Holding the Candles

At our morning service last Sunday, we had a wonderful and deep conversation about the nature and purpose of prayer in light of Jesus’ teaching in Luke 11:1-13. This passage begins with what is known as the Our Father or Lord’s Prayer, which Jesus gives his disciples as a model of how to approach God in prayer. He goes on to tell some stories that illustrate just how much our view of God affects our view of prayer – using the examples of a less-than-enthusiastic friend and a poor parent to show how God’s love for us goes beyond our typical view of human relationships. And he gives the simple advice of “ask, seek, knock” to encourage us to persevere in prayer and trust that God will indeed answer.

That’s all well and good, but as one of our members brought up – what happens when you’ve been asking, seeking, and knocking and you still haven’t heard or seen anything? How do we listen when the answer seems to be only silence?

In raising this question, we might recall the irony in Jesus’ own prayer life. The gospels all paint a picture of Jesus as a man of prayer, but let’s not forget one of his most well-known prayers – his plea to God to “remove this cup from me” in the Garden of Gethsemane. And yes, we know that he concluded this same prayer with “not my will, but yours be done”, as a note of seeming resignation knowing that this prayer would also be met with silence. It’s a vivid moment of both hope against hope and abandonment, graphically described by Luke with anguish and sweat like drops of blood. The very Son of God’s fervent prayers went unanswered.

On Sunday I also shared a short piece by William Brodrick that I said spoke deeply to my own changed view of prayer:

Once you’ve heard a child cry out to heaven for help,
and go unanswered,
nothing’s ever the same again.
Nothing.
Even God changes.

But there is a healing hand at work
that cannot be deflected from its purpose.
I just can’t make sense of it, other than to cry.
Those tears are part of what it is to be a monk.

Out there, in the world, it can be very cold.
It seems to be about luck, good and bad,
and the distribution is absurd.

We have to be candles, burning between hope and despair,
faith and doubt, life and death,
all the opposites.

You might wonder just how “God changes” when confronted with what appears to be silence in the face of unmerited suffering. I think that perhaps what changes is our view of God as one who stands separate and apart from that suffering as we cry out, and one who willingly enters into that suffering alongside us.

The key here comes from our other reading from last Sunday, Colossians 2:6-19:

“For in (Christ) the fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have come to fullness in him, who is the head of every ruler and authority.” (Col. 2:9-10, NRSV)

This is the change in God – that the fullness of who God is becomes revealed as the one who is desperately praying in the garden, burning like a candle between hope and despair. And so our desperate prayers, our tears and sweat, our hope again hope – those are not just ours but God’s as well. And so the very God whose prayers seemed unanswered prays in and through us, by the Spirit who Paul says “intercedes with sighs too deep for words.” (Rom. 8:26, NRSV)

We might not be able to see or sense how that healing hand is at work in the midst of our pain. Even Jesus had to abandon himself into the obscurity of trust that this hand truly will not be deflected from its purpose, even when all the evidence might say otherwise. But let us also remember that Jesus’ story, and therefore God’s story (and ours) does not end in the garden or even at the cross, but in the ultimate victory of life over the power of death and darkness.

We light candles at prayer vigils when tragedy strikes – not to find answers or to strategize on solutions (though those are important pursuits that will come later) but to remind each other that we are not alone in our grief, in our crying out. And God, who we believe became human in order to share our pain and transform it, carries a candle with us, bearing witness to a light that cannot be extinguished in the darkness. So we gather as a community of candle-bearers, with many lights so much more powerful than one. May we lift and hold each other in bearing these lights together.