Lord have mercy is my most frequent prayer. It’s what I pray when I don’t know what else to say, when otherwise my prayers would fall apart into incomprehensible groanings (which I also allow space for and spent time this morning doing, as I grieved for the children and families at Uvalde Elementary in Texas).
In the face of the tragic and incomprehensible, we offer what little we have, which colloquially is often expressed as our “thoughts and prayers.”
If thoughts and prayers are sacrilegiously coupled with studied and intentional inaction, politicizing disregard for children’s and others’ lives, as is the current situation with the Republican party’s lock-step covenant with the NRA, it is no wonder the response from those grieving and afraid is “don’t give me your thoughts and prayers.”
However, abusus non tollit proprium usus. The abuse of something does not disallow it’s appropriate use. So with prayer, simply because we witness hypocritical prayers does not mean prayer is unimportant or ineffective. Prayer is in fact the most important thing, it is our manner of union with God, which then moves us into action in the world aligned with God.
In fact prayer is in Christian perspective us joining Christ’s prayers in the Spirit out of abiding love for God’s world. Even the lament “don’t give me your thoughts and prayers” is in fact a kind of prayer.
In the current back-and-forth on social media around gun control, perhaps we lose sight of this theological insight. In our grief, in our rage, we may miss that even our own social media posts are themselves prayers.
In a very early series of sermons by the Cappadocian Gregory of Nyssa, he says,
“Prayer is intimacy with God and contemplation (theoria) of the invisible. It satisfies our yearnings and makes us equal with angels. Through it good prospers, evil is destroyed, and sinners will be converted. Prayer is the enjoyment of things present and the substance of things to come… Now I think that, even if we spent our whole life in constant communion with God in prayer and thanksgiving, we should be as far from having made God an adequate return as if we had not even begun to desire making the Giver of all good things such a return.” (Sermon 1; The Lord’s Prayer, Beatitudes, 24-25).
So yes tell it like it is, name the idolatrous prayers the kind of prayer NRA backed gun rights Republicans are praying, which are prayers to their god Moloch and acknowledgement of their willingness to sacrifice children at the altar of their god.
But then join Christ in his prayers which he continually brings before God his Father. Use all the prayers at your disposal. Pray the prayers of lament and rage in the Psalms. Pray prayers that good will prosper, that evil will be destroyed, that heard-hearted politicians will be converted, that violent young men considering such hateful actions might turn toward peace and healing.
Pray all those prayers. Then also, and importantly, act. You can do at least the following today. You can write your senators and advocate that they pass the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act.
You can support financially organizations who have been involved over the long haul in promoting gun sense and safety. One of the most active and effective is Moms Demand Action.
You can join a service of worship Sunday where prayers like Litany In The Wake Of A Mass Shooting are prayed. We will include this litany in our Memorial Weekend worship.
Finally, stop voting into office craven politicians who sacrifice children at the altar of Moloch.
As difficult as it is, it’s good to remember the odds, lest our fears immobilize us or push us into counter-productive behaviors. The odds that children will die in school from a mass shooting are extraordinarily low. Although mass shootings are horrifically tragic, they are also incredibly rare, and it is healthy for us, for our own sake and for the sake of our children, not to overplay the risks. When we do so, we make decisions that unnecessarily expose children to traumatizing experiences.
Instead, I invite us all to turn our energy toward creative long-term solutions, like beating guns into ploughshares. For more on that, see Shane Claibourne and Michael Martin’s project.