Shadow Prayers, Then and Now

I wrote to reflect not just on what was lost, but on what was revealed to me, even in the worst of times—about faith, about love, about fear, about my worries that all our efforts to stay alive as the church wouldn’t be enough, only to discover on the other side that what held these precious, human, imperfect souls in my charge together wasn’t me or the staff, or the building after all. It was the fragile threads of faith and the mystery of God that binds us, even when it seems completely absent to our view.

Transcript

Shadow Prayers

Shadow Prayers was written shortly after my retirement in 2021 and published in 2022. I had delayed my plan to retire for months after the global pandemic began. I stayed on to try to lead the church until they could meet once again, a divisive election was over, and a vaccine was on the horizon. 

I compiled materials and reflections from 2020 until early 2021 to try to create a chronology of the pandemic as experienced by one pastor in one church. It was not unique—all of us who lived through that time shared many crises—isolation, loss, disconnection, disruption of community, racial division, and the ramping up of conspiracy theories, distrust and fear. 

I wrote this book as a quiet reckoning with a year that reshaped the world and reframed the intimate rhythms of daily life as well as public cataclysm. I included prayers, a few sermons, and meditative reflections, as well as poetry, song lyrics I composed, and wrote brief introductions to set the context of the writings. Whilethe book traces the emotional and spiritual undercurrents of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was not about headlines or statistics, but the lived texture of solitude, grief, resilience, and grace.

I structured the book as a kind of liturgy of memory, each entry becomes a kind of prayer—sometimes whispered, sometimes raw—capturing the shadows cast by the uncertain threats, the isolation, the flickers of hope in unexpected places, and the moral weight of collective vulnerability. 

I published my book with Parson’s Porch, as I had with my early book. It is still painful to me to remember preaching to a camera in the silence of empty pews, the ache of postponed funerals, the quiet heroism of caregivers, and the reckoning with mortality that touched every household. My youngest child was sequestered, as a New York City schoolteacher, in a tiny apartment, near enough to witness the refrigerated trailers for the bodies that overwhelmed the hospital. She banged pots and pans with others for the heroes of the crisis—weary doctors and nurses trudging home after holding hands with people they could not save from a virus that we did not know how to defeat. Worrying about carrying the death home to their own families. And we were separated for so long from our other daughter and her two children for more than a year. When we finally drove to upstate New York, the joy of two granddaughters running out to our car, crying into their grandmother’s arms, I will never forget.

BY writing that book, I wanted to simply remember what happened. Because I knew somehow that life would go on and I might, we might, try to put it behind and resume “normal life” again. And that would be a terrible mistake. I suspect most of us still believe we have not recovered fully. The political divisions are still deep and worse. The racial wound is bleeding worse than ever. Churches have made it back to half or three quarters attendance, but many checked out and moved on. And in the culture wars since, our souls seem to have suffered some kind of malignancy. Suddenly we are searching for Jesus again, but as we do, the land is full of nationalist Christian idolatries and culture gods. Anger is everywhere in our public sphere and media, and the pace of technological change is greater than ever. 

I have moved on past my own book. But Shadow Prayers came back to me as I was putting together a booklist for some friends who wanted some suggestions for a kind of spiritual reading group. I was writing out short descriptions of books I have read in recent years that might nurture and sustain them in a time when they feel adrift among the institutional church in their lifeboats of financial and attendance survival. 

After writing a nice list of books that speak to me (and I’ll share my list in an upcoming podcast and blog), I thought back to my own book. I felt embarrassed to promote it, so I thought I would share some copies with my friends that are in my closet my wife keeps asking me to clean out sometime before we ourselves go to the nursing home. 

But as I thought about a small group of friends, I thought, “Well, maybe they’d find this useful.” That’s why writers write, and songwriters sing, at least in my view, hoping that something that occurred to us might bless, inspire, encourage or hold up somebody out there and say, “It was good you lived. You helped me keep going.”

I wrote to reflect not just on what was lost, but on what was revealed to me, even in the worst of times—about faith, about love, about fear, about my worries that all our efforts to stay alive as the church wouldn’t be enough, only to discover on the other side that what held these precious, human, imperfect souls in my charge together wasn’t me or the staff, or the building after all. It was the fragile threads of faith and the mystery of God that binds us, even when it seems completely absent to our view.

I might go back and read those words again, ask myself, “What did we learn? What did we forget about what we learned?” Because it’s still with us, I think, what you and I saw. We don’t have to live there, but maybe we don’t move too fast. There’s still healing work to be done.