Mad (Libs) for God

I’ll never forget how excited I was the first time I saw a t-shirt that outlines Robin Williams’s reasons why it is “great to be an Episcopalian.” Number nine on the list of ten is that I get to believe in dinosaurs.  I always think what that really means is that being an Episcopalian means I get to ask questions. There wasn’t much room for questions in the church of my childhood. But if you spend even a little time around me, it becomes clear quickly that I am a girl made of questions. I have millions… about everything… even small things…even sacred things.

This morning’s Psalm 67 is a great example. Right in the middle, we are exhorted to praise God. “Let the people praise you! Let all the people praise you!” This exhortation fills the Bible, and the Old Testament particularly, and to be honest, it has always stuck in my craw. Why on earth would God, the omnipotent and the all-powerful, need praise from little old me??  I get gratitude! I get appreciation ! But why worship and praise?

Shortly after I moved to Canandaigua, I joined a local Education for Ministry class in nearby Geneva. My first night in the class was a lesson on how to write a collect.  If that word doesn’t draw up an immediate image for you, just grab a prayer book. The Book of Common Prayer is full of them!  The word “collect” comes from Latin and means to draw together – rather like the word collect – and these prayers are used in Anglican, Catholic and Lutheran services. My first night in EfM, we were given a fill-in-the-blank version of a collect, and I got familiar with my fellow students while we filled in the blanks to write our own prayer for the group for the night. The formula we were given was:

Oh God who…..(Fill in the blank)

We ask that you…..(Fill in the blank)

So that we may….(Fill in the blank)

In Christ’s name, Amen.

I’m a teacher, and I think of myself as a good student, so I was horrified that I was
stumped on the very first assignment! Oh God who what? What on earth does that mean? The fantastically patient woman I was working with said we were supposed to say something nice about God or God’s power – to praise God for something connected to what we were about to ask for in the next line. My confusion shifted from “how do I do this” to “why would I do this.”

Luckily, because EfM is education in the Episcopal Church, I was allowed to ask! So I asked my group why God would need our praise. I don’t remember much about their answers, but they must not have satisfied me; all the way home from Geneva, I was still wondering, “Why does God need my praise?” So when I got home, I did what all good seekers do – I googled it.  If you google “Why Praise God,” you will get hundreds of hits that say some version of, “well, don’t you feel good when YOU get a compliment?” These answers did not help me. My discomfort with praising God was based on just such an assumption. Saying we ought to praise God because everyone likes a compliment and it will make God smile sounds to me like making God in our own image instead of the other way around. So, Google did not have the answers, and I have wrestled with the question ever since. But two plus years later, I think I am finally starting to understand.

When I left EfM, I was so bothered by my struggle with the collect formula that asks us to praise God before we ask for something that I cut that fill in the blank page out of the book out and laminated it. I stuck it on my refrigerator, and for the last year, I have used a dry erase marked to play with it as a kind of “Mad Libs” for writing prayers. (Don’t worry – this is not a sacrilege. Even the diocesan web page from our Presiding Bishop’s last post in North Carolina has a page encouraging us to write our own collects.)   But what I have discovered as I write these prayers is that the praise we give is not for God’s benefit at all – but for my own.

It turns out that when I have to pay attention well enough to come up with something God is or something God can do, I am able to pay attention to what God is and what God can do! My naming out loud (or at least in written words) the wonder of God in my life allows me to see what I have before me. Praising God requires me to spend some time before I ask for something considering what I have already been given, what God has already given me and all of us and all creation.

We are usually very good at knowing what we don’t have – what we need – but we are often not as good at knowing and naming what we do have, what we don’t need because it has already been provided. And I’m talking about more than just gratitude here. For me, saying, “I’m grateful God healed my child,” resonates differently somehow than “Oh God who healed my child.” Saying “Thank you, God, for bringing me home safely,” feels to me different from saying “Oh God who brought me safely home.” Stating God’s greatness and generosity allows me to feel and see how great and generous God is!

The praise, I think, is not necessary because God would have an identity crisis without it; it is necessary so that I don’t forget who God is for me. And this strange little prayer, the collect, helps me do that remembering by encouraging me to say it aloud.  To be sure, I’ve come up with some very unusual collects over the last year. One of my favorites begins, “Oh God who inspired somebody to try eating artichokes” because that is a persuasive God!  But we don’t have to be as silly as I tend to be to play with the collect.  Filling in the blanks to make our own collects allows us to express the mundane everyday stuff we want to petition for on behalf of ourselves or all creation. For example, an asthma attack that feels scary can be:

Oh God who was to the Israelites a mighty wind, I ask that you breathe air into these aching lungs so that I might be calmed and be well. In Christ’s name, amen.

A plea for patience in the face of a petulant child might read:

Oh God who forgives me as I blunder my way through life, grant that I have the forbearance to not smack this child so that we may both have an afternoon of peace. In Christ’s name, amen. (I have prayed something like this!)

When our house in Seattle was burgled for the third time in five years and we came home with our young children to the chaos of intentional destruction all through the house, something moved me to send the children downstairs to make lists of what they were glad the thieves had not taken. The collects we could have written from those lists would have looked something like, “Oh God who preserved my Star Wars Legos and puppy stuffy…”  but they would have served as more than just gratitude. We would have been able to touch that place in us that knew God was with us even if we momentarily felt very scared and very alone. Through praise, we could have felt God’s power.

So perhaps you could try it now. You could close your eyes if you want…. sometimes that helps words float up like in a magic 8 ball. I will begin with the standard words, and then I’ll pause so you can fill in your bit. As you do it, try to pay attention to how it feels in your body. And if you like the results