The Hard to Handle Prayers

*Today's enews is written by Fr. David Taylor, in special preparation for our worship this Sunday which will incorporate our lamentsbefore the Lord.

In August a dear friend to many of us, Thomas McKenzie, died in a tragic car accident on his way to drop off his eldest child at college. A month later, an artist friend of mine committed suicide, leaving behind a wife and three children. And then a few weeks ago a beloved professor of mine from seminary died of cardiac arrest. All three deaths have left me feeling restless and ill-tempered. It’s as if I’ve lost the ability to know what to do with my emotions. I struggle against the temptation to simply shove them under the rug and I find myself exhausted by the merciless stupidity of death.

It’s at times like this that I go to the Psalms for help. I don’t know what to think or to feel or to pray, and I desperately need to know that my prayers even matter. What I discover in the psalms of lament are prayers that furnish me with language for the seemingly unspeakable, songs to make sense of the sorrow that threatens to drown me, poems that give coherent shape to the often-incoherent nature of life. As I write in my book, Open and Unafraid, the lament psalms remind me of something that I all-too easily forget: that God is in fact able to handle my broken heart and my raging words of protest.

This coming Sunday, a week before we officially celebrate the Feast of Christ the King, the staff at COTC is providing us with an opportunity to give voice to our personal experiences of lament. Each bulletin will include an index card that’ll offer four prompts: a lament for yourself, a lament for your family, a lament for something in society at large, and an invitation to name what you long for God to do in response to these laments. Later in the service you’ll be offered an opportunity to reflect and to bring your index cards to the altar.

But we won’t be leaving our laments there, hoping against hope that something decent will come from them. We’ll actually get a chance to continue praying our laments throughout the season of Advent, often nicknamed “The Little Lent.” In various ways our individual prayers will inform our official Prayers of the People and they’ll hopefully become an occasion to share our lives vulnerably with one another during the intervening weeks.

I feel no resolve about the deaths that have occurred so close in time and that have affected me so deeply. But I do feel relieved to know that there is a God in heaven who welcomes my often-erratic attempts at prayer, who provides me with psalmic words to give expression to the often-inexpressible, and who surrounds me with a community that chooses to remain soft-hearted in the face of powerful forces that would tempt us to become hard-hearted. May God in his mercy hear our laments and draw near to us in our hour of need.

David Taylor