Rick Hamlin

Give the News Back to God

2013-05-07T15:06:32-04:00

My father's rambling graces were famous in the neighborhood. Whenever one of us invited a friend over for dinner we usually warned them, "Dad always starts dinner with a prayer. Just bow your head and wait. It could go on for a while."

Dad came in from his commute on the freeway, kissed Mom, hung up his jacket, poured himself a drink, then we converged to the dinner table from different parts of the house. We scraped our chairs on the linoleum floor, closed our eyes and listened to Dad. "Let us reflect on the day," he began.

His day always seemed to include what he heard on the radio on his drive home. "God, I ask you to be with us in the coming election," he prayed. "May the voters make the right choice." Or "Be with our astronauts in tomorrow's flight." Or maybe it was something about what was going on in sports: "Remember the Dodgers in tonight's playoffs..." He'd add in a few details about the weather "We're sorry about those who have suffered from tornadoes" and then something about family news, "Don't forget Auntie Eleanor and her upcoming surgery."

We used to call it The Six O'Clock News. Dad put everything in his prayers, all the headlines of what happened. Prayer can be a way of processing history, even recent history. I think of all those passages in the Psalms that rehash the Israelites wandering in the desert: "Forty years long was I grieved with this generation and said, 'It is a people that do err in their heart and they have not known my ways...'"

Dad was a modern-day psalmist in a button-down shirt and a bowtie. In my childhood he prayed us through the Watts riots, Haight-Ashbury, the Vietnam War, the stock markets rise and fall, inflation, Cambodia, Watergate, Nixon, Agnew, Ford and Carter. He dumped everything in his prayers, all the stuff he worried about.

This is a great way of dealing with the news. Instead of getting too riled up, nerves jangled, temper frayed, Dad put the news back into God's hands. He asked God to intervene in places God was not necessarily considered. What did God know about the Dow and runaway inflation? What would God think about Nixon and Watergate? The point was, if we were thinking about it, if it bothered us, the good Lord deserved to hear it. The good Lord would care. Every day was a National Day of Prayer.

But then as his graces continued he moved on to matters closer to home. He prayed about us kids. "We look forward to seeing our daughter march in the drill team at tomorrow night's football game ... Bless Rick at his piano recital on Sunday ... We're grateful for the new minibike Howard bought. We pray he uses it safely and ask him to receive your blessing ... We are thankful for Back to School night and our children's teachers. Bless them."

What a valuable lesson in prayer and parenting. Dad prayed for us. He noticed what was going on in our lives. The football game, the homecoming parade, the senior class musical, finals, dance class, the prom. He paid attention. You can never underestimate a child's need for love and attention from his parents. Why not pass it along in prayer?

I'm not sure how he managed it, especially a man of his generation, a buttoned-up World War II veteran. How did he get over the natural embarrassment that comes from praying out loud in front of your loved ones? Somehow for him it came naturally as breathing.

Dad prayed for President Nixon, the astronauts, Sandy Koufax and us. We were on equal footing with the famous people who dominated the news. What he couldn't always articulate in a conversation he could say in a prayer. He bowed his head and his heart opened up.

I'm not nearly as good as praying aloud as he was. I fumble for words. I wonder if I've made myself clear. I edit myself. But in my private prayers, I mimic Dad's heart-on-the-sleeve, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink graces. The world is full of heartache, sorrow, disasters, anxiety, tragedies in-the-making, bad news both big and small. I believe in being informed. I'm just as happy as anyone to log on to one news site after another, but if it starts pulling me down, if it makes me angrier than it has any right to, I do just what he did. I give it back to God.

Then I look for someone to bless. Because I was blessed night after night.

To Sing Is to Pray

2013-04-25T16:25:14-04:00

When I was a kid there was a sign on the wall in the choir room at church with its message written in ecclesiastical Gothic script -- it's still there, I'm told -- that said, "He who prays sings twice." As a kid I scratched my head, wondering what it meant. Still do. (How can you pray twice?) One thing I'm pretty sure of, though, is singing is a way to pray.

Look at the Psalms. It's so easy to forget they're songs and songs with extraordinary range. Some are very easy to set to music, and they have been a million times. A half-dozen tunes come to mind for the 23rd Psalm: "My shepherd is Lord, I have all I need..." Others would challenge the gifts of the finest composers. The opening of Psalm 137 -- "By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept..." -- could be bluesy, but what do you do with later lines like, "Happy shall be he that takes and dashes the little ones against the rocks?"

Verses like that embarrass us. They're disquieting, disconcerting. Part of me wants to edit them out of the Bible. What a mistake that would be, like censoring a prayer. What if we thought of them as songs? What if we sang out in our anger, like some hip-hop artist? What if our vengeful urges were put to music to sing to God? I can imagine the experience would be cleansing, healing. We all have enemies. We're supposed to pray about them. Even sing of them. Why should we be surprised when a psalm gets raw? A lot of other contemporary music is.

Of course, music is a great way to memorize words. In a pre-literate, pre-print era, putting a text to music was a way of remembering it. When you couldn't carry a pocket Bible or use a Bible app on your cell phone you could carry the words in your head and heart, surely the best place for them.

The early church created hymns that clarified their beliefs. Paul is probably quoting one of those early Christian hymns in his epistle to the Philippians (2:10-11): "That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven and things in earth and things under the earth. And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord." Must have been the sort of thing Paul and Silas sang in jail, their feet in stocks. How else do you get through misery? Sing your way through it.

