Prayers for Functional Atheists

Phaedra Taylor, “Joy and Sorrow,” Prayers for the Pilgrimage

We are all functional atheists at some point in our prayer lives.

With Thanksgiving around the corner, there’s a chance that your family may want to talk about politics, and there are three ways that you might respond:

• Avoid it like the plague.

• Fight back like a Rottweiler.

• Believe that God has gone MIA.

I’ve done all three at some point.

This year more than most, politics stands to create cracks where there were previously none and turn cracks into canyons that threaten to turn kith and kin into strangers and enemies. It’s the same perhaps for the family Christmas meal or the New Year’s Eve party or the all-together holiday getaway.

And we may tire of praying the same prayers year after year, or wonder whether the heavens have gone silent, or, worst of all, fear that God has withheld a favorable answer because we’ve done something to incur his displeasure.

So, like our primordial parents, we hide from God by not believing in God. We hide our fears and faithlessness because, seemingly left bereft of divine help, we believe that they’ve become unbearable.

And yet that’s precisely what we ought not to do, argues Stanley Hauerwas in his book, Prayers Plainly Spoken:

“We do not need to hide anything from God, which is a good thing given the fact that any attempt to hide from God will not work. God wants us to cry, to shout, to say what we think we understand and what we do not. The way we learn to do all this is by attending to the prayers of those who have gone before.”

One of my dearest hopes with my book with Phaedra, Prayers for the Pilgrimage, is that it will supply you with words when words seem to fail you and that it will enable you to say to God what your heart needs to say to God as you approach the end of this calendar year.

We’d be thrilled to bits, too, if you bought a copy for family or friend as a Christmas gift.

I’ve got a host of prayers for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany—on joy & sorrow, frazzled parents & lonely New Year’s, refugees & martyrdom, feasting & fasting, justice & peace, hate & love, and more. And my hope is that they might help you to believe that God is near at hand, present by his Spirit, and attentive to all of the cries of your heart.

Oh—and I found my gloves, blown a quarter of a mile from the house by an early summer thunderstorm!