When Public Prayer Gets Too Personal

It happened four times in two months—in churches scattered across the continent. It made me uneasy.

I attended Sunday worship with mainstream Protestant congregations in Wisconsin, Massachusetts, West Virginia, and California. In each service the pastoral prayer was interspersed with personal, intercessory prayers by worship attenders.

Why did I—one who loves both prayer and populism—squirm during this form of piety?

Because these prayers were overwhelmingly personal.

A dear friend articulated my concern. He is facing cancer in a private part of his body. He stopped going to church because he is afraid that part of his body will be mentioned during prayer. Public prayer that fails to distinguish between the personal and the private can really hurt people.

Another friend of the same generation winced when he heard his church service broadcast on the local radio station: “And now let us pray for R. who has prostate cancer and a female doctor.” The invasion of privacy hurt the person being prayed for as well as embarrassing those present in the sanctuary. Prayer that is too personal goes from being “good” personal to “bad” personal in an instant.

Keep public prayer public

I recognized another cause for my distaste for overly personal intercessory prayer as I left the fourth of these otherwise magnificent services of worship: no one mentioned anything truly public.

All the intercessions were individual, individualistic, even.

“Heal my mother-in-law who has the flu” is an important intercession. The flu is no laughing matter, as anyone who has ever had it knows. Still, why did the people of Indonesia receive no intercessions? What about currency crashes or floods or transpersonal events?

Surely these rival the flu in difficulty.

Yet in all of these services, prayer focused on medical issues like arthritis, cancer, and flu while omitting spiritual or international concerns.

Their absence points to a kind of selfishness in prayer. The irony is deep. When we pray for our ailing mothers-in-law, we are trying to be unselfish. And we are failing by lack of proper context.

Pious exhibitionism

Another reason for my distaste is the attention getters. In each service, there was one person or more who just talked too long. He or she was not calling attention to the power of God to intercede but to the power of personal pain. Pious exhibitionism is no better than any other kind.

The fact that L., who has severe arthritis, had a good day on Tuesday, a bad day on Wednesday, and saw the doctor on Thursday is simply not of wide enough interest to merit observation during public worship. Any of us who suffer from arthritis know how deeply we need God to survive it. Public mention in such detail, though, does not invoke God so much as offend others. Those who suffer in private have as much guarantee of God’s presence as those who suffer in public.

Public exhibitionism about private pain is not prayer: it is not addressed to God so much as addressed to a human crowd for human sympathy.

Writer Annie Dillard sums up the problem we face. We don’t want prayer to be impersonal so much as we want it to be appropriately personal.

“During the long intercessory prayer, the priest always reads ‘intentions’ from the parishioners. These are slips of paper, dropped into a box before the service begins, on which people have written their private concerns … ‘for a baby safely delivered on November twentieth, we pray to the Lord.’

“Suddenly the priest broke in and confided to our bowed heads, ‘That’s the baby we’ve been praying for the past two months. The woman just kept getting more and more pregnant!’

“How often, how shockingly often, have I exhausted myself in church from the effort to keep from laughing out loud? I often laugh all the way home. Then the priest read the next intention: ‘For my son, that he may forgive his father. We pray to the Lord.’

” ‘Lord, hear our prayer,’ we responded, chastened” (Teaching a Stone to Talk, pp. 19-20).

Protect private writhing

What might save intercessory prayer from the debasement of the silly, the trivial, or the overly personal? How do we assure intercessions that include the stranger, tame tendencies to exhibitionism, and respect the privacy of people for whom we pray?

Minimally, we might ask permission from someone we’re about to “out” in prayer before we pray for them. Piety is important for prayer. So are good manners.
Remember that prayer is conversation with God, not with each other. A good prayer keeps the focus on God and off ourselves. We might ask ourselves whether we are really speaking to God or just letting God overhear something we are trying to tell our neighbors.
Distinguish public intercession from private prayer. Is this prayer better made in private or in public? In prayer groups or at home, prayer can be as personal as we need it to be without fear of offense. (In criticizing some public prayer, we dare not discourage private and personal prayer.)
Balance the kinds of prayers that we make in public worship. Prayers of petition are magnificent, but they are only one kind of prayer. Worship that allows individual petition to dominate is skewed.

If all conversation between you and a close friend was about private ailments, that would hardly be desirable. In good prayer, as in good conversation, we include praise, listening, lament, forgiveness, and petition, as well as a deep acknowledgement of the other.

Prayer, as Abraham Heschel puts it, “serves many aims. It serves to save the inward life from oblivion. It serves to alleviate anguish. It serves to partake of God’s mysterious grace and guidance. Yet ultimately, prayer must not be experienced as an act for the sake of something else. We pray in order to pray.”

Petitions must be very carefully prayed so that they do not turn into orders to God. Instead, prayers of petition can be forms of surrender and always need to imply that the answer is God’s will, not ours.

Parts of ourselves have to get out of the way if we are to pray in public. Prayer does not dislike the self. Rather it wants the smaller self, the one Luther called the curved-in self, not to get in its own way so that the larger self can see and participate in the larger design of God.

A prayer by Saint Augustine adheres personal fatigue to a collective hope. In this prayer, arthritis, prostate cancer, and mothers-in-law are all collected into “burdens.” Augustine resists the tendency for his public prayer to become group therapy. In it he joins a burdened human race in offering our souls to God.

God of our life,
there are days when the burdens we carry chafe our shoulders and weigh us down;
when the road seems dreary and endless, the skies gray and threatening;
when our lives have no music in them, and our hearts are lonely, and our souls have lost their courage.

Flood the path with light, we beseech Thee
… and so quicken our spirits that we may be able to encourage the souls of all who journey with us on the road to life,
to Thy honor and glory.

Your Response?

This is one pastor’s attempt to be faithful in public prayer. What are your reactions? LEADERSHIP would like to publish other approaches to teaching people to pray well. Contact Us or write to LEADERSHIP, 465 Gundersen Dr., Carol Stream IL 60188.

Donna Schaper is associate conference minister for the United Church of Christ 51 Center St. Ludlow MA 01056