Civil Rights protesters sang as they marched. On the Sunday before the Martin Luther King holiday, we sing the African-American anthem, "Lift Every Voice and Sing" at our church and I feel connected with every campaign for justice when I sing that high A at the end. The women in Liberia who led their peaceful protest against the monstrous Charles Taylor -- Pray the Devil Back to Hell in the documentary -- sat in the marketplace singing hymns.

First responders in Haiti after the devastating earthquake of 2010 remarked on the hymns the people sang as they waited for food, medicine, water, clothes, praising God. Why praise? Because praise is healing. Praise takes you out of yourself and puts you back into God's world. Praise is a song.

The songs that help me, the songs I pray, don't necessarily have to have God in them or faith or any conventional prayer language. I remember a paralyzing moment of depression many years ago. Fearing the onslaught of some panic attack, I reached for a cassette recorder and put in a tape of an old musical. In a rotten mood, in a rotten voice, I sang along and felt myself pulling away from the darkness in my head. Can't even tell you what the song was, but the act of singing was a Godsend.

You might be one of those who was told at a young age that you couldn't sing. Maybe you're scared of what will come out even if you attempt "Happy Birthday!" Mind you, the psalm says, "Make a joyful noise to the Lord." Nothing there about a perfect sound. I'd rather stand next to someone singing the wrong notes than think they are too intimidated to sing at all. We'll call it harmony. I sing loud anyway.

Someday I might lose my chops; I fear a wobble has entered my voice already, a vibrato big enough to drive a truck through. But I will sing, sing at the top of my lungs until I can't anymore, I will sing with my last breath. It's all prayer.

What to Pray in a Crisis? Just say "No!"

2013-04-16T13:51:44-04:00

All sorts of terrible words come to mind, curses and imprecations, when I take in a disaster like the bombing at the Boston marathon. I can hear my unbelieving friends say to me, "Rick, why bother to pray at a time like this? If God is in charge, why should innocent people get killed and injured?" Quite frankly, I understand their anger and bafflement. But the one prayer that works for me at a time like this is "No, God, No!"

Okay, it might not accord with the peaceful, loving, patient language that we usually associate with prayer. It doesn't necessarily bring instant peace to my soul. These are hardly the words I'd prefer to meditate on. And yet, it's all that I'm feeling in my numbness: "No. God. Please, no."

Years ago I spoke to a Presbyterian minister whose son was born with severe disabilities. For some months it wasn't certain that the child would even survive. The minister went into a tailspin, furious at God for giving him this gift as a parent. "After all I've done," he thought. After serving God so patiently, so lovingly, with such devotion all those years, was this what he got in return? Was this how God treated his servants? The man was so angry he simply stopped praying. He continued preaching, leading church meetings, doing his job, but he couldn't pray. Not a word.

Finally he confessed to a friend, another minister, about the spiritual silent treatment he was engaged in, his inner fuming. The friend said simply, "If you were angry at me, I would expect you to tell me. Why can't you do the same with God?"

If you're angry at God, say something. Say anything. Don't hold it in. It's not going to do any favors for your prayer life.

More recently I remember receiving the devastating news, by phone, that my brother-in-law had been in a small plane crash and he was the only survivor. For twenty-hours his survival was uncertain at best. I was horrified at the loss of life, his colleagues killed in an instant. I was terrified to hear of the burns covering his body and the trauma he must have suffered from. I was frightened for my sister, my nieces, for myself. Could I pray? About the only words I could pray were "No, God, no!"

Through the grace of God, through the amazing work of doctors, through countless weeks of therapy, through a long trial at the burn center, my brother-in-law survived. My prayers eventually changed, but I still feel some sort of resonating agony, a spiritual PTSD, when I think of it. What I do know, what I know for sure, is that my faulty, struggling "No, God, No!" prayers were what got me through the worst, those twenty-four hours. They were honest and heartfelt. And it never occurred to me that they weren't heard.

As this tragedy in Boston unfolds, as the experts become more certain who was at the heart of this horror, there will be more prayers to say. Prayers of forgiveness, prayers of love for our enemies. I can reach for those prayers right now and mouth them. But "No, God, no!" is still what comes to mind first. With as much self-forgiveness as I can muster, I'll stick with that. It's what keeps me in touch.

If you're angry with God you might as well say something. Anything. The holy people I love best are the honest ones. Hope will come. But it's not here now. Not yet.

Jesus Lives!

2013-04-01T12:44:30-04:00

Jesus lives!

It's a phrase we usually associate with Easter, the words we sing in an old hymn on Easter Sunday: "Jesus lives! Thy terrors now can no longer, death, appall us." The awkward 18th-century diction can't take away the awesome, heart-stopping reality of it: Jesus lives! The rafters ring with "Alleluias," the church smelling of lilies. But when I hear that phase I'm more likely to think of a service that wasn't on Easter, a funeral for a guy who died too young and had insisted that no matter when death came, we were to sing "Jesus lives!"

"Why?" I wondered when I looked at the program. "Why would Jeff want us to sing this?" Funerals are usually chances for the poignant and mournful "Abide with me" or if musical mention of the Resurrection is asked for, some soprano will sing "I know that my Redeemer liveth" from the Messiah.

Jeff was an Episcopal priest. Gregarious, sunny-tempered, Southern, courteous and outrageously evangelical in a New York City that wasn't used to being invited to church, especially when they met him at an Upper West Side health club or bar or party. He adored church and he adored his calling. A priest was all he ever wanted to be. Even as a kid, when other boys were practicing their pitching on a sandlot, he played "church" at home, typing up bulletins, setting up the chairs in his living room, inviting the neighborhood kids. He was still doing it as an adult.

