort to attend classes and initiate contact with my son’s social worker and do everything on my part to make the adoption happen. I recognized there were things out of my hand and I told the deity so with the sometimes-shaky expectation that God would handle it. It never crossed my mind that God wasn’t behind my decision. I resent anyone snatching prayers from my mouth like food, chewing them, then giving me back what they didn’t swallow in the name of the Lord.

I’m critical enough to ask God for what I need from a place of honesty and put all the effort I can in making it come to pass. I sometimes feel like God and I have got it going on like that (although there are days I swear the deity is missing in action). And like God’s relationship with Abraham, I expect the deity to answer my prayer. Sometimes we must all recognize that raping the mouths of others for the prayer we think they should be praying is violent and destroys relationship to God and other people. And I must recognize that my learning to pray to God my way is a journey in faith for me, not someone else. But next time somebody attempts to rape my prayer, instead of praying out of a frustrated anguish that an eighteen-wheeler hits her or him one wheel at a time, I’ll call the person on the insult and if they get offended, gently remind them “in love” that it was God’s will for me to correct them about what’s in my heart to bear.
c. Raphael—God has healed
5/18/06