Prayer is popular. Why wouldn’t it be? The globe faces a pandemic with no guaranteed medical intervention. For all the victories of modern science — and they are many — we find ourselves overcome by nature. Thus, we pray. We pray that God, who is outside nature, would intervene. We pray for relief, for protection, for safety. Yet, in all our prayers, we make little room for confession. Perhaps we bargain, but we do not repent. Our prayers may be last-ditch efforts to garner some aid, or, worse, they may be presumptuous claims on God’s obligation to help us. In an individualistic culture, our egotistic demand — nay, self-asserted right — to life and happiness binds any existent deity to do our will. Or, so we think.
In a mere month, the madness of modern mankind has been monstrously manifest. Human beings have tumbled into a collective hysteria as they’ve realized — presumably for the first time — that death is a potential reality. We’ve stockpiled and hoarded, rushing to the stores every few days like squirrels frantically bounding across the yard in search of another winter nut. Nothing is wrong with preparedness as such, but the mania has revealed our great fear — death. This exposes the real issue — our mental and spiritual fragility.
While leaving the sociological analysis to the experts, allow me to suggest one reason we are frail. We are frail because in our enjoyment of relative safety and stability, we have forgotten that the world is a dangerous place and we are dolefully powerless. In the not-so-distant past, these twin realities were fixed in the minds of everyone, for better or for worse. With the dawn of modernity, humanity began to domesticate this wild world by wielding the tools of rationality and science. To be sure, rationality and science are not intrinsically bad. Yet, in the hands of hearts that are deceptively wicked, they made us delusional. The human becomes the standard and measure for all things. This mood is expressed in the late 19th century poem “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley:
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
“I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.” True enough, the pains of this world pale in comparison to the unconquerable interior of a human. But the poem also reveals the modern belief that “I am in charge.” Enter stage right a virus with the capacity to kill. Enter stage left hysterical villagers shutting themselves in huts with toilet paper and hand sanitizer. Cue ironic recital of “Invictus.” (Two caveats: First, I’m aware that supply chain issues may be more complex than simple hoarding. Second, I am in no way diminishing the courage of the essential workers, not least those involved in food supply and in medical care.)
My point, while admittedly somewhat provocative, is that most of us have learned a sharp lesson. We are not in control. So, we are witnessing an awakening of sorts. Here’s the logic. If we are not in control, perhaps we should turn to someone who is. That someone is called God. This is a good lesson. My concern, however, is that our baptism into modernity has so muddled our relationship with God that we think of God as approachable or on par with us, or, again worse, subservient to us. And, as if matters weren’t already convoluted, the winds of postmodernity have been shifting us long enough now that we construct God into the image that fits us best. After all, postmodernity is an age of self-expression and emotion. My emotive feelings about God are reality. Or, so we think.
In summary, I’ve been saying three things. First, the pandemic has exposed a serious epidemic of mental and spiritual frailty. One reason we are frail is because we have flattened the world or “disenchanted” (see Charles Taylor) it. In an attempt to make sense out of it and control it, we’ve forgotten that we are small. Second, our relationship to God is transactional with us being the consumer, demanding products and services from a deity who is obligated to us. Third, and this returns to where we began with prayer, we are praying as an attempt to get what we want from God. Hence, our prayers sound something like this, “Lord, keep us safe from this virus, take it away. We need help. Amen.” As we are about to see, such prayer was unthinkable not so long ago.
The remedy to the above maladies is to recover the prayer of confession from the past. The prayer of confession puts the game pieces in their proper places. It reminds us that we are not in control, that we don’t lay claim to God, and that we don’t appeal to God generically but through the specific work of Christ on the cross. Consider the following from John Knox (1564):
A Confession of Sins and Petitions Made unto God in the Time of Our Extreme Troubles, and yet Commonly Used in the Churches of Scotland, before the Sermon.
Eternal and everlasting God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, you who show mercy, and keep covenant with those who love and in reverence keep your commandments, even when you pour forth your hot displeasure and just judgments upon the obstinate and disobedient; we here prostrate ourselves before the throne of your Majesty, from our hearts confessing, that justly you have punished us by the tyranny of strangers, and that more justly you may bring upon us again the bondage and yoke, which of your mercy for a season you have removed.
Our kings, princes, and people in blindness have refused the Word of your eternal truth; and in so doing, we have refused the league of your mercy offered to us, in Jesus Christ your Son, who although you now of your sheer mercy have offered to us again in such abundance, that none can be excused by reason of ignorance; yet not the less to the judgment of men, ungodliness overflows the whole face of this realm. For the great multitude delight themselves in ignorance and idolatry; and such, indeed, as appear to reverence and embrace your Word, do not express the fruits of repentance, as it becomes the people, to whom you have showed yourself, so merciful and favorable. These are your just judgments, Lord, by which you punish sin by sin, and man by his own iniquity, so that there can be no end of sin, except you go before us with your undeserved grace.
Convert us, therefore, Lord, and we shall be converted; let not our thankfulness procure your most just judgments, that strangers again rule over us, neither yet that the light of your gospel be taken from us. But in whatever way it is, that the great multitude is altogether rebellious and also that in us there remains perpetual imperfections, yet for the glory of your own name, and for the glory of your only beloved Son Jesus Christ, whose truth and gospel you, of your sheer mercy, have manifested among us, it will please you to take us in to your protection, and in your defense, that all the world may know, that as, of your sheer mercy, you have begun this work of our salvation among us, so, of this same mercy, you will continue it. Grant us this, merciful Father, for Christ Jesus your Son’s sake. So be it.
Notice there’s no outrage. “God how could you do this to us!?” “Why are you being so mean!?” “Fix this, now, we demand!” Obviously, those are outrageous examples, but are they really that far from what’s in our heart? Notice also that there’s no weird dualism. That is, the prayer doesn’t see God as caught off guard by bad circumstances. No, God is still in absolute and total control, orchestrating and governing the events of the world by the council of his will. Finally, notice that there is a confession of God’s absolute righteousness and justice to do as he pleases. The prayer of confession is a corrective to modern forms of prayer. Recovering and utilizing such prayers will form us and shape us into different sorts of people. This is the remedy we need.
At some point, life will return to some semblance of stability. In all likelihood, it will be similar to before. It would be a great shame if we exchanged our quarantine pajamas for “Invictus” shirts and went back to life as normal. We would be foolish to neglect the lessons of this moment. I’m not primarily thinking of reprioritizing what’s important like relationships and such, though those are important lessons. I’m primarily thinking of how we conceive of God and how we conceive of ourselves. When this is over, the lesson we will hopefully never forget is one spoken by the prophet Isaiah long ago: “It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers” (44:22). It’s cringeworthy to our ears (see Acts 7:57). We convulse and rage (see Psalm 2). But I submit to you that Isaiah makes more sense than anything else we are hearing.
(This essay first appeared on Medium)