Why Prayer is Difficult (But Also Easy)

I Samuel 1:4-20

Tracy Letts wrote an award winning play titled, “August: Osage County.”  The events of the play unfold during a hot August.  And the place where they happen is not too far from here – Osage County, or Pawhuska, Oklahoma.

The play was adapted as a major film and released in 2013.  It received attention because it had an all-star ensemble cast, including Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Benedict Cumberbatch, among others.  But it also drew attention to the reality of family patterns and family dynamics.

 

If you want to feel much better about the troubles and quirks of your own family, then I highly recommend the film.  This is over-the-top dysfunctionality.  There is so much pain and anger seething through this family that the climactic scene is a meal that becomes both verbally and physically violent (May none of your Thanksgiving gatherings turn out this way!).  These are people who’ve hurt one another, and they can’t get past the hurt.

Meryl Streep and Sam Shephered play the roles of mother and father to this broken clan.  The mother is dying of mouth cancer and has a nasty addiction to pain meds.  The father is an alcoholic who disappears – that’s the event that draws all the children back to the big house in Pawhuska. 

Their oldest daughter (played by Julia Roberts) is angry and mean like her mother, and is involved in a deteriorating marriage, with a fourteen year old daughter who hates her.  The middle daughter is lonely and depressed and has never married.  But she begins a secret affair with a man she believes to be her cousin.  Only he’s not her cousin.  Spoiler alert if you haven’t seen it – we find out that there was a previous affair between her mother and uncle, so he’s actually her half-brother.  The youngest daughter has spiraled through a series of unsuccessful relationships, and the sleazeball guy she brings home on this trip ends up smoking pot and making sexual advances on her 14 year old niece.

So, if you’re looking for a feel-good romantic comedy some evening, avoid this one.  But if you want to think about the many ways that family life can go wrong, then there’s plenty for you here.  As the film moves toward an ending, the angle of interest widens out beyond one set of parents and their three daughters.  There are suggestive hints about previous family patterns that are now shaping this family.  And there are flashes of sad insight that these dynamics will roll on like waves into the next generation and the next.

Our reading today concerns a woman named Hannah.  Her family troubles are the key to understanding her difficult situation.  And her perseverance and trust in God in the midst of those troubles offer us hope and insight.  She provides a way forward, out of our own troubles, because she models for us a kind of faith and a way of praying that might be exactly what many of us are looking for.

Many of us find it easy enough to voice a prayer now and then.  What’s more difficult is to practice the kind of praying that emerges from the white-hot center of your struggles in life.  That is, it’s difficult to feel like you can get all of yourself into your praying. 

Hannah’s story shows us that this deeper and more satisfying way of prayer is available to us right now.  Praying this way doesn’t require any attempt to straighten up a messy life; doesn’t require you to feel particularly religious; and doesn’t require you to iron out the wrinkles of frustrations and disappointments in your life. 

What makes good praying possible is a frank admission of the troubles you face.  The best, most honest prayers, emerge from an experience of family conflict, sibling rivalry, feelings of alienation, frustrated desires, and pessimism.

The priest Eli sees Hanna moving her lips without sound.  He accuses her of drinking too much.  She says, “No, I haven’t poured myself too much wine.  I am a woman deeply troubled . . . I am speaking out of my great anxiety and vexation” (v. 15-16).

This is the best kind of praying.  It’s the easiest kind of praying, actually.  Because it’s simple.  It’s offering all of yourself – including your most ferocious desires – to the Lord.  But there’s a flip side.  It can also be very difficult.  Because some of us don’t want to think of ourselves as troubled.  Some of us don’t know what we want.  Some of us are afraid to be still long enough to name why we’re in pain. 

Prayer is the most basic, primal, child-like response to the troubles of life.  Prayer is for people who are in trouble, and who need help.  Consider Hannah: Hannah doesn’t pretend that God is interested in only certain parts of her experience.  She deals with God as the whole person she is.  She brings all of herself before God.  And who is she?  She’s part of a family where there’s pain and anger.  And she’s part of a religious tradition that misunderstands what she really needs. 

