Keep Praying

His funeral Mass, like every Catholic Mass, included intercessions, during which a member of the congregation stands behind the lectern and offers prayers. “For [a person or an institution],” a generic one may begin, “that [he / she / they] may [find peace / be safe on their trip to the Vatican / generally benefit from some positive outcome], we pray to the Lord.” The congregation responds, “Lord, hear our prayer”: a rote phrase that churchgoers have repeated thousands of times on Sunday mornings. Or, if you attend Mass in Vevay, Indiana, on Saturday evenings, when the priest in the relatively larger town upriver travels east and opens the doors to God’s solarium.

With my heart performing the Macarena and my tear ducts defogging, I delivered the intercessions on Saturday. They were written to be unpretentious and straightforward, which means they weren’t written by me. But they weren’t so simple that they lacked intent. They sent ‘em up for Claude, “our brother” in the parochial sense, that he may enjoy his heavenly company; that his younger brothers, the ones in his footsteps who wear the uniform, be kept secure; that his dedication to family and community and the homebound last as an example (as a matter of generalizing—my mind was cloudy, too); and so forth. Not one of them was written, “For our brother Claude, that he may receive our thoughts and prayers.

You don’t get “thoughts and prayers” during the intercessions; the closest you get are the “prayers each of us holds in our hearts” or a similar petition, which is open-ended and personal. Sometimes there is a prayer for a sick congregant and the congregant’s family, that the former may reclaim good health and the latter maintain its strength; sometimes there is one for beleaguered people, be they near or distant, displaced or hurt by a recent disaster, that they may find their way home and not be troubled more; and sometimes, from the first time I recall standing behind that wood box at age 13, there is one for our elected leaders. That they may do what is necessary to bring about peace. To do what is right.

There is a misapprehension in American culture about the nature of prayer—Christian prayer, mostly, but it may as well be all prayer. After the Las Vegas shooting in October, former White House ethics lawyer Richard Painter tweeted, “For thoughts and prayers call a priest or rabbi. For decent gun laws call a congressman.” A viral YouTube video posted after the Parkland high school shooting likened the effect of sending “thoughts and prayers” to applying makeup with a dry brush. An activist says she is donating the proceeds of a T-shirt she created to a gun control group; the front of the shirt has the words “THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS” crossed out, with “POLICY AND CHANGE,” bold and undefaced, featured prominently alongside them.

On Sunday, comedian Kevin Smith—who wrote and directed the Christian religious satire Dogma—tweeted that he had suffered a massive heart attack. In response, Chris Pratt—a Smith fan and an avowed Christian—tweeted that he was “praying [his] ass off” for Smith’s recovery, because he believes in the “healing power of prayer.” The website Complex read the responses to Pratt’s tweet so I didn’t have to, even though I did—it concluded that “Twitter users responded pretty negatively for [Pratt] ‘praying’ for Smith.” One of the misguided responses to Pratt was: “Good thing Kevin believed in the power of science, and went to the hospital.”

These acidic takes are missing the point: The prayerful aren’t claiming that their pleas take the place of human action. As far as it reasonably can be inferred, Republican lawmakers (and it’s always Republican lawmakers) don’t imply their thoughts and prayers are adequate replacements for legislative activity to address gun violence. If you are so persuaded that politically feasible firearms restrictions would curtail incidents of mass slaughter, then by all means, attack the lawmakers who vote no. (This time it’s not always Republican lawmakers.) But to attack them for praying isn’t constructive—that is, if the point of criticism is to be constructive and not spiteful.

Chris Pratt didn’t specify the intent of his prayer. But such prayers don’t assume a mystical quality. There is prayer for the steadiness of the surgeon’s hands, for the fortitude of the afflicted, for “speedy recovery”—not for asking God to bellow voila! and disintegrate arterial plaque. The American writer Ambrose Bierce facetiously said in his Devil’s Dictionary that to pray was “to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.” In reality, I’ve prayed for God’s facilitation—that medical treatment of family be effective and that He not hold my transgressions against them.

We pray for miracles, yes—during hockey games, amid times of hellish strife, in jest, and in reality. But often we’re praying merely for sustenance, for goodness, for the triumph of community, the disarmament of prejudice, the emergence of humility, and that when experiencing these in combination we may find wisdom and tranquility.

In times like these, the type of thing that tempts one to interpret Ambrose Bierce seriously.