I stood on the patio of my downtown Los Angeles apartment and watched protestors cross Olvera street holding signs with the image of Michael Brown. My Facebook feed told a different story of that night as it filled with Fox News commentary and unsourced images of burning cars and destruction that wasn’t happening. The feed didn’t offer an ounce of empathy to people who were angry, hurting, and tired. The Facebook attacks came from a large range of evangelical church-goers from hometown evangelicals — who asked me if I was a lesbian during a visit home from school because I wasn’t dating anyone — to college non-denominational evangelicals — who drank beer during Bible studies and got tattoos with JRR Tolkien imagery. I had been fading from the evangelical church for awhile because I found my required college Bible classes endlessly boring and I hated going to church because everyone was so mean. The night of the Ferguson protests was when I finally stepped away. I didn’t stop believing in God, but I did stop believing in a military-industrial-complex god who we sang “Onward Christian Soldiers” to during Sunday school.
It has taken the past seven years to educate myself on the racist foundations of the United States and all the other ways the Abeka curriculum circled around the truth in the fields of literature, art, and science. I was 22 years old and still didn’t really know about sex or pregnancy. Someone told me it was a “special hug” and I never asked questions about it again. For seven years, I did a great job straddling the lines of evangelical dogma and yet to be labeled, whatever I believe now (I like just, Christian) because I was great at performing evangelicalism. My husband and I got married too young because we didn’t want to deal with our parents’ reaction to living together before marriage, I found a church so if someone came to visit us we had a place to take them. Despite being the academy award winner of evangelical performance, there was something I never could perform: prayer.
Prayer was unbelievably cringe to me even before I left the evangelical tradition. It’s hella awkward because we are there in total silence, sometimes people — in all seriousness — say, “Papa God”, and when you ask why you should pray you get a list of reasons that don’t really make logical sense, but boy are those responses canned and well-rehearsed. I already had terrible social anxiety as a teenager and now someone wants me to lead a small group in prayer? No, thank you.
I have had to adjust a lot of things in the past seven years. I’m open to learning new traditions and practices that help me grow as a member of my community and connect to God. Prayer just wasn’t one of them. It seemed so pointless.
Steven and I went to the Huntington Gardens in Pasadena the year before the pandemic. The docent walked our group to Henry Huntington’s rose garden. The rose garden was designed and influenced by the Chinese gardening tradition of using uneven lines and walkways to force contemplation. Each angle is a new perspective and a new image to contemplate or connect with the Creator.
A few weeks ago, I starting using Richard Rohr’s “Yes, And” as my daily devotional. His second passage is on prayer and I have been stuck on it everyday:
“Everything exposed to the light itself becomes light (Ephesians 5:13). In prayer, we merely keep returning the divine gaze and we become its reflection, almost in spite of ourselves (2 Corinthians 3:18). I use prayer as the umbrella word for any interior journeys or practices that allow us to experience faith, hope, and love within ourselves. It is not a technique for getting things, a pious exercise that somehow makes God happy, or a requirement for entry into heaven. It is much more like practicing heaven now.” — Richard Rohr
That cringe I always felt wasn’t prayer. It was the performance that made me uncomfortable. A performance I had mastered for so many years — it was inauthentic and motivated by self-preservation.
Prayer is the rose garden.
Prayer can be the words you use before you eat if that connects you to the Creator of life, prayer can be contemplation, a meaningful conversation with a friend, a TV show that makes you reflective (Ted Lasso, obviously for me), or prayer can be a personal discipline. Prayer is for internal growth, not performative words for a crowd. I do have a prayer life. Internal practices that I’m using to connect to God: I started to garden, I’m reading more, I write down things that I’ll never publish, I say the names of people who bother me in a meditation so I can improve my empathy and love, I sit in the sun for 5 minutes everyday — and I stopped performing.