Imprecatory Prayers

I got a package this weekend from Wm. B. Eerdmans containing my review copy of Gordon Atkinson's book. Atkinson is probably better known to you, as he is to me, as "The Preacher" — as in the Real Live Preacher. His book, which includes a graceful foreword by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, collects many of his essays from the blog, as well as a few appearing here for the first time.

If you're a regular reader of RLP then you're already aware of how inspiring and troubling his essays can be. What's struck me so far (I'm only about 60 pages in) is how well these pieces translate from occasional Web postings to a print collection. Some books of collected columns only serve to underscore how repetitive their authors actually are. Reading their collections all at once reveals their patterns, formulas and tricks and you realize these writers may be best in small doses. But the Preacher's stories, essays and snapshots of life acquire a collective weight in this volume that seems to give these pieces, read one after the other, even more of an impact.

But so anyway, I put down the Preacher's book but I still had this passage …

People who doubt can have great faith because faith is something you do, not something you think. In fact, the greater your doubt the more heroic your faith.

I learned that it doesn’t matter in the least that I be convinced of God’s existence. Whether or not God exists is none of my business, really. What do I know of existence? I don’t even know how the VCR works.

What does matter is whether or not I am faithful. I think faithful is a hell of a good word. It still has some of its original shine. It still calls us to action.

… ringing in my ears (read the whole passage here) when I found myself browsing through yet another flame war in someblogger's comment section on the question of God's existence. And there somebody had posted the lyrics to one of my favorite prayers.

This prayer was written by Andy Partridge who recorded it with his band, XTC, on their 1986 album Skylarking. I grant you it's an odd sort of prayer — odd enough that some people condemn it as blasphemous while others embrace it as a kind of atheist acredo. Perhaps it was intended as those things — perhaps it is those things — but there's no denying that, whatever else it may be, it is clearly and explicitly a prayer: "Dear God …"

The late Mark Heard, who was a devout believer, used to write prayers like this. So did King David. Jesus knew those prayers well — well enough that he recited one with nearly his dying breath. The Syrophoenician woman in Mark's Gospel — the woman the Preacher calls "the smallest person in all the world" — prayed such a prayer and it broke Jesus' heart.

Part of what upsets people about Andy's prayer, I think, is that it's so angry. I don't know where or why we got the idea that prayer should never be angry. If you're not angry, as the T-shirt says, you're not paying attention. And the things Andy is angriest about are the things we probably should be angry about.

The fancy theological word for what's going on in this song/prayer is "theodicy" — the attempt to cope with the problem of evil. (The term theodicy, meaning essentially the "justification of God," was coined by Leibniz, who thought he had solved the problem. He hadn't.) I would be more confident about saying that Andy had reached the wrong solution to this problem if I had a better idea of what the right solution looked like. (I think it has something to do with freedom but, really, it's an infuriating Mystery.)

So the point here is that I like this prayer. I also rather like the one the Preacher prayed at the end of the passage above: "God, I don’t have great faith, but I can be faithful. … I will love."

Both of which remind me of my favorite prayer of all, the prayer of another desperate parent in Mark's Gospel: "Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief."

So anyway, get yourself a copy of the Preacher's book. Or a copy of Skylarking. Or both.