His premature death should not have come as a surprise. In those days before the success of anti-viral drugs, in an era that still breaks my heart, we'd sung too many services for guys who had died of AIDS, most of whom had been evangelized by Jeff. It's hard to explain to the young today how fast loved ones could disappear back then, how one week they would complain about a cough or an insistent flu bug -- so they said -- and then they were in the hospital and then they were gone. Not that we were clueless. But we were all too young to think of death.

Jeff himself was too upbeat, too full of God's love, too committed to his vocation to die. He would be the one to beat this thing, whatever it was (and there were times we didn't know or couldn't tell or nobody wanted to tell). He got thinner. His summer tan couldn't really cover up for something that was wrong. He wasn't working out in the gym as much or it wasn't making much difference. But he was excited about God's work, telling us about a new church where he hoped to be called. Oh, he had plans. Hope fueled his plans.

"Maybe he isn't dying," we said to each other. "Maybe his really is just a bad case of flu." Some of us are still hurt that he wouldn't admit it. That he didn't give us the opportunity to pray specifically for him, to lay our hands on him and ask God for a miracle. But then, he lived as though he was a miracle. Why talk about dying? There were too many people who still needed to hear about Jesus.

Evidently he'd thought enough of his own death, though, to tell someone what hymns we should sing and "Jesus lives!" was at the top of the list. It opened the service.

I can remember singing it from the choir loft. We'd just welcomed our second child into this world. I carried my six-week-old infant son in his Snugli over my choir robe, the perfect liturgical accessory for a funeral, new life bouncing on my chest, kicking and gurgling, while we were mourning the death of a 37-year-old priest.

Except we were asked specifically not to mourn. "Jesus lives!" we proclaimed, adding stanzas of "Alleluias." It bewildered me. Was this just more of Jeff's wishful thinking? Was he asking us not to cry when that would have been the more appropriate response? Why did he want us to celebrate? Death hadn't died in his case. Death had triumphed over his illness. No miracle here.

Or was there a miracle in our midst? This is the hard part to explain to anybody who hasn't known God's love or the support of a faith community, but as I looked down at everybody in the church and listened, I couldn't find the tragedy in Jeff's death anymore. I felt that shock of understanding, the way the disciples must have felt at that first Easter when the women rushed from the tomb breathlessly to tell them that their Lord had risen. The tomb was empty, he was not there. No less was Jeff in that casket making its solemn way down the central aisle while we sang our Alleluias.

"Jesus lives!" wasn't a phrase that should be preserved only for one day, any less than the Resurrection should be relegated to Easter. Jesus lived and still lives in all those people who had been evangelized on the Upper West Side, in the incense that clouded the altar, in the soup kitchen, in the sermons, in the prayers, in the shabby old Victorian church that Jeff saw becoming something new. We were becoming new. Still are.

Twenty-three years later, I can see how Jeff's vision is being fulfilled. We've had many more funerals, some of them as heart-breaking as Jeff's, like when the children's choir director died in her 50s of breast cancer and the infant I'd once carried in his Snugli sang through his teen-aged tears. But again and again, we've found cause to celebrate on those sad occasions.

Because "Jesus lives." Not lived, but lives. It's the most outrageous sentence I know.

The Truth About the Lord's Prayer

2013-03-18T15:58:34-04:00

I'm not the first person and I certainly won't be the last to point out that the Lord's Prayer is largely in the first-person plural. "Our Father ... give us this day our daily bread ... forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us ... lead us not into temptation." It's as though Jesus was reminding the disciples and us that you really can't pray for yourself by yourself without somehow praying for others. Put it another way: When you pray for yourself, you're also mystically involving everyone else who has needs. We're all in this together.

As an old friend of mine, Elaine St. Johns, once wrote,

There is no way to pray this prayer for one person or one family alone. The minute I consciously addressed "Our Father," I was including my family, friends, strangers, enemies. I was praying for them as well. I realized the universal intent of Christ when he gave the prayer to us. When we pray, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done," we make supplication not only for our own known and unknown needs but also for the needs of his children everywhere.

I have to admit I'm always praying for myself. I can become painfully self-absorbed in prayer, asking God for all those worries that consume me, but then when I turn to "Our Father, who art in heaven..." I end up tuning into something bigger. My mind expands, my heart expands (like that Grinch at Christmas) to include others. Prayer is other-oriented. It'll take your right out of yourself. "Not just the daily bread I need, but something for everyone else as well. Please."

Over the years there have been several scientific studies that attempt to test the effectiveness of prayer. (The best seem to come from Harold Koenig at Duke University.) They have revealed that prayer has quantifiable benefits for a longer, healthier, dare I say happier life.

But the danger of testing prayer scientifically is when someone tries to set up controls. Say, one group of hospital patients gets prayed for and another group does not, researchers looking at the differences between the two groups, comparing them.

First of all, how do they know that the "un-prayed-for" really went without prayers? They might have had secret advocates they didn't know about, let alone that the researchers knew anything about. But finally, as a praying person, how could you honestly say you were going to pray for one group and not another? What kind of prayer would that be? It's "Our Father," not "My Father" or "His Father" or "Her Father."

Prayer can't limit itself to one small universe. It's generous, indiscriminate, compassionate. It knows no bounds.