Hannah’s story shows us a family arena of competition for affection, rivalry, jealousy, and emotional ignorance.  Hannah’s husband has another wife.  Now that’s enough dysfunction right there, isn’t it?  But Hannah hates his other wife because she’s been blessed with children.  And the other wife hates Hannah because it’s obvious that the husband loves Hannah more.  Now add to this that Elkanah is emotionally clueless.  He can’t imagine why his wife Hannah would be crying.  And when he figures out she’s crying because she can’t have children, he responds by saying, “Honey, but aren’t I enough?”  Holy cow!

But in the midst of her own troubles, Hanna stays alive to her own desire.  She can say what she hopes and wants.  She can imagine a future and admit to herself and to God what she longs for.  This is not only the best kind of praying.  It’s the only kind of praying.  We finally begin to pray when we begin to connect with our own desires.  I am not suggesting that whatever we desire is automatically good.  I am only suggesting that we cannot truly pray until we begin to be honest about what we really want.

Hannah wanted a son more than anything else.  And yes, God gave her a son, Samuel.  But the story teaches us that getting what you want isn’t quite the point.  After all, she had promised to surrender her son to the priesthood.  The point is learning to trust God with your deepest desires, and to express this trust as a ferocious patience, an energetic and expectant waiting upon God.  Hannah’s life is a picture of the struggle of her people Israel - waiting patiently on God’s arrival.

Pete Scazzero has written a book called Emotionally Healthy Spirituality.  He argues that our lives are like an iceberg, with most of it hidden beneath the surface.  And he argues that most congregations and Christians practice a kind of faith that deals mostly with the small tip of the iceberg that’s visible above the surface, leaving the massive depths of our lives untouched.

Here’s how Scazzero describes his own family:

“My Italian-American family, like all families, was cracked and broken.  My parents were children of immigrants and sacrificed themselves for their four children to enjoy the American dream.  My dad, a baker by trade, worked endless hours. . . . His one overriding goal was for his children to study, graduate from college, and ‘make something of their lives.’  My mom struggled with clinical depression and an emotionally unavailable husband.  Raised under an abusive father, she suffocated under the weight of raising her four children alone.  Her married life, like her childhood, was marked by sadness and loneliness.  My siblings and I emerged out of that environment scarred.  We were emotionally underdeveloped and starved for affection and attention.  We each left home for college, trying unsuccessfully not to look back.”

When Scazzero was sixteen, his older brother disobeyed his father, quit college, and joined a flaky religious cult.  This is what caused the house of cards to come tumbling down.  His parents were ashamed and crushed.  This family failure pulled the covers back and exposed the unhealthy expectations and patterns that had long been shaping the family’s life.  Scazzero suggests that his own family was more deeply shaped by family patterns than by the good news of Jesus Christ and by life in God’s new family.

One of the chapters of the book is titled, “Going back in order to go forward.”  And it deals with the importance of recognizing the ongoing influence of our families of origin, the families in which we were raised.

He sums up the Bible’s teaching on these patterns in two broad generalizations:

1.     The blessings and sins of our families going back two to three generations profoundly impact who we are today.

2.     Discipleship [learning to follow Jesus Christ] requires putting off the sinful patterns of our family of origin and relearning how to do life God’s way in God’s family.

Maybe you’ve never thought about your family inheritance as a matter of mixed blessings and curses that continue to shape your life.  But family life is the arena in which we develop our personality, our desires, our basic approach to the world.  In family life we learn our attitudes about money, we learn to how to cope with conflict (or not), we learn whether sex is good or bad and whether it’s ok to talk about it, we learn whether it’s ok to experience and express grief and loss, we learn whether it’s ok to explode in anger or even admit we’re angry, we learn family codes and family secrets, we learn whether to be open to people who are different from us racially or economically, we learn what counts as success, and we learn whether it’s ok to admit and talk about our feelings.

In your family, you learned a way of dealing with life that has an assumed answer on every single one of these issues.  Some of them may “work” for you.  Others of them won’t.  Family dynamics at odds with the way God’s new family operates will tie you up and harm your relationships and make your life miserable.  They provide the pain and trouble that will offer you the chance to begin praying from the very depths of who you are.  They will force you into deciding what you want most in life and who you really want to be. 

And if you decide that you need a fresh path, a new approach, you will find that this is far too difficult to accomplish without God’s help.  It is almost impossible to break out of harmful patterns into healthy ones without participation in a community of people following Jesus Christ who are learning together what God’s new family looks like.  My prayer today is that all of our praying will move down deeper towards the center of who we are.