Column draft for April 11

We had a very good Bible study this week with a focus on everyone’s first choice in Biblical reading, Habakkuk 1. We barely go through the first few verses, where the prophet cries with the Psalmist, how long.

We heard the usual defense of unanswered prayer: “sometimes God says no.” David Marshall, a retired pastor, wanted the talk to be more candid. He shared his struggle with unanswered prayer, especially in terms of illness when he visited hospital rooms. It reminded me of a new work by Frederick Schmidt, The Dave Test, where he writes of his physician-brother’s death to cancer recently. So much of what we say may bolster us during hard times, but I find it difficult to grasp how helpful it could be in times of trouble. Prayer is not magic. Positive thoughts are not magic. Still, prayer is perhaps one of the few times we pull yourself up by your bootstraps types ever admit dependence on a force greater than our own willpower.

A lot of a pastor's time is spent in hospital rooms, praying for healing. First, it brings up the issue of direct divine intervention in illness. given that we know so much, we often reserve to the divine only those inexplicable, surprising rises from illness. By and large, I see large-scale faith healing ministries as a scam worthy of Peter Popoff. Still, even charlatans may witness a healing as the linkage between mind, body, and spirit, are not fully grasped.

When I was stricken with cancer over two years ago, a number of people told me that I should not get surgery or radiation for prostate cancer and should rely on prayer exclusively, along the lines of Christian Science stance upriver at Principia. With karl Barth, i tend to see prayer as part of a protest against the hardships of life. Instead of prayer being a substitute for action, I tend to see it as an attempt to engage our will with the ways of god, to mobilize our resources to seek a partnership with the ways of God.

I see God’s work as often mediated through human action. So, healing may come at time directly, bidden or unbidden, i suppose. With our capacities, we  are co-healing agents with God in matters of all of life, mind, body, heart, spirit.

I do hold that God does not will illness on us. I am not among those who says that god takes our loved ones due to some tossed off statement about needing them in heaven.Even though i  am part of the Calvinist tradition, I cannot see how all things that happen  are discretely planned and acted upon by God. The answer to job in chs.38-41 show that god has both the wild and the tame, the planned and the random events as part of the divine order.

At the same time, prayer strikes me as a valuable support in times of trouble. I recall a minister who was stricken with the plague of cancer for the third time. this bout would be his last. He told me that some  days he did not have the strength to move from bed in the morning. Then, he said it was as if all of the prayers coalesced about him and he felt almost lifted up out of bed to try to embrace another day.

I am not one who sees suffering as an instrument of getting the tough going. i have seen too many instances of suffering’s destructive powers to the psyche and soul. As we move into Holy Week, i am comforted by the fullness of the personal grasp of suffering in the life of Jesus. There, in unanswered prayers as at Gethsemane, we are still accompanied by the One who cna comfort and lift us up.