The Lord's Prayer appears in two places in the Bible. In the book of Luke, Jesus was praying, apparently by himself, and when he had finished one of the disciples asked him, "Lord, teach us how to pray the way John taught his disciples," referring to John the Baptist. Jesus responded, "When you pray, say" and he gave the disciples the familiar words.

But in the book of Matthew, toward the end of that good advice we call the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus warns the disciples against praying ostentatiously with long empty phrases and lots of words. "Do not be like them," he says, "for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. Pray then in this way..." and he gives his followers the Lord's Prayer.

"When you pray, say" and "Pray then in this way." Maybe I'm reading into it, but he seems a little exasperated that he has to point all this out to the disciples. Haven't they been watching? Haven't they been listening? Do they really need words to pray when they've been living with a man who lives his whole life as prayer?

Well, yes, we really do need words to help us. An outline to hang our different concerns and fears on, a guide so that we cover all the basics. It's not very long, it's not the great poetry of the psalms or the passionate expressions of Paul, praying for all those little churches he's visited or intends to visit. Jesus gives us just few words. A few words we can't live without. "Our Father ... give us this day our daily bread ... forgive us our sins..." For all of us together.

What Can Bring Christians Together?

2012-01-19T16:54:36-05:00

"That we all may be one." We pray it almost every Sunday. The other Sunday as we were saying it, something clicked in me and I thought, "Wow. This prayer is a huge challenge for all of us Christians." Maybe especially me.

Christians come in many different shapes and sizes, more specifically different political views. That shouldn't be so bad. When you come upon someone whose view is different than yours it's an opportunity to test out your opinions, wrestle with the angel like Jacob did. With any luck, you'll come out stronger. (In Jacob's case he came out with a new name too, Israel.)

I once had a minister who said, "If you're sitting in a church and everyone has the same political opinion you do, get out of there." Good advice. Because it seems that as Christians, our biggest goal is learning to love others, especially those others who are different from us. "Love your enemies," Jesus said.

But there are a lot of people out there that would have us not love each other. I don't know if it's "divide and conquer" or a way of claiming power. Hey, if you say you're the sole keeper of the gospel truth that gives you the right to kick a lot of others off your mountaintop. It might even be good for fundraising.

Personally I become wary every time I see "evangelical Christian" used as a quick label. Of course I'm evangelical. To believe the good news is to want to share it. But am I that label some journalist is giving me? Why must we all be lumped in a group? I prefer the term a friend uses: passionate Christian. To be a passionate Christian is to love and that's what counts most.

There are hot-button issues that are supposed to divide us Christians, left and right, sheep and goats. The sanctity of life, abortion, gay marriage. I can see myself sitting at a table all alone when I say, "I understand the heartfelt opinions of my fellow Christians on these issues." I don't mean that as a cop out. If you can't understand, if you can't have compassion for someone who disagrees with you, what sort of person are you?

I'm not talking about tolerance. Tolerance seems like a bland, passive, often patronizing value. There is a faint air of superiority in tolerating. But loving someone who is different from you, really appreciating them, that's the goal.

Not long ago I was reminded of Chuck Colson's introduction to the reissue of his memoir Born Again. He specifically thanks the editor Elizabeth Sherrill who worked on the book and points out how fond they became of each other, even though they're on opposite sides of the political fence. Elizabeth, who is a friend, told me that the affection went both ways. And she hasn't voted Republican in decades.

We used to sing a song in our high school church youth group, guitars strumming: "They'll know we are Christians by our love, by our love," the refrain repeated again just as a reminder. Seems like the only way to make that prayer "That we all may be one" come true.

Psalms on the Subway (VIDEO)

2011-11-04T11:06:32-04:00

People do tons of things on the New York subway: eat, sleep, read tabloids, gossip, watch movies, play games, work on their laptops, put on makeup (I wince every time I see this, sure some woman is going to poke out her eye). They also pray.

I live in the upper reaches of Manhattan, one of the first stops on the A train, and I make my morning commute my meditation time. I usually take a seat -- unless I spot some very pregnant woman or person with a cane. I read a psalm, then close my eyes and close out. The noise of the train rattling down the track is my call to worship, the rocking relaxing. Besides, when you do something regularly in the same place, all those external stimuli trigger a response. My desk makes me want to work, my bed makes me sleepy, my train makes me want to pray.

I'm not alone either. I see people on my subway with Bibles, prayer books, devotional pamphlets. More in the morning than the evening, but we're all working on our spiritual journey on the ride downtown.

Take a prayer ride on the NYC subway with me. The only thing I wouldn't let our cameraman do was film me praying. As I told him, "If I think you're taking a picture of me, I'm not praying." Only when he put away his camera could I do it. So much for being sacred on the subway.

WATCH:

Include Religious Women in Peacemaking

2011-10-11T12:17:37-04:00

When I look at religion in the world today I ask myself if it's part of the problem or part of the solution. The headlines can be disheartening. I have to remind myself there were saints in the past who changed the world for the good and brought peace. John Woolman, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr.

And recently the women of Liberia.

It's no secret that in world's war zones women often get the brunt of the suffering, scrambling to protect and feed their children. As Hilary Clinton says most poignantly in the upcoming PBS series Women, War and Peace, premiering on October 11, "In today's wars the primary victims are women and children."

But women can also be the catalysts for change. In Liberia 250,000 people died in 14 years of civil war. Rebels recruited young boys into their armies, got them high, gave them guns, taught them to kill. Whole villages disappeared. Families were destroyed, the capital of Monrovia was decimated, people crowded into refugee camps. The war might have gone on forever if the women had not organized themselves.

