This “praying for people” business has been much like the “gratitude” business: challenging.

I realized early on that if I wanted to cover Lent in people-prayer, I would have to pray for some that I wouldn’t gravitate toward at a dinner party.  Let’s face it, there may not be forty people I like in this world.  Kidding. (Maybe.)  But honestly, when considering whose name I should utter before the One who made them each day, I have been confronted by the faces that surround me most often.  And not all of these faces are BFFs.

Praying for some of them has been similar to the act of constantly choosing gratitude: I don’t see what there is to like here, Lord, but if it(he, she)’s from your hands, then I’ll trust you have your reasons.

How do we pray for people we don’t like?  The same way we give thanks for gifts that look more like punishments: in faith. Faith that their potential (ahem, like mine) is not maxed out at NOW, that he’s doing a work on them (ahem, like on me) that hasn’t been completed.

I am learning that prayer, like gratitude, is not my opportunity to fluff my own feathers, sing my greatest hits, preen before God to convince him of how wonderful I am.  It is not a quid pro quo, an A5 choice at the heavenly vending machine.  It, in its purest moments, is a falling to the knees, a speechless beholding of glory beyond my comprehension.  An acceptance of what is beyond me, what should deign to look at me.  Hands not grasping, clutching, but open, waiting.  A posture of receiving.

Oh, the rubble he must sift through to find any of that in my words!  Because most of the time I open with doubt.  “I don’t know what you’re doing here…”  I give my own assessment of the situation.  “This doesn’t make sense…”  I offer the result of my informal poll of one.  “I would have gone a different route.  And not made her.”

In the day-to-day frustrations, I am confronted with how much trusting there is left to do.  I feel conspired against, tested.  Tsunamis occur and I hear explanations attempted and among them are “God is testing us,” and I think, “THAT’S NOT HOW HE WORKS!” as the cork gets stuck in the wine and I think, “Why, God, WHY?!”  Or “If God is exists and he allows this to happen, he’s a cruel masochist,” and I think, ‘THAT’S NOT WHO HE IS!” as a dream is deferred and I push the gratitude journal away and secretly wonder with Eve why he’s holding out on me.

This is life, this constantly finding out how I was wrong about him and this constantly finding out how little I really know.  This is life, this surrender to the one with the plan even as my heart and feelings deceive me and I question with the critics just what he’s up to.  Because the simple answer is, I don’t know. So what do I do with that?  Do I take my doubt, my anger, my frustration at plans thwarted and paths blocked and build a wall to block him out?  Do I hurl it all at him in outrage?  Do I use it as Exhibit A in the case against his goodness?

Am I that intolerant of mystery?

We demand answers, progress, wholeness and justice in a world that was broken almost from its beginning, that is incapable of meeting our own ill-conceived notions of what these virtues are.  We think we know what the world should look like?  We, whose ancestors lived in verdant perfection with every need met and cut their eyes to the one tree and said, “Unjust!  We want that.”

We will never be satisfied with what we cling to here, bandages over gaping wounds and explanations born in blindness.  Each of our lives will face its own earthquake that will shake to the core what we formerly and comfortably believed.  It will not be enough.  We were not made for comfort and easy answers, for gods in our own image.  We will end up imprisoned by, beholden to, our objects of safety because what we were ultimately made for is not subject to our control.  Sooner or later, we must answer the call of mystery with a closed door or an open heart.  Because the fact is, a god who can be explained is just man pretending to be him.

As I embrace the mystery myself, sweating and uncomfortable more often than smiling and relaxed, I come face to face with how much more there is–the depths and heights that would have remained unplumbed had I stayed in Central Command and continued to call the shots to an unhearing, uncooperative universe.  I would not have felt my heart unfold as I spoke a name in prayer that I would rather have not mentioned, would not have heard words escape my lips that I could never have conjured on my own, thoughts reflected from a part of myself that bears another’s name.  That same part that keeps gravitating toward my DVRed 25th anniversary performance of Les Miserables and being reduced to tears at Alfie Boe’s rendition of “Bring Him Home,” a song (and a people-prayer) I never even liked until I saw this performance.  My heart, newly trained in gratitude, leaps at the sight of Jean Valjean carrying Marius across the barricade as it recognizes a rescue that only begins to mirror my own, the enemy lines crossed on my behalf.  I watch the finale, the cast of actors spent in emotion (except for Nick Jonas, who just looks constipated), and Boe singing with tears streaming that “to love another person is to see the face of God.”  And I know that anything good in me, any propensity to love rather than hate, to pray for rather than curse, to believe rather than to deny, is born of a place that is deeper than explanation and rich in a mystery beautiful beyond description.