Thursday, February 22, 2024
Alphabet Soup and pandemic prayers
The Rev. Aaron B. Jenkyn
Full text of the homily given at Thursday's Healing Eucharist:
Do you remember March of 2020? The early days of the Covid pandemic. Do you remember how it felt?
I remember the day my kids school closed, the day they sent my husband home from work, the day we had to decide to cancel worship. We thought it was only going to be a few weeks, a month at the most.
At first neighborhoods came together. Love notes and messages of thanks went up in windows around town, everyone was trying to figure out how to stay connected, how to grow hope, how to persevere in the midst of this seemingly impossible thing that was unfolding before our eyes. In those first few weeks, those first few months, we were so naive to what was to come, which was for the best, since what we were experiencing already felt so impossible.
I was working for a small church at the time, and we were trying everything to help support eachother in whatever ways we could think up. I had some friends and colleagues who turned to the Book of Common Prayer, gathering for Compline every night on Facebook Live. A beloved friend suggested a group of us read Morning Prayer over the phone together, we did it once, but the art of holding the phone and turning pages and balancing a preschooler on my knee was more than I could handle. Another time, I left my kids unsupervised to lead a prayer call, and within minutes they were knocking on my office door, one of them with a bloody nose and the other full of stories of brotherly mishaps. By the end of the first month, the days started to melt together, differentiated only by the flavor of hard that day doled out.
Once we realized things weren’t going back to “normal” Zoom school became a thing, which meant putting my first grader in front of a computer screen in a room by himself from seven in the morning till midday - as you can imagine this was unbearable for everyone involved, teachers, parents, and most especially the seven year olds. Seven year olds aren’t meant to sit in front of computer screen all day (and neither are we). After a month of trying to balance Zoom school and remote church work and my own seminary classes, also on Zoom, and life as a family of four with grandparents and friends whom we desperately missed, I began getting the calls no one wanted, but we all knew were coming. Friends of friends were sick with Covid, the degree of separation between the virus and us grew smaller and smaller, until it was clear it was here and people in my community began to get sick.
I woke up one morning and thought “I can’t do this anymore. My littles are little and they are scared. I am not-so-little and I am scared. How do we as a community, as a country, as a world handle this much death, this much sadness, this much isolation. ” The thoughts raced through my head. I was so tired, and soon my exhaustion and overwhelm turned to anger. I began to wonder - will this ever end, and where is God in all of this.
I didn’t want to pray anymore, I couldn’t muster up the energy, I didn’t have the right words, I didn’t really have any words. Have you ever felt like that?
I remember so clearly sitting at my kitchen table later that same day. I was suppose to lead Midday prayer on Zoom, and instead I was crying into a bowl of alphabet soup, looking down and thinking, that’s all I’ve got. That’s all the prayers I can muster. A spoonful of scrambled letters, and a bowlful of heartache. Of course, What I didn’t know then, was that much of the following year, and years, would be scrambled prayers and bowlfuls of heartache.
I took a deep breath and I went live anyway. I logged into Zoom as I had each day before and there staring at me through the computer screen were the faces of beloved parishioners and friends, a dear colleague and a few strangers — all gathered in this strange new place we called “Zoom church”. It was far from perfect, but there they were. The exhaustion and uncertainty in their lives was very different than mine, and yet, very much the same and I could see it on their faces.
We sat in silence for a long time that day and then let the words of our tradition carry us, and as we finished praying, I asked the group if there was anything else we could prayer for, and someone far braver than I called out “for the courage to keep praying. For the strength to keep looking for God in the world.” And then to my surprise, others joined in, with prayers too deep for words. One by one, they prayed the most sincere and heartfelt prayers I had ever heard. The space between us melted away, and what was left was a real, raw, vulnerable and sincere longing for God.
There are many times in our lives when all we have is the desire to pray but not the words. And sometimes, we don’t even have that. Sometimes all we have is scrambled letters, racing thoughts and tears rolling down our cheeks into bowls of soup. Sometimes all we have is a heart full of worry, a body full of rage. Sometimes we are too worn out, too tired, to done with it all, to pray.
And yet, we are called to persevere in prayer. And somehow we do.
In today’s first reading we hear the story of Esther, a remarkable story worth reading in its entirety, but we hear it in today’s lesson because the story of Esther illustrates the purpose and the power of prayer. In the example of Esther we see prayers as a petition to God, as a confession of sins, and as an intercession on behalf of others, but we also see it as a deep desire to seek and find God. In the example of Esther we are reminded that even in the midst of turmoil we must never stop trusting that God is at work in the world. Through prayer, we are expressing our desire to be in Gods presence. Through prayer we are seeking to find connection, real, raw, and authentic.
We are not called to persevere in prayer so that we get what we want, we are called to persevere in prayer so that we can learn to trust that God is at work even when we can’t see it. We are called to persevere in prayer, so that we can learn better how to pray with sincerity and truth for God’s will to be done on earth.
Thinking back to that time at the beginning of the pandemic, my prayers remained scrambled for a long time, I imagine some of yours did as well. But after Midday Prayer that day, when I looked into that bowl of alphabet soup, my scrambled prayers were joined with the prayers of so many others. An offering of our hearts, a letting go of our desires, a transformation of our prayers and a reminder to look up, to find God at work in the world. We are called to persevere in prayer, but we don’t have to do it alone.
Amen.