I’m praying again.

Rockstar Petitions + Returning to Love

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We had turned on SNL to relish Maya Rudolph as Kamala Harris and Jim Gaffigan as Tim Walz. I expected to snort-laugh. I didn’t expect to cry. It’s not often an SNL musical guest brings me to tears, let alone even resonates as music I’d want pulsing through my speakers while I form words around my biggest hopes. But Coldplay did.

Sure, Chris Martin’s dancing was the tiniest bit dorky. But, I’m a dork. Once I got past my little mocking giggles, it was his earnestness that pulled me past my pretension. When did public figures stop being earnest? I’m so used to seeing vitriol on screens that encountering earnestness feels vulnerable and penetrating. By the time Chris sang, “We pray with every breath/ though I’m in the valley of the shadow of death” I was praying too.

I’ve been praying again, and not just in the existential sense of recognizing that there is a Presence of Love who pervades every part of my life even when I cannot see or sense them, a Presence I need not prosecute or prove. I’m praying with practices. I’m praying with words. I’m praying to the Word Made Flesh when my own flesh fills me with fury and, most often, frustration. I’m talking about Jesus, but not Jeezus.¹ I’m talking about power, but not the kind that would get me elected to any public office. I’m talking about Help and Thanks and Wow, but mostly Help. I’m talking about talking with the Presence that some might say has failed me, the God who could have saved my bones or saved your marriage, the God who could have breathed your stillborn baby’s lungs back to life, freed you from the burden of bankruptcy, and kept every Israeli and Palestinian safe from harm.

Several years ago people wanted me to start calling myself a “public theologian,” and I asked a mentor of mine who is an actual theologian what he thought. He affirmed the gift and cautioned against claiming the title. It stung a little, but the farther I get from that phone call, the more grateful I feel that I didn’t claim a title that crowned me with any special knowledge. The fact of the matter is my life would have crumbled my career. Instead, I get to do what many self-proclaimed public theologians on social media and ones with actual doctorate degrees from places like Aberdeen and King’s College and Duke probably can’t do. I don’t have to decipher our doubts or dissect the distance between God’s goodness and our grief. I arm myself not with syllogisms or scriptures but the practice of paying attention to my particular personhood and letting what I witness spill over into stories and poems that maybe, just maybe, might pierce the veil of your pain. Even for a moment.

I’m praying again, but what I am asking to be saved from is not my sin or my suffering—though I do beg for a break. I am praying to be saved from the illusion of separation.

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It’s amusing what comes out of me when I decide to start typing to you. I didn’t think I had much I wanted to share this week. (Well, for the last two weeks, since I’ve been fighting an infection.) I thought this would be a disjointed update of photos and links to things I am loving, and instead what is popping out of me is a letter from the sadness and love in me to the sadness and love within you.

I think you also might be surprised by what words live within you, waiting for your will to say them.

My spirituality has needed a long silence. And maybe yours has too. I wrote about it in my latest essay here, on “Unleashing the Language of Faith.” If you are in that season, please know that I respect your quiet. I respect the pain that prompted you to put old words on pause and old books in the Goodwill pile. You’ve got your reasons; I’ve got mine. When I think of the people I am writing to, I don’t think of the people who sit in a pew without a problem being there. I think of people whose pain has been made more prominent by pastors. I think of women who were trained that making themselves smaller was the best way to show God is big. I think of the faces I used to see in therapy (and pray to see again), whose tears told truths sharper than any sermon I’ve ever heard. I don’t write for the people who know what they believe. I write for the people who have lost their certainty, and maybe their community, and are in the midst of gaining their lives.

If you aren’t one of those people, I don’t want you to leave. I want you to hear that love is large and grace has grit. I want you to stay, because I used to be you. I know that might come across cranky or self-righteous. But I hope you hear care. The truth is, I want you to stay, or leave and return later, because every single one of us reaches a point in life when our beliefs break along with our bodies or burdens, and I want you to know I’ll be here when you can’t say the creed without crying or cringing. I’ll be here when your kid gets rejected from youth group for coming out. I’ll be here when you get ghosted by the community you called a church family. I’ll be here when you can no longer find your worth in work, even though you don’t yet realize you do. I’ll be here in the land littered with lament and f bombs, ready to remind you that your belonging is not contingent on your beliefs or a body that doesn’t break but on your existence.

And, oh, your existence is good, even an existence full of grief.