They dressed in white, with white T-shirts and white hair ties, bare of make up and jewelry, "in sackcloth and ashes" as they said like Queen Esther when she spoke up for her people. In sweltering 100-degree heat and pouring rain, they sat in a field next to the fish market in Monrovia in the spring of 2003, asking, begging and praying for peace. Thousands of them held their ground in a fierce display of nonviolent resistance.

Liberia has a large population of both Christians and Muslims. At first, as organizer and 2011 Nobel Prize Laureate, Leymah Gbowee writes in her new book "Mighty Be Our Powers," there was distrust among the two groups. "Some of the Christian women felt that praying with Muslims would 'dilute' their faith." She brought them together in a workshop where they shared honestly, openly, the horrors of the war. The men killed, the daughters raped, the lost lives. They came up with the slogan, "Does the bullet know Christian from Muslim? Does the bullet pick and choose?"

In their peaceful protest they prayed together, chanting psalms like "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want" or Muslim prayers like "In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful, Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds..." They alternated singing Muslim songs with Christian hymns. The bishops of Monrovia and the imams supported them from the sidelines, but the women took the biggest risks.

How did they find such courage? How did they even find the energy? They drew on their faith, and Leymah is an especially captivating in talking about faith because she doesn't hesitate to describe her failings. She doesn't whitewash her sexual past, her children out of wedlock, her drinking. What she finds is that her very powerlessness, when harnessed with her faith, becomes a source of extraordinary power.

This is something all the women in Women, War and Peace have in common. Their status in society becomes an asset. They learn how to use it to their advantage. They go places men don't go. They see things. They move behind the lines. "I saw daily how right it had been to begin the work by mobilizing at the bottom," Leymah writes. "You can tell people for the need to struggle, but when the powerless start to see that they really can make a difference, nothing can quench the fire."

The women in Liberia turned that war around. When the peace talks with the warlords were going no where, they risked humiliating themselves, threatening to remove their clothes as they blocked the doors of the conference, forcing the men to talk. It is one of the most moving moments of any film you'll see.

The prayers of people in times of war must break God's heart. But I saw something stunning happen here when Christians and Muslims prayed together. It gave me hope.

WATCH: Pray the Devil Back to Hell

WATCH: War Redefined

Women, War, and Peace is a five-part series airing on PBS starting Oct 11, 2011.

Pray for the Unemployed

2011-07-25T16:19:34-04:00

If you want to know what people really care about and where they're really hurting, look to their prayers.

I wouldn't normally have privy to that information but through my involvement in a website called OurPrayer.org I see the requests for prayer on the site, people asking for prayers from people like me, from anybody. And what do they want? Jobs, jobs, jobs.

"Please pray that the Lord will guide my steps into the right job. I need enough to pay my bills..." "Please say a prayer so I can find a job. I don't have any source of income..." "I have a brother who needs a job really bad..." "I have been without fulltime employment for almost three years. I am working two part-time jobs but making way too little to support my family..."

That's just from scrolling down a few pages and doesn't include the people who don't want to share their requests publicly but still ask for prayers. We have over two thousand volunteers around the country who pray for every request and it can be heartbreaking work. You can feel the pain that's out there. I'm extremely grateful to have a job, but I've been out of work before and it can be humiliating, depressing, agonizing, soul-destroying.

Every job search has its technical side. The phone calls, the emails, crafting a résumé, networking, contacting people who just might give you a lead to the person who could possibly have a job. But I believe every job search is also holy.

"The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet," wrote Frederick Buechner. That takes more than just pounding pavement. It's the work of prayer and reflection, writing down where your thoughts take you then putting shoe leather to your prayers. Hasn't every job you've found felt like a Godsend? Then for God's sake, don't do it alone.

In the past year as I've found more and more friends and acquaintances out of work, I've tried to make myself available for those conversations that job seekers depend on. Rarely have I had something tangible to offer, but that's not the whole point. If I can do something to help them make their way in this snarly process, something to ease that loneliness of feeling outside the work world, then I feel fortunate. Responding to the tentative email from an out-of-work "friend of a friend" is a sort of entertaining angels unaware.

As a country we all seem to pray for the big disasters splashed in the news: the devastating tornado, the city wiped out by a tsunami, the school paralyzed by a crazed gunman. And then we move on. I confess I too get weary of the unemployment statistics. They just seem like numbers. I'm ready to move on. Until I read some of those prayer requests.

I've made it a point to put some job seekers on my prayer list and keep them there. In this market it takes a long while to find a job and it's easy enough to get discouraged. But to pray is to be persistent. If you are in that job-hunting slough of despond, I welcome you to log on to OurPrayer.org and let your need be known. It's a free service. (I find it appalling that some prayer sites charge for prayer.) Ask for as much prayer as you need as often as you want. Anything that can give you energy and hope on a day-to-day basis. May your prayers take you where you deserve to be.

Passing Along Faith, Father to Son

2011-06-19T01:00:33-04:00

On the morning I flew home to be at my father's bedside for the last time, I took a jog in the park. Running along the cold asphalt beneath the bare trees, I remembered walking there years before with my very pregnant wife in the same dank season. Somehow the walking was supposed to ease the birthing process. "Now I am a father with two sons," I thought, "and soon to lose my own father." Birth and death were marked by the same urge: to slow time down as it raced it along.

