I've been thinking about thoughts and prayers.
As mass killings in schools, shopping centers, a Las Vegas concert, synagogues, and elsewhere have proliferated, we hear the now-routine response, “our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families,” a phrase that has become an ugly social profanity. If the only thing we taught a newcomer to our country is that gun violence is now the leading killer of our children and teenagers, they would think with good reason that we are insane.
Police at the scene of the Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting in Newtown, Connecticut (December 14, 2012)
And if they were told that the routine response to this recurring tragedy is for politicians and public leaders to offer their thoughts and prayers without any meaningful action to interrupt this violence, their diagnosis of our insanity would be confirmed. And of course it’s not just mass shootings: the same inaction, shoulder-shrugging, and thoughts and prayers have been the reaction of those in power as ICE has wielded state-sponsored and taxpayer-funded violence to execute people in the streets of Minneapolis.
As a person of faith, I have thought about and prayed over too many friends, neighbors, and strangers. Some were sick or dying, others lost in drugs or alcohol, or ruining their marriages or friendships. I prayed for our younger son when he was serving in the Peace Corps in Africa, prayed for him every day for a year and a half until the call came in January 2000 that he’d been killed in a terrible traffic accident on a rural African road.
His death confirmed my long-growing doubts about the efficacy of prayer, undermining a life-long belief that God could somehow manipulate our human experience if we asked sincerely, passionately. There was now too much evidence that God was unresponsive, too little evidence that God intervened, too little evidence that God responded to anyone’s thoughts and prayers!
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Thoughts and prayers without legislative or divine action are a sick joke.
Early in January I spent five days in the hospital dealing with blood clots in both of my lungs that left me breathless and closer to death than I’ve ever been. After I made my way through the emergency, I spent the rest of January rehabilitating at home.
What I didn’t expect was how much thoughts and prayers have helped. They helped because they were not soul-less, empty phrases but acts of love. Less than an hour after my internist sent me to the Emergency Room at our local hospital, my wife, our son, our daughter and her husband were crowded into the small room, touching me, encouraging me, and exchanging information about me and my condition with doctors and nurses.
In the three days I was in intensive care, waves of love came: texts and emails, voice mail messages, cards and handwritten notes – all of them wishing me well and most of them sending love with their thoughts and prayers. A friend who lives in San Francisco flew down on my fourth hospital day, sat with me for several hours, then caught a flight home. I emailed each of my clients to tell them what happened to me and that I was postponing our sessions for a month; to a person they sent back their encouragement to take whatever time I needed before returning to work and added words of affection.
My name was on our congregation’s prayer list on Sunday – an entire community, not just my family and friends, sending loving thoughts to me in the middle of their worship. Whether or not God was involved, or listened, or cared, I felt the impact of that outpouring of support, and it meant something to me.
What I learned in the past month is that I don’t need God to explain what makes people courageous enough to speak up and speak out about good and evil, or to behave with loving kindness. Instead, I see thoughts and prayers combined with action as the sacredness of the ordinary, that love-driven expression of care and hope arising from the hearts of regular people.
A whole bunch of ordinary people who were there for me accomplished the extraordinary: lifting me out of my fear of death, offering their love and encouragement, and making it clear that I mattered to them and that they wanted me to stick around. I’m not smart enough to know what science would say about the impact of such love on the process of healing, but I can personally attest that it’s possible to draw strength and vivid hope from thoughts and prayers like these.