Does prayer change things? Or us? Or both?

Fake Prayers

May 27, 08:59 AM

I listened on NPR the other day to Tina Brown, the celebrated journalist. An interviewer was getting Brown’s take on new books she liked. What struck me most were her comments about Facebook and privacy, and even more striking, the public selves we present.

"What you're seeing more and more," Brown said, speaking in particular about celebrities, are people’s "sort of fake Facebook pages." Their media handlers, she said, create "dual identities." They put on display a self, for example, which is "happy, carefree, laughing, jumping around in the beach and sharing …drinks in the bar with, you know, Mr. Everyman." So there is the Facebook persona and "on the other side is really what I'm really doing." It may not be so appealing.

And I got to thinking about ways we present ourselves to others—the image we may try to project sometimes. I think about the proverbial airbrushing of our flaws, the pointing only to our strengths, the blunting of our jagged edges.

And I think of how we pray. Do we come "as we are?" Or, as a friend of mine once put it, do we throw into our prayers "theological sounding words" to dress up our prayers and make them seem (to us at least) more profound?

I like the title of a chapter in my friend Matt Woodley’s book: "Prayer as Guttural Groaning" (The Folly of Prayer). If we are honest, will our prayers sometimes sound not-so-pretty? "The best prayers," noted seventeenth-century writer John Bunyan, "often have more groans than words."

I find people are surprised sometimes when I teach about this gut-level dimension of prayer. They think only in terms of niceties, even if the politeness gets forced. But long have I loved C. S. Lewis’s line, "The prayer preceding all prayers is ‘May it be the real I who speaks. May it be the real Thou that I speak to.’"

Doesn’t God prefer real prayers over fake?