“Thoughts and Prayers”

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On social media, and in person, many people seem to dislike the phrase, “You’re in our thoughts and prayers,” used when someone discloses a tragedy such as a death in the family.

I don’t think all who object to this phrase are against thoughts and prayers as such. They are against clichés that may not have a lot of thought behind them – not insincere, exactly, but maybe lacking in genuineness.

When I was in graduate school studying journalism, professors emphasized the importance of avoiding clichés in writing, for the reason mentioned above, but also because writing that uses a lot of clichés is uninteresting.

Rote Prayers

Religious people use a lot of “clichés” when they pray, and that’s especially true of people of my own faith. Catholicism has a lot of rote prayers, ones we recite over and over, starting with the sign of the cross and the words that go with it.

We often make the sign of the cross sloppily and recite the words, “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” without thinking about what we’re saying. And that goes for the beautiful and meaningful prayer taught to his disciples by Jesus called “the Lord's Prayer” or “Our Father.” We can rattle it off without thinking about what we’re saying or as we think about something else entirely.

The Catholic mass is also an occasion for thoughtless prayer. The mass, or Eucharist, is the center of my spiritual life. As an expression of Jesus’ exhortation at the Last Supper to “Do This in memory of me,” and in the spirit of the form of worship practiced by the early church, there is, in my opinion, no greater way to worship God.

Mary McGlone
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But to do it properly, you have to focus, listening attentively to the Scripture readings and making yours the prayers of the priest. Intentional participation, including the singing, is the key. That’s not to say that the prayers should be a “Jesus and me” thing. You should also be conscious of our oneness with the community.

Sr. Mary McGlone, in her column “Scripture for Life” in the National Catholic Reporter, places the lessons from the weekend liturgies in a real-life context.

“When we listen to a cranky child, a dissatisfied student, an upset client or even someone who is telling us the same story for the umpteenth time, we might wish they were filling a hot air balloon instead of delivering their suffocating monologue to us. Could that be how God feels when we pray, not without ceasing but without thinking or feeling?”

The context for this quote is the gospel story about the Pharisee and the tax collector in Luke’s gospel. As you may recall, the two went to the temple in Jerusalem to pray. “The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, ‘God, I thank thee that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week, I give tithes of all that I get.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’”

More Like a Resume?

The prayer of the Pharisee, writes McGlone, is more like the recitation of a resume than a prayer.

The story, she writes, “reminds us that prayer calls forth genuine encounter; or, we might say, ‘real presence.’ To pray at the invitation of the Trinity (as in when we make the sign of the cross at the beginning) requires us to strive to be as fully and genuinely present as we can be, to God and to those with whom we pray.

“Whether we bow or cover our heads, whether incense and bells or guitars and chimes help us enter more consciously into God’s presence, we remember that we pray at God’s unceasing invitation.”