Beloved,

Faith is personal but not private. Bishop Greg Rickel of then Olympia empathized with this teaching many years ago. The statement triggered my knee-jerk reaction whenever I heard it, as I used to keep everything to myself. My faith was definitely kept private, if not more than anything else, because, one, I did not think my belief was anybody’s business. Two, I did not want my friends to think of me as an over-the-top, zealous televangelist type or to show my ignorance. The biggest reason I held my belief close to myself was not wanting to be judged. 

During the Wednesday night Lenten soup suppers, we explored a topic of prayer one evening as part of the Going Back to the Basics series. What is prayer? We often casually say we pray, but do we really know what it is? Why and how do we pray? What exactly does prayer do? During the discussion, a person shared, “My prayer is deeply personal.” All agreed, including myself. However, at that moment, Bishop Rickel’s teaching resurfaced in my mind. 

“Faith is personal, but not private.”

How do we live our faith and share our stories? A theologian, Paul Tillich, teaches us that listening is the first duty of love. When we truly love someone, we try to understand them by listening. When loving someone is difficult, the least we can try is to start listening to the person. However, I am also not so naive as to ignore how listening can quickly become a disingenuous, convenient tool not to open our big mouths. We listen sometimes just to let others do all the talking so that we can keep our thoughts to ourselves. In this case, listening no longer serves as an act of love but becomes a shield to insulate ourselves from harm, threats, or conflicts. For example, I sat with people one day, looked straight in the eyes, and tried very hard to listen to them. Despite my efforts, my poor ADHD brain ejected out of my head and flew off to space travel in Lala land. Oh, how embarrassing it was when I got caught!

Prayer draws us closer to God, so we say. When we pray, we offer God our hearts, thoughts, and hopes. If we all pray to One God, then I wonder why our prayers sometimes take us further away from each other. When we pray in Jesus’ name and bring us closer to One God, shouldn’t we be closer to one another? Yet, lately, my experience tells me otherwise. Somebody’s prayer means a threat to others, though both pray to the same God. The distancing of our hearts is especially true and prevalent today among Christians, between conservatism and liberalism, as if it is a matter of win or lose, though we all pray to One God in Jesus’ name. Any faith tradition experiences similar divisiveness; one common denominator in all of these is us—humans. However, let us not lose hope. Prayer, when practiced with the right intention, has the power to unite us and bring us closer to God and each other. Let us hold on to this hope and continue to pray for unity and understanding. 

Faith is deeply personal but not meant to be private. By making it personal, we often end up insulating our true selves from others quietly. However, hold your knee-jerk reaction to indulge me for a moment; making our faith public might not exactly be like what you have in mind—making our faith public means living our faith to the fullest as we share our lives with strangers, friends, and even foes. Your life is filled with amazing stories of God’s grace that nobody has experienced but only you. We all have encountered undeserving God’s grace through someone’s kindness that helped us hold on to faith, hope, and love in times of joy, anger, fear, and loss. Our job is to generously share the undeserving God’s grace we received at some time or another with fellow humans—publicly. Christian prayer gives us the courage to open our eyes, ears, and hearts to learn how to follow Jesus’ new commandments: To love God and His people. Our prayerful intention, therefore, must always be to let the old self die and renew our hearts to be aligned with Christ so that we may see each other in a different light on a new day,  with new joys and new possibilities. Christian prayers should bring us closer to one another this way and not tear us apart. 

Faith is personal but not private. Easter is right around the corner. Let us live our faith to the fullest and share our lives as Jesus did. As our former Presiding Bishop, Michael Curry, said, If it’s not about Love, it’s not about God. With God, it’s all about Love. Your love, your faith, your stories, they all matter. They are what make our community strong and vibrant. Let us continue to share, to listen, and to love, for in doing so, we honor God and strengthen our bond with each other.

Love in Christ, 

Fr. Andrew