12

The Amnesty of Honesty.

When I walked off the stage, half a dozen people told me it was one of the better sermons they’d heard. An older man shook my hand with his right, patted my shoulder with the left and nodded at me, the signature Christian affirmation from that generation’s men. I felt good about what I had said, and was feeling pretty good about what others had said about what I’d said. Who am I kidding; I was getting drunk off the compliments.

When Wade walked up to me I anticipated his usual, well spoken encouragement. His wife was a devout Christian woman while he himself was a confessed agnostic with atheistic leanings.

Wade, a sincere man a decade or so my senior, as humble as he was articulate about his heavy skepticism, I’d secretly taken on as one of my first evangelical projects.

He was shaking my hand and speaking at the front of the room, and I was sure that he was as moved as he was convicted.

“That wasn’t fair,” Wade said, our hands still moving up and down.

I was confused. When I asked what he meant he referred to how I’d ended the sermon. I had closed by referencing a poll which showed a vast majority of people, provided the opportunity to have a conversation with anyone in history, would choose God. Not only was this the most popular answer given, but it was also the most popular answer given by self-professed Christians.

I ridiculed this as sad.

After sharing the poll numbers I declared that Christians, at least real ones, should know we have direct, unmitigated, unmediated, unrestrained access to God now. We call this prayer. We can and should already be having conversations with God. Why were they wishing to a pollster that they could?

“Don’t you see brothers and sisters, you can have this conversation today!” I’d pontificated in full accordance to what I believed I believed.

“Huh?” I asked Wade, pulling my hand back.

“That was a cheap shot, and it wasn’t fair, Steve. You know you don’t have that with God.”

“Wait. What?” I was still making the internal switch from bask to defend mode. Wade continued.

“You know you don’t have back and forth conversations with God like you and I are doing right now. You know how frustrating it is to talk to God even on your best day of prayer. How you wish you could sit down and chat with Him and hear him unambiguously speak back. I don’t think what you said was fair, it wasn’t right, and I don’t think you even believe it.”

I was speechless. Not just because this was the first time I had ever seen Wade confrontational, but because I couldn’t find a secure space in my mind to argue from. He’d thrown open a door to an unacknowledged room I’d dutifully kept my back to. He was pointing inside, demanding I see what I’d denied for Jesus.

I knew how to talk about the power of prayer, the interactions one has with the Lord when they are a follower, my personal relationship which far exceeded my youthful Catholicism which I relegated to empty ritual. I knew all the Bible passages, read a few books. I had a poster in my office that read “Make War on the Floor” and featured a man bowed down, prayer-warrioring which I think is the term’s verb form.

The truth was however that prayer had been a struggle in every way.

The truth was, I often hated prayer.

I did it, most every time save for a few ecstatic moments at conferences or at the birth of my children, begrudgingly, ashamedly, confusedly. Prayer made little logical sense to me and reinforced a terrifying sense that faith is no more than a one way conversation exclusively reserved for anyone willing to suspend their disbelief. At times prayer even reinforced my deep insecurity of being rejected by the God who doesn’t talk back. The absentee father that doesn’t answer the phone but sends unsigned postcards from wherever he is.

I knew all this was in that well lit room behind the door. But to admit it was, in so may terrifying ways, to part with my heroes, to divest myself of my newly acquired tradition, to go cold turkey on the affirmation I love being addicted to. So, I argued and defended myself against Wade while agreeing inside.

And then days later I confessed I agreed.

I agreed prayer is not at all to me what I alleged it was supposed to be, that it was illogical to me on a lot of levels and has never felt right. That I knew some people who pray and don’t seem to have these hang ups, that others had stories I could only categorize as miraculously specific answers to the requests they’d made to God. But for me, I conceded, it was like this at all.

An interesting thing happened when I confessed this agreement. I felt closer to Wade. And I was closer to Wade. I have to believe two beings are closer than they were as soon as the leaves that obscure some truth are removed. But feeling closer to an agnostic after admitting your skepticism over prayer probably isn’t that surprising.

What surprised me was that I also felt closer to God. Who knows, maybe that confession to Wade was one of my better prayers up to that point.

In fact, I felt closer to every one of the hundreds of others I have admitted this to. Not because I just happened to find the few people on Earth who secretly thought the same as I did. But because prayer is, for so many people, a strange, seemingly fruitless and ultimately undesirable part of daily life – they’re left feeling secretly crappy and unspiritual about it. I found people need someone on behalf of faith to understand this, not judge it or paint over it with flowery rhetoric. I was just learning to love by not mere toleration of their allegedly comparative weakness, but by my own admission that I generally don’t really get it either, though expected to.

I thought I was being loving in telling necessary truths rather than actual ones. But in my pastoral desire to dutifully strengthen the flock I reinforced for most of us that we’re excluded. My desire to look strong in the faith did what pretense always does, creates a stage full of actors pantomiming “truth.” Jesus called these hypokrites; Greek stage actors.

But honesty has always been more loving than dogma. I’ve always preferred people tell me what they actually think, versus what they’re expected to. The former is a bond. The latter is self-preservation.

Compassion requires we accept what is true, not what must be. Compassion is unafraid of what it finds when it opens doors others deny are there. Compassion isn’t offended or disgusted by what is revealed by picking up old logs and facing what’s underneath. Compassion tells the truth, swallows the truth, accepts the truth and rewards the truth so help us God.

What a terrifying thing Compassion can be.