When my son was born after midnight on that day we walked in the park, my first call was to home, Mom and Dad getting on the line. As always they were the ones I wanted to talk to when anything important happened: the boys' first steps, baseball victories, class plays. The last time Dad visited, the last plane trip he ever took, we ate lunch in this park on a sunny day to celebrate our younger son's high school graduation, Dad getting around by walker. Now I had a weird thought, "Who will I call when Dad dies?" I wouldn't be able to share this milestone with him.

Fathers and sons pass along their heritage from generation to generation. From my dad I inherited blue eyes, decent teeth, a bad heart, fondness for irony, readiness to cry and respect for spiritual yearnings. We went to church because it was Dad's notion that we should learn something about the mystery of worship and have some vocabulary for exploring faith. We acquired his vocabulary every night when we listened to his rambling graces at dinner.

My wife and I took our kids to church every Sunday, and both boys had to put up with me at some point as their highly flawed Sunday school teacher. "We'll pay for this someday," I used to tell my wife. Not many of their peers had to spend Sunday mornings in a pew. Sure enough, at age 16, the oldest leaned over after one sermon and whispered, "Mom, Dad, I don't believe in God anymore. We can talk about it later." The younger made his doubts known well into college.

We have talked about faith many times since then. One of the emails I most treasure came from a more-or-less atheist son who was reading the Bible as literature in a college class. "I finally get it why smart people like you and Mom believe in God," he wrote. "It's an act of faith. You believe on faith. Not that I believe any of it myself," he added.

At their grandfather's funeral service , both boys proved that the family heritage has been passed along with the ease of their tears and the willingness to find a few ironic details amidst the sentiment. They seemed ready to absorb this milestone. The only way I can seem to get at it is by gazing at them.

"Every boy needs a father," said a psychologist friend to me. How inadequate I have often felt to the task and how grateful I am that I've had a chance to take on the role. This is the first Father's Day that I don't have a father to call or to send a silly card to, but I'll do what he did on Sunday, bellow hymns from a pew. Then my mind will wander in a prayer urging time to slow to a crawl in a life that has sped by.

Military Chaplains: Should Taxpayers Support Religion in the Military?

2011-05-17T13:40:56-04:00

Not long ago there was an article in The New York Times about soldiers looking to have atheist military chaplains in the armed forces. An atheist chaplain? Isn't that a contradiction in terms? And come to think of it, what does a military chaplain do anyway?

"It's a tremendous opportunity to portray the generosity of God to others, not the stinginess," says recently retired Army chaplain Col. Ken Sampson. "Just by your very presence and the symbol you wear on your collar, you're making a significant reminder of that which is holy." Those symbols could be a cross, a crescent, a tablet of laws, a wheel for the Buddhist chaplain.

A good chaplain gets to know his troops and makes him or herself available. If a soldier has a personal matter, she can go to the chaplain and blow off steam, complain, ask for counseling, get another point of view, and yes, get spiritual help. But wouldn't a good counselor do just as well?

"Not necessarily," says Lee Lawrence, a writer and filmmaker who with her colleague spent three months in Iraq and Afghanistan to make their award-winning documentary Chaplains Under Fire. (Scroll down for excerpt.) "The relationship with a counselor would have to be a lot more formalized. And it wouldn't have the same confessional protection."

A soldier is more likely to talk to a chaplain, knowing what he says can't be shared. "Of course you're going to point out some options where that person can go to get help," says Chaplain Sampson. "But on the front lines, when a soldier doesn't have the options, you're like a social worker, spiritual advisor and family therapist, all wrapped into one."

Chaplains are required to minister to all, no matter what a soldier's faith or non-faith. "If a chaplain is well loved and open to all, people don't feel excluded by any language he uses," says Ms. Lawrence. "I've heard chaplains say to a group, 'I'm going to conclude this prayer in my tradition, you can conclude it in yours' and no one seemed to be offended or feel excluded."

Because a chaplain is an officer although not in the chain of command, he's in a special position. The commanding officer can go to him to get a sense of what the troops are thinking, but he can also advise the officer. "I remember meeting a Navy chaplain," says Ms. Lawrence, "who was the one person on board ship who could and would tell the captain that he was being too strict."

Before Ms. Lawrence made the documentary she wasn't sure that we should have any religious personnel in the armed forces. She is far more convinced of the chaplains' value now. "One chaplain told me, 'I don't think any war is just but as long as we're sending young people out there then I want them to have spiritual support.' That's closer to how I feel now."

"If a soldier wants to pray with me, I make it clear that yes, I'm a Protestant and I approach life from the perspective of a triune God, but I will pray with them no matter what their tradition," says Sampson. "Once or twice in my 28 years have I ever had someone refuse. It's sacred, that trust placed in you."

I work for an organization that among other things supports our military chaplains. I am hardly unbiased. It's a dreadful thing to have to send anyone off to war, but as long as soldiers are in combat I want them to have all the spiritual support they can.

WATCH:

Chaplains Under Fire from Leiturgia Communications on Vimeo.

Do You Need to Believe in God to Pray?

2011-04-08T21:01:27-04:00

My very thoughtful 20-something son, Will, asked me the other day, "Dad, how do you pray for somebody if you don't really believe in God?"

Ouch. I know where this one was coming from, and I wanted to help, while respecting his beliefs. He's somewhere on the agnostic spectrum, full of doubts but I've always felt that honest doubts have a lot of faith in them. He's also been dealing, like the rest of the family, with a horrific tragedy that seems to offer only one response: prayers, lots of prayers.

