Prayer

Gospel reading: Luke 16.19-31
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

When I was growing up we would travel to Pennsylvania once every few years to visit Dad's family. With the exception of my dad the whole Walters clan lived within a few hours of Hershey. Uncle Russell had ventured as far as the Pocano Mountains where he pastored a little Methodist church for decades. But they all remained very much Pennsylvanians.

If you've been to that part of the country you'll recognize the unique accent spoken. This isn't the kind of thing that lends itself to description in a blog. But I noticed things like the attachment of "dontchya?" to sentences and the way my cousins' voices went down rather than up in pitch at the end of a question.

It was one thing to hear these exotic tongues spoken by people I barely knew. But what I had not expected was the contagion of the accent. As soon as we arrived the inflections would infect my father's speech as well. And with every day that we stayed Dad would sound more and more like a Pennsylvanian.

Part of the way we talk depends on whom we're talking to.

If we think of prayer as a way of talking - far too narrow as a definition, but it may work as a metaphor - what if it works a little like traveling to Pennsylvania did for my dad? Let's just play with this notion for a bit.

Sometimes our language changes as soon as we realize that we're talking to God. We put our best...well...tongue forward, so to speak. If we don't slip into thees and thous, we might affect that calm, earnest, pious voice we imagine God wants to hear. This seems like a less than helpful way to be changed by prayer. Taken far enough we can pray as though we're pretty sure the person God really wants to hear from is somebody else. So we try to talk like her.

But this isn't what happened to Dad when we joined his family again. No, the accent got stronger as stories were told. It was clear that Dad was changed a little by the encounter, but he wasn't becoming less himself. A voice long quiet was returning. The change was audible. I heard parts of my father's past that I simply couldn't have in Arkansas.

Kathleen Norris says that "prayer is not asking for what you think you want but asking to be changed in ways you can't imagine. To be made more grateful, more able to see the good in what you have been given instead of always grieving for what might have been."

Maybe the change that occurs in prayer is something like the unexpected return of a lost accent. We often don't even know it's happened. But in the process of sending the deepest parts of our selves toward God - anger, hope, confusion, joy, the stuff of psalms - we are given access to our selves once again. Access to our lives once again. And the truly miraculous result may be that our gratitude for what is overtakes our grief for what might have been. The miraculous result is that we come alive in the present.

Chiefly on Prayer

The three year old
came in from the rain
and told his mother
he had a talk with Jesus.
What did he mean
she wanted to know.
“Well,” he said
“I was sitting on top
the slide and I asked Jesus
if I should let go
and he said
if I were you
I’d go for it
but
you’re gonna get
a wet bottom.

- John L. Wright*

*"Chiefly on Prayer" comes from a collection of poems by my uncle, John L. Wright titled Through an Old Wooden Bowl.