How do we pray with hope and honesty? Pastor Sean Palmer introduces us to beloved author Anne Lamott and her book Help, Thanks, Wow. Anne’s words on three simple prayers guide us into simple and universal types of prayers.
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I do not know much about God and prayer, but I have come to believe, over the past twenty-five years, that there's something to be said about keeping prayer simple.
Help. Thanks. Wow.
You may in fact be wondering what I even mean when I use the word "prayer." It's certainly not what TV Christians mean. It's not for display purposes, like plastic sushi or neon. Prayer is private, even when we pray with others. It is communication from the heart to that which surpasses understanding. Let's say it is communication from one's heart to God. Or if that is too triggering or ludicrous a concept for you, to the Good, the force that is beyond our comprehension but that in our pain or supplication or relief we don't need to define or have proof of or any established contact with. Let's say it is what the Greeks called the Really Real, what lies within us, beyond the scrim of our values, positions, convictions, and wounds. Or let's say it is a cry from deep within to Life or Love, with capital L’s.
Let’s not get bogged down on whom or what we pray to. Let’s just say prayer is communication from our hearts to the great mystery, or Goodness….Prayer is talking to something or anything with which we seek union, even if we are bitter or insane or broken.
— Anne Lamont Help, Thanks, Wow
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Psalm 28
Eternal One, I am calling out to You;
You are the foundation of my life. Please, don’t turn Your ear from me.
If You respond to my pleas with silence.
I will lose all hope like those silenced by death’s grave.
Listen to my voice.
You will hear me begging for Your help
With my hands lifted up in prayer,
my body turned toward Your holy home.
I beg You; don’t punish me with the most heinous men.
They spend their days doing evil.
Even when they engage their neighbors in pleasantness,
they are scheming against them.
Pay them back for their deeds;
hold them accountable for their malice.
Give them what they deserve.
Because these are people who have no respect for You, O Eternal,
they ignore everything You have done.
So He will tear them down with His powerful hands;
never will they be built again.
The Eternal should be honored and revered;
He has heard my cries for help.
The Eternal is the source of my strength and the shield that guards me.
When I learn to rest and truly trust Him,
He sends His help. This is why my heart is singing!
I open my mouth to praise Him, and thankfulness rises as song.
The Eternal gives life and power to all His chosen ones;
to His anointed He is a sturdy fortress.
Rescue Your people, and bring prosperity to Your legacy;
may they know You as a shepherd, carrying them at all times.
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Psalm 22:27-31
All the ends of the earth
will remember and turn to the Lord,
and all the families of the nations
will bow down before him,
for dominion belongs to the Lord
and he rules over the nations.
All the rich of the earth will feast and worship;
all who go down to the dust will kneel before him—
those who cannot keep themselves alive.
Posterity will serve him;
future generations will be told about the Lord.
They will proclaim his righteousness,
declaring to a people yet unborn:
He has done it!
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Most good, honest prayers remind me that I am not in charge, that I cannot fix anything, and that I open myself to being helped by something some force, some friends, some something. These prayers say, "Dear Some Something, I don't know what I'm doing. I can't see where I'm going. I'm getting more lost, more afraid, more clenched. Help.
These prayers acknowledge that I am clueless; but something else isn't. While I am not going to go limp, I am asking for the willingness to step into truth.
This is what gets everyone off the hook, the hook being the single worst place to be. My priest friend Bill Rankin said that through prayer, we take ourselves off the hook and put God on the hook, where God belongs. When you’re on the hook, you’re thrashing, helpless, furious, like a smaller kid lifted by the seat of his pants by a mean big kid. Jesus, on the literal hook of the cross, says to God, “Help,” and God enters into every second of the Passion like a labor nurse.
— Anne Lamott Help, Thanks, Wow
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“Thanks” is the short form of the original prayer I used to say in gratitude for any unexpected grace in my life: “Thankyouthankyouthankyou.” As I grew spiritually, the prayer became the more formal “Thank you,” and now, from the wrinkly peaks of maturity, it is simply “Thanks.”
Now as then, most of the time for me gratitude is a rush of relief that I dodged a bullet—the highway patrol guy didn’t notice me speed by or the dog didn’t get hit by someone else speeding by. Or “Oh my God, thankyouthankyouthankyou” that it was all a dream, my child didn’t drown, I didn’t pick up a drink or appear on Oprah in underpants with my dreadlocks dropping off my head. These are all DEFCON 1 moments of relief and gratitude worth giving God thanks.
The second and third levels of this great prayer are said with a heaving exhalation of breath, the expulsion of bellows—THANK you, whooooosh. The constables found my passport. The brakes held. The proliferation of white blood cells was about allergies, not leukemia; the pediatrician cancelled the appointment with the head of oncology and instead recommended Benadryl. Oh my God: thanks.
How can you help saying thank you after moments like these, when real danger is averted? Even atheists do. Agnostics joke, “The man upstairs must like me,” as if it’s the dean of admissions. I personally clutch at my chest and cry, “Thanks, my God. Thanks.” And at such moments I would kneel and press my forehead to the ground if my right knee would not begin to sob. Then I usually move to: “I owe You big this time. I’ll never ask for anything else. This time I mean it.”
I thank God when my obsessive looping is alleviated. Oh, God, thank you—10 whole minutes just passed without one thought of a cigarette or a drink or the horrible ex. I got through the bad appointment with my doctor, my bank, my lawyer, my ex—the worst is over. (Actually, under no circumstances should you ever say or even think the worst is over. You will bring the evil eye down on yourself so fast it will leave you keening. But it is OK to say, “That could have been so much worse,” which is always the case.)
Gratitude runs the gamut from shaking your head and saying, “Thanks, wow. I appreciate it so much,” for your continued health, or good days at work, or the first blooms of the daisies in the public park, to saying, “Thanks, that’s a relief,” when it’s not the transmission, or the abscess, or an audit notice from the IRS. “Thanks” can be the recognition that you have been blessed mildly, or with a feeling as intense as despair at the miracle of having been spared. You say Thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou: My wife is going to live. We get to stay in this house. They found my son; he’s in jail, but he’s alive; we know where he is, and he’s safe for the night.
— Anne Lamott, Help, Thanks, Wow
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“The third great prayer, Wow, is often offered with a gasp, a sharp intake of breath, when we can’t think of another way to capture the sight of shocking beauty or destruction, of a sudden unbidden insight or an unexpected flash of grace.
“Wow” means we are not dulled to wonder. We click into being fully present when we’re stunned into that gasp, by the sight of a birth, or images of the World Trade Center towers falling, or the experience of being in a fjord, at dawn, for the first time. “Wow” is about having one’s mind blown by the mesmerizing or the miraculous: the veins in a leaf, birdsong, volcanoes”
“Wow is the child seeing the ocean for the first time. Wow is the teenager’s Christmas car (secondhand but still). Wow is John Muir. Walt Whitman. Mary Oliver saying that the sun was “the best preacher that ever was.”
What can we say beyond Wow, in the presence of glorious art, in music so magnificent that it can’t have originated solely on this side of things? Wonder takes our breath away, and makes room for new breath. That’s why they call it breathtaking.
— Anne Lamott Help, Thanks, Wow