Unholy Prayers

It is tempting to assume that all prayer is beneficial. The reformer Martin Luther knew better, once making the perceptive comment that a person praying should be careful, as praying can lead to a multitude of sins.

In this, Luther was simply agreeing with Jesus, who offered a parable about a religious person who used prayer to elevate himself in God’s eyes even as he dissed a humble person praying nearby. Jesus taught that God would not hear that braggart’s prayer.

As the son of a Protestant minister, I was expected to support my father by attending every church service. The service that I most dreaded as a young person was the Wednesday night prayer meeting.

Part of the reason was that few other young people ever attended. My main problem, however, was that I had a hard time enduring the long prayers. After my father invited people to voice their prayer concerns, the twenty to thirty in attendance would sit silently or stand to offer prayers before my father closed the service.

A good number of the prayers were ones asking God to heal or comfort a person or family experiencing some difficulty. None of those prayers bothered me, but there were others that were tough to listen to. Sometimes a prayer would give a person’s name or allude to a person so clearly that everyone knew the person’s identity. This would be followed by that person’s problem mentioned or again alluded to in cryptic detail. The line between concern and gossip had been crossed.

Another kind of prayer focused on all those who didn’t regularly attend the Wednesday night prayer meeting. Little did people know that I wished that I were among those not attending. That prayer skated so close to Jesus’ own parable of the bragging religious official that even as a kid, I felt the prayer was putting ourselves in that bracket.

But the prayer that I most dreaded every week came from the same person, a member my father’s age, who considered himself a spiritual leader. His prayers went on and on, but the worst part was that his prayers seemed to eventually focus on my father. He prayed that God would bless my father’s ministry with more people coming to church, which was fair enough. My father was hardly a perfect minister. But then this man’s petitions would ask God to deepen my father’s spiritual life, apparently to be more like his spiritual life. On Wednesday nights, I felt my father was being graded in public, earning at best a C.

In retrospect, I’m not sure my father’s expectation that his children attend the prayer meeting was a good idea. All teenagers, as they begin to look for role models in adults around them, are hypersensitive to hypocrisy. I certainly was at that age, and I suspect most children of clergy are as well.

Fortunately, I was blessed to have other adults around me whose spiritual lives were transparent and real. How interesting, as I look back, that few of them made a habit of praying much in public.

Or maybe, the adults who became models to me took Jesus’ advice more seriously, that the prayer that God prefers is the one made in secret.