Less than a month ago, his uncle, my brother-in-law Mike, was in a small plane crash that killed five guys and left Mike the only survivor, struggling for 24 hours between life and death in a hospital E.R. and then rushed to a burn unit where he is recovering slowly, oh, so slowly. How do you react to that? You can send cards, you can send casseroles, you can make calls, you can visit the family. But you want to do something bigger, and prayer feels like the biggest thing, something big enough to address the pain and sorrow.

Will wanted to say, "You're in my prayers," but he doesn't know how to follow up on that. What can he do?

I thought back to a phrase my dad had, the one he used when someone was in the hospital or someone lost a job or someone's marriage was floundering. "I'll hold a good thought," he said. Dad was a praying man so a "good thought" meant a prayer to him. But can't a "good thought" also mean the expression of a compassionate heart's deepest wish, a marshalling of all the good forces in the cosmos for the best resolution possible, a trust that good will come of bad?

That atheist provocateur Christopher Hitchens writes in the current Vanity Fair about the 400th anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible, recalling how at his father's funeral he read from Paul's epistle to the Philippians: "Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things."

As a very spiritual but not necessarily believing friend put it, "When many people are holding on to the same good thought you have to trust that the universe responds."

I know Mike has responded to the love, the good thoughts, the prayers that have multiplied around him. There are people remembering him on several continents. I can't quite believe that he would be around without them. Those same healing thoughts have been extended to the grieving families who have lost fathers, husbands and sons.

"Go ahead and say 'I'm holding a good thought,'" I told my son. "Go ahead and use that language. Your grandfather would say that. I can even give you a Bible quote mentioned by a learned atheist..."

As for me, I'm holding good thoughts for people in Japan, in Iraq and Afghanistan, in Haiti and in a hospital burn unit. Here's a place where I write them down to share them with many others. Sometimes it's the best you can do and all you can do.

What Saying Grace Says About You

2011-03-09T20:45:14-05:00

Do you bow down before you chow down?

Do you say grace before mealtime? (By grace I mean saying any prayer from any faith tradition before you eat.) Do you? Turns out this is a major indicator of your political bent, Republican or Democrat, according to authors Robert D. Putman and David E. Campbell in their colossal tome <em>American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. I'll try to keep some suspense here by not immediately revealing which party does which, but I can feel myself already objecting to being so quickly categorized.

First of all, saying grace before you eat is healthy for you. Rebecca Katz, a nutritionist who has done wonders for cancer patients by coming up with foods that are just right for them during treatments, makes a great point about how a moment of praise or thanksgiving before you eat a meal is simply good for the digestive track. Think about that next time you grab a fast-food nosh and dash. How much would it really slow you to take a breather before you chow-down?

"I don't want to be seen saying grace in a public place," most of us think, even those of us who say grace very regularly (groan -- that documented group). We don't want to look like that Norman Rockwell painting, you know the one, of the boy and his grandmother bowing their heads to the wry amusement of others in the 1950s diner. Maybe you've had that experience of dining with a holy person in a restaurant and pausing to see who's going to go first? Is somebody going to say the blessing before the waiter starts grinding the fresh pepper on your plate?

I admit I've heaved a sigh of relief if we didn't have to do the bowing-heads moment. But then, I've also been incredibly touched by those prayers. It's nice to be held hostage for a minute to the spiritual in a restaurant's material realm.

The question as professors Putnam (he of Bowling Alone fame) and Campbell put it in their survey was about the frequency of grace: do you do it several times a day, once a day, a few times a week, once a week, occasionally or never? I would end up in the category of at least once a day -- before dinner at home. My wife and I made that decision to say grace every evening when the kids were young and we keep it up even though we're empty-nesters.

There is some awkwardness at the table when we have guests for dinner. I find myself announcing rather loudly at times, "Let me say grace first." Let the atheists in the bunch understand that this is one of my little eccentricities -- I would hate to think they feel unwelcome. I never go on so long that dinner gets cold.

My father did sometimes. Three weeks ago at his funeral I spoke about his rich prayer life. We used to call his graces "the six o'clock news," he'd put so much information into them: how the Dodgers were doing, what the President said, any natural disasters, our report cards, back-to-school night, the dog barking, Mom's rolls. Quite frankly it was a good school for prayer. I've learned to let any interruption -- that dog barking, the timer for Mom's rolls -- right into the prayer and let it go.

Back to that categorization. A little over 50 percent of those who say grace regularly are Republicans. About 40 percent are Democrats. In my family we're divided politically right down the middle. My Republican brother-in-law always holds hands when we say grace. My Democrat brother-in-law gives these thoughtful, heartfelt graces that make me cry. I love them both. They are people of deep, abiding, probing faith. We can disagree about many things but we can always agree about this: We are blessed.

At dinner we remember that first. Then pass the rolls.

Foxhole Faith: The Value Of Prayer When We Are Vulnerable

2011-02-07T18:59:17-05:00

I paused when I read the playwright Matthew Lopez refer to himself in The New York Times as a "foxhole Episcopalian."

Not that the expression was hard to parse but I hope he didn't say it apologetically, as in "I don't ever darken the door of a church unless something's going terribly wrong." If that's so, what's so wrong with that? Foxhole faith can be mighty powerful and foxhole prayers are some of the richest kind we make.

There are people in this world who keep a running dialogue with God about what's going on in our lives. "Prayer is just conversation with God," they say confidently enough. I know that kind of prayer and I do it at times, endorse it even. In my life as a magazine editor, perhaps the most controversial story we ever ran was one from a woman who prayed to God when she lost her makeup bag on a weekend trip. Many readers were horrified. "Why would she pray about something so superficial?" they asked. "With all the problems in the world, why pray about a make-up kit."

