Thoughts and Prayers: What Good are They Anyway?

“Thoughts and prayers.”

I first heard this term when I was eleven years old and my grandmother died. I was living in Portland, Oregon at the time and my grandparents had been living in Connecticut. My mother and I flew to Boston and back over the course of a week. When I returned to school after her funeral a teacher of mine called me over after class to tell me that the entire class had been sending me and my family “thoughts and prayers.”

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I remember saying “thank you” out loud but inside stewing in anger, my early adolescent angst wondering “how the hell will your thoughts and prayers bring my grandmother back to life?”

I’ve been turning over these words in my mind quite a bit over the days since seventeen children and staff were shot and killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida. Watching the survivors of the shooting bravely speak out publically against assault weapons and argue for greater gun regulation legislation has stirred up the questions of my own adolescence. It is clear that these teens who are turning their mourning into powerful public witness are not interested in the thoughts and prayers of politicians and religious leaders who will not back up their prayers with action. Instead, they are calling out all of those in power who use the front of ‘passive’ religious language to mask their immoral lack of resolve.

To my foregone teenage self this movement spearheaded by these teens against offering unsubstantiated ‘thoughts and prayers’ feels powerfully cathartic. It legitimizes my own outcry of pain when my teacher sent me well wishes without being able to change the tragic reality of the death of my loved one.

However, to my current self, the self that is an adult minister who leads congregations in intentional moments of prayer and meditation on a weekly basis, my feeling is more complicated.

As a kid who often felt his ‘prayers’ fell on deaf ears I learned early that I could not rely on believing in a personal God that will save this world through ‘His’ Will. I learned after my grandmother’s death that I could no longer honestly believe that praying to God will change the universe because God will listen and intervene. After all, for all my prayers for my grandmother to come back to life, she never got an ‘Easter’ moment. And yet, I now find myself believing more than anything in the power of prayer.

So what is the power of prayer that I believe in?

For me the power of prayer is the power of intention, attitude, and action. I define prayer as a moment of collective intention of “us” being alive together. Whether that “us” is a person and God, a person and a community, a person and the natural world around them, or simply a person and their own heartbeat, it all falls under the umbrella. Prayer is an intentional moment of collective openness to the possibility of the universe. It is an attitude of deep feeling, forgiveness, and willingness to love. Finally, prayer as I understand it is an action, or has a component of action.

There is no holier feeling to me as a Unitarian Universalist minister as leading a congregational time of prayer; a time of music, words, and silent reflection in which each individual is held in the collective intention of being alive together. But I do not limit prayer to only that which is done in pews. This is why the action component of prayer is so important. I have prayed with my feet in a march for justice and prayed with my hands holding a baby.

I believe that each of us has “prayed” an infinity of times in our lives, whether we choose to call it prayer or not, because simply by living we have been invited to moments to be alive with one another in an intentional way.

We are at a point in the history of religion in this country where us religious leaders need to listen to the public outcry of those like the survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting. They are telling us that the intention of our prayers is not enough. They are screaming at us to remember that intention and attitude do not form a complete prayer by themselves. They are inviting us to act out of faith and values in a way that puts our prayers into action.

I do not believe that to act out of our prayers needs to mean that we must be political, though that is one option. However, I do believe that all of those of us who consider ourselves prayerful must look long and hard about the praying we are doing in our lives.

Are we praying with the intention to create a Kindom of God on earth but not following through with action to make that a reality? Are there ways in our own lives and in the lives of our communities where we may pray harder with our feet and hands and less with our mouths and ‘what-ifs’?

We should not throw out our thoughts and prayers, they are part of us being together as a country and community. But we must lean further into them and live into our intentions more fully through action. In the wake of such tragedy as the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting may each of us commit more fully to our prayers and act out of them to make the world a stronger, more joyful, and more loving place to live beside one another.

Amen

**All the views and opinions expressed are my own and do not represent my employer