“Thoughts and Prayers” Is Bullshit

A few years ago, I stood on an Emancipation Day stage in London, Ontario, and told a story about a man who had fallen into a hole.

The walls were too steep to climb out.

A doctor passed. The man called for help, so the doctor wrote a prescription and threw it into the hole.

A priest passed. The man called again. The priest stopped, offered a prayer and continued down the road.

Then a friend arrived.

The man shouted for help.

The friend jumped in.

“What are you doing?” the man asked. “Now we’re both stuck down here.”

“Yes,” the friend said. “But I’ve been down here before. I know the way out.”

The prescription may have been useful. The prayer may have been sincere.

Neither man stayed long enough to learn whether what he offered was what the person in the hole needed.

The friend did.

The other day, I found myself thinking about that story again.

I was holding my phone and reading messages from people who cared about me. Some said they were thinking of me. Others said they were praying.

I began my response with six words:

I appreciate the thoughts and prayers.

I did not appreciate them.

Not all of them, anyway.

I was angry. The sort of anger that makes sarcasm feel like a sacrament.

What I wanted to write was:

Thoughts and prayers is bullshit.

This is an awkward position for somebody who still believes in prayer.

I was raised Catholic. I became an Anglican priest. I have prayed in churches, hospitals, funeral homes, kitchens, car parks and beside beds where nobody knew what else to say. I have prayed with people who were dying and people who were terrified they might be.

I have asked God for healing, forgiveness, courage, mercy and, on more than one occasion, a clear sign that I had not completely fucked everything up.

Sometimes prayer was the only honest thing left.

Sometimes it kept a frightened room from becoming unbearable. Sometimes somebody remembered my name before God when I could no longer find the words myself.

That is not bullshit.

The bullshit begins when prayer becomes a substitute for something already within our power.

The problem with the priest in the story was not that he prayed.

It was that he kept walking.

“Thoughts and prayers” can become the spiritual equivalent of marking a message as read. It acknowledges that suffering has been observed without creating any particular obligation for the observer.

There. I have thought about you. I have prayed for you. I may now return to my life.

I know this because I have done it too.

Clergy can be particularly good at it. I know because I was one.

I learned how to make concern sound liturgical. I could place suffering inside beautiful sentences, proclaim the presence of God and leave before anything became inconvenient.

I could pray for the lonely without making a phone call, for the hungry without opening a cupboard and for the wounded without asking what their safety might require from me.

There are worse things than knowing how to pray beautifully.

But beautiful language can make distance sound remarkably like care.

The Letter of James is brutally practical about this. If somebody is cold and hungry, it is no use blessing them, wishing them well and sending them away without what their body needs.

James is not telling the Church to stop praying.

He is asking what the prayer becomes.

Jesus prayed constantly. He also fed people, touched people, stopped for people and crossed social boundaries for people. He allowed himself to be interrupted by bodies, hunger, grief, illness and need.

His prayer did not protect him from other people’s suffering.

It made him interruptible.

That is the part we prefer to spiritualize.

Most of us like compassion until it asks for something specific: a meal, a phone call, an introduction, a place at the table or an hour we intended to use differently.

Suffering is rarely charming.

People in crisis do not always express gratitude properly. They may reject the first thing offered and then resent that nothing else came. They may tell the same story again. They may misunderstand our intentions. They may fail to recover according to a schedule that rewards our kindness.

I know something about being that person.

I also know something about avoiding that person.

There have been times when I preferred the clean feeling of concern to the messy obligation of love. I have spoken about justice more faithfully than I have practised it. I have mistaken naming suffering for helping to carry it.

I have said, “I’ll pray for you,” when part of what I meant was, “I hope somebody else knows what to do.”

That confession matters because I do not want to write another indictment entirely from the bottom of the hole.

I have stood at the top too.

Sometimes I helped.

Sometimes I hesitated.

Sometimes I prayed and kept walking.

There is another truth.

People have come for me.

Friends have answered the phone. Colleagues have entered frightening situations without making me feel like a problem to be processed. Catholic families have refused to leave. A priest in Oban saw my face and kept the church door open. Strangers in Glasgow pulled over a chair and gave me a ticket I could not afford.

None of them fixed my life.

They did the thing that was in front of them.

That is often what love looks like before we turn it into theology.

Pull over the chair.

Leave the door open.

Answer the phone.

There are illnesses we cannot cure, losses we cannot reverse, relationships we cannot repair and distances we cannot close. Sometimes prayer really is all we have.

A person praying beside a hospital bed is not failing because they cannot heal the body. A parent remembering a distant child before God is not pretending the distance has disappeared. An old woman carrying the names of her family through the rosary may be doing more faithful work than anyone will ever see.

Powerlessness is real.

Prayer gives us somewhere to place what our hands cannot hold.

That is not bullshit.

The bullshit begins when we are not powerless but behave as though we are.

It begins when “thinking of you” replaces calling. When “let me know if you need anything” gives the suffering person another job: identifying, organizing and requesting the help we have already suggested we are willing to provide.

None of this means we must enter every crisis or remain in every relationship.

Boundaries are not abandonment.

Sometimes love keeps its distance. Sometimes it calls emergency services, says no, tells an uncomfortable truth or admits that somebody else is better equipped to help.

The friend in the story jumped into the hole because he knew the way out. Jumping in without that knowledge may simply leave two people trapped.

But prayer should at least make us stop at the edge long enough to ask what love requires.

Real prayer does not always change the circumstances.

Sometimes it changes the person praying.

It makes them pay attention. It makes them follow up. It makes them less certain that somebody else will deal with what is happening.

The other day, I said I appreciated the thoughts and prayers.

Some of them, I did.

I appreciated the prayers of people who had no other way to reach me. I appreciated being remembered by people separated from me by distance, circumstance and limits they did not create.

What I resented was the possibility of being surrounded by expressions of concern while remaining alone with everything the concern was supposedly about.

Everybody cares.

Everybody is praying.

And a person can still be left alone.

Perhaps that makes me angry because I still believe in prayer.

Counterfeit prayer offends me because the real thing has sustained me.

Prayer matters.

That is why we should stop using it as an alibi.

If you tell somebody you are praying for them, then pray.

Properly.

But keep listening.

The prayer may ask something of you.

The man in the story did not need his friend to explain why the hole existed. He needed someone to come close enough to help him find the way out.

I still believe in prayer.

I still need it.

I simply no longer believe prayer was given to keep us safely on the road while somebody else calls from the dark.

There was a phone in my hand.

There usually is.

That feels like enough theology for today.

Giff on the Way Home.