I was not religious in college. Except for the night of a show. I was both a non-practicing Christian and a practicing actor at the time. I did not know what I believed about God. I was very skeptical about prayer. If God had already decided what would happen, what good would my prayer be? If God was wishy washy or absent-minded, and needed me to pray in order to take action, what kind of God was that? And if there in fact was no God, I was speaking into nothingness, or worse, whistling in the dark. So why do it? Intellectually, prayer seemed to me to be a waste of time.
Except right before a play. Right before any play I was in, I would sneak out a side door from the dressing room to this little vacant open area and I would say a prayer. It was a real, old school, traditional prayer with me directly asking God for help to do the thing I was about to do, for my castmates, for our crew, all that. Then I’d say Amen and slide back inside before anyone caught me being religious.
I did this without fail for every play for four years. I was not confident that anything happened. I am not a very superstitious person – I didn’t think the whole thing would fall apart or I’d forget lines if I didn’t pray. If I’m honest, it’s just that in that time of my life, nothing mattered more to me than that show. And for all my doubts and skepticism, for all my living in my own head, I knew in that moment that I wanted God with me in whatever was about to happen.
One time, as I was leaving the dressing room, my friend Andy asked me where I was going. He was (and is) one of the people dearest to my heart, and I trusted him, so I confessed that I, an intellectual college student non-religious agnostic Christian, was gonna go hide and pray. He, an intellectual college student non-religious agnostic Jew, asked if he could come too. This made me feel both very uncomfortable and very loved, and I said yes. And then I prayed the way I always did, and when I said Amen, he said Amen, and then he hugged me and said, “Thank you.”
That only happened once, 25 years ago, and I still think about it, about him being there, about us praying, about the warmth and the love that sat alongside the anticipation and nerves. And I think of those prayers, which feel so different to me now that I’m religious again. I feel now that they didn’t need to make sense, that they didn’t need to be full of understanding. It was not that I prayed that God would help because I believed God was there: It’s that in praying that God would help, I began to believe that God was there.
There’s a saying we love in the Episcopal Church – that praying shapes believing. This, I believe, was what was happening to me. My decision to pray guided me into belief, or maybe revealed a belief I didn’t fully know I had. There is no such thing as mere words: words have power. And words offered up to God could not be empty even if they tried. God hears. And God shapes us through the prayers we offer up. Rather than praying exactly what we believe, we pray so that we can figure out what we believe. We say certain prayers so we can learn how to live into the belief of them.
I pray a lot more now, as you might expect from a professional Christian. Of course, I lead prayers in worship on Sundays. As a parent, I pray with my children before meals and bedtime.
When I am invited to a hospital to see a newborn child, I pray for little babies as I hold them. Here is the prayer I pray: “Watch over your child, O Lord, as her days increase; bless and guide her wherever she may be; Strengthen her when she stands; comfort her when discouraged or sorrowful; raise her up when she falls; and in her heart, may your peace which passes understanding abide all the days of her life, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.” I didn’t make that one up: it’s in the Episcopal prayer book. What do I believe about a new life and what my hopes are for them? I have decided to let this prayer shape my belief.
When I show up at the end of someone’s life, I pray for them. Sometimes they are somewhat aware of that. Most of the time they are not. Here, from the same prayer book, is what I pray: “Deliver your servant, O Sovereign Lord Christ, from all evil, and set him free from every bond; that he may rest with all your saints in the eternal habitations; where with the Father and the Holy Spirit you live and reign, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.” I do not always know what I believe about death. These words I pray are not simply a comfort: They are a challenge. They push me to accept the things I cannot change, and to find God even in death.
Jesus says to pray for those who hate you. What a command. Maybe we resist this because we are afraid of what we will end up believing about our enemies: That they are human, that they are beloved – if not by us, then by the same God who made us both. This is what so angered the prophet Jonah. God commanded him to prophesy to his enemies. Jonah didn’t want to, not because he was scared he’d fail, but because he knew he’d succeed, that his enemies would repent, and that God would forgive them. Jonah didn’t want them to be forgiven. Jonah didn’t want to admit they were loved like that. Their praying forced him to believe in God’s graciousness in ways he couldn’t have imagined.
I realize now why I am enraged when politicians utter, “thoughts and prayers,” after yet another mass shooting in our country – a senseless tragedy that they absolutely could have stopped. I am not enraged because I don’t believe prayers do anything, because I think prayers are useless, because I think they’re “only prayers.” No. I am enraged because I don’t believe the politician is actually praying about it. Because praying shapes believing, and their beliefs, their actions, show no signs of being transformed by God. If everyone who said thoughts and prayers actually prayed daily for those victims, God would use those prayers to help them understand what they really believe.
I’m still in my head about a lot of things, but not about prayer. I don’t spend a lot of time trying to define or understand it. I just pray. I’m starting to believe that God will figure out what to do with that.