First of all, I'm not so sure it's superficial -- I've learned that much from a couple decades of marriage. The point of the story, it seemed to me, was that yes, you should talk to God about everything. A God who numbers the hairs on our head shouldn't mind hearing about Estée Lauder, Lancôme and Revlon. It might be a welcome change.

But what if you haven't talked to God at all, not since your now-I-lay-me-down-to-sleep days and you're not even sure God exists and then you're hit with a devastating loss or a case of cancer or an emergency trip to the E.R.? Why shouldn't you pray then and why couldn't that prayer be powerful?

My son got me to watch one of those TED Talks videos that you hesitate to download because you know you're not going to get anything else done for the next 20 minutes. The woman, a scholar researcher Brené Brown, had me completely captivated with "The Power of Vulnerability." The uncomfortable truth of the matter is we're at our best as humans when we allow ourselves to be most vulnerable. And there's nothing more vulnerable-making than a foxhole.

I found myself in one the other day. I had a frightening lapse of memory at the office, one of those things you can't even laughingly shrug off as a senior moment. I was in a meeting for over ten minutes without any awareness of why I was there and what I was supposed to do. I told my colleagues there was something wrong, something seriously wrong with my head. And they knew I wasn't fooling when I couldn't come up with my own home phone number.

I ended up being taken in an ambulance to the E.R., my wife meeting there. I answered a barrage of questions, counting backwards by sevens, seeing if I could remember three words ("yellow," "Empire State Building," "the Bronx"). They gave me an MRI and a series of blood tests. So far -- thank God -- nothing big has been found. But I remember praying in that ambulance, strapped to my seat like a rag doll, the baby-faced EMT looking at me guardedly as I repeated in my head, "Jesus Christ, have mercy upon me, make haste to help me, rescue me and save me ... " Couldn't remember my phone number but that much I could remember. A prayer I've said a thousand times before and needed now.

It was a foxhole moment and it served its purpose. I was more than glad to be vulnerable with God, even as I was chagrined that I had made myself so dramatically vulnerable before my colleagues. After six hours I came home, one thought running through my head. "God only helps those who help themselves" is not in the Bible because it's simply not true. God helps those who are willing to trust. A foxhole moment is just when I want to be with my friends. Why wouldn't God want to be with me then?

Don't ever apologize for foxhole prayer or even a foxhole faith.

Forgiveness Might Still Be Possible in the Digital Age, But How Do We Forget?

2011-01-14T08:27:19-05:00

Evidently, Sarah Palin, or at least her minions, have been trying to take down the now-notorious map of 20 congressional districts targeting representatives to challenge in the 2010 elections. Call them crosshairs, call them surveyors' marks, but as Josh Bernoff at Adage.com has pointed out, you can't take something off the Net once it's been put up there. In fact, you can even draw more attention to it by your efforts (there's evidently something called the Streisand effect, recalling Barbra Streisand's lawyer's efforts to remove pictures of her house on the Web).

How do we forgive and forget in this age when nothing can truly be forgotten? It's all out there floating around in cyberspace.

I've typed stuff in a rage to one or two correspondents that I really hope never turns up again. I'd like to think it sinks into oblivion, weighted down by the ages, but it's just as alive as when I typed it. Not long ago, I really hurt a friend with a hasty message I left on his phone. He called back and left me a message revealing his anger. Luckily, I was able to catch him on the phone and apologize. "Please forgive me," I said. "Think nothing more of it," he said. "It never happened." But what if the whole thing were in an e-mail exchange, waiting to be rediscovered, like a wound begging to be picked? You can push "delete" and then delete it from your deleted mail and you know it'll still be there.

Forgiveness is a powerful force, essential to our mental health. Laura Hillenbrand's best-selling book Unbroken: A World War II story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption tells about how Louie Zamperini, brutally tortured in a Japanese prison camp, found release when he finally forgave his torturer, who surely doesn't sound like he deserved it. But then, isn't that the whole point? To really forgive you've got to forgive the unforgivable.

We depend on time to heal all wounds. Forgetting is a helpful partner when you need to forgive. I remember my wife writing an article about adult siblings who had reunited after long periods of separation. "You can write about my dad and my uncle," I suggested. They had a falling out when I was a kid and didn't speak for years, but by their 70s they were the closest of brothers. She tentatively approached my dad on the idea. He would do anything to help my wife, but he wasn't going to help her here. To bring up the feud again was to bring up something too painful. Better to leave things alone. Forgiveness had happened with the aid of forgetting. (Even as I reveal the thinnest outlines of the story I fear I might hurt my uncle or my cousins or any of my loved ones.)

Forgiveness is part of our spiritual well being, but when I've talked to people who have forgiven powerful wrongs, they've pointed out that it's not always good to ask for someone's forgiveness. It can bring up the unforgettable. Better to act in a forgiving way. Forgetting is divine.

My favorite example of divine forgetfulness comes from a surely apocryphal story of a simple Philippine peasant who claimed that he had spoken to Jesus. He was taken to the local bishop, his claims tested, only to insist on the truth of his testimony. "All right," said the bishop, "next time you talk to Jesus, ask him to tell you what sins I've confessed." The peasant agreed. Soon he returned to the bishop and offered only one answer, "He forgets."

Now in telling this, I'm sure I've gotten some detail wrong or made a mistake in attribution, so please forgive me. I'm afraid that none of what I've written here can be forgot.