Yesterday we returned after over two months of absence. As the leader of the group began to solicit prayer requests, she asked NPH if there's anything he needed prayer for, anything at the church or otherwise. We mentioned some of the prayer concerns that people had shared in worship last Sunday, and that was that. In reality, NPH's mind and spirit are heavily pressed with concerns, but that was not the venue in which to share them. So we kept it formal, professional.
The leader began to pray. It didn't take long before her prayers were a moaning, almost chanting recitation of needs and pleas filled with "Hallelujah's" and other charismatic filler. And when she got 'round to praying for NPH, she explicitly prayed for him personally, making overt mention of "all those things he's keeping to himself."
Then she launched into a fervent tirade of glossolalia. For close-to-a-minute she ranted and pleaded in some kind of tongues language that nobody there could understand, a canting that NPH dare not try to reproduce.
Almost suddenly, the cognitive disassociation that usually marks NPH's participation in group prayer ceased. It's usually the case that we, when praying with others, are painfully aware of people's idiosyncracies and personality traits and the way those are brought to bear on their praying. We're also very conscious of ourself and our own words and inflections.
Yet here was this very strange, even ecstatic, kind of praying going on, yet because NPH was himself the subject he buckled down mentally and forced himself to just participate in it, rather than analyzing it and so distancing himself from it. This woman was praying for us in words that no person could understand, which is the only way that we could have been prayed for in a setting like that. We've got a strong hunch that whatever the pleas and prayers were that were coming out of her mouth, they pertained directly to things that only NPH knows about.
This experience converges with a couple of other things this week that have started to shake loose our otherwise stable arrangement of God and the natural world. There's the young woman we occasionally run into at the local gym, the charismatic who is utterly incapable of small talk and who must talk always and only about God: what God is teaching her, what God is saying to her, what God is doing in the community. We keep listening uncomfortably, nodding and saying, "yeah" and "uh huh" before finding a way to excuse ourself and wish her well. We keep walking away perturbed.
Then there is Jason Byasee's post on Theolog, the blog of The Christian Century. It's about some friends of his who's daughter suddenly got over a milk allergy problem she has had since infancy. Its' cessation coincided quite inexplicably with an occurance at her church youth group, where people laid hands on and prayed for her, that she would be healed. Byasee is flummoxed:
Her parents are not flaky people. They both have doctoral degrees from top flight, internationally recognized universities. They can’t explain her healing. Perhaps she just happened to grow out of her allergy that week. Or perhaps the Spirit worked.He quotes another friend, a protestant minister, who, hearing the story and Byasee's ambivalence about it, simply said, "Man, we're in the wrong church. Our problem is that we pray without expecting God to do anything."
NPH hears himself addressed in this critique. Yet somehow yesterday's experience worked to create an expectation. Not an expectation that some miraculous intervention would soon be forthcoming, but rather an expectation that God is really listening, that prayer really can be more than the pious and self-aware mutterings of those of us who need to complain, an expectation that prayer actually does something to God and to us (we're stopping short of the oft-repeated mantra that it "changes things").
All of this is a strange convergence of people, thoughts, and incidents that have unsettled us and confused us and comforted us at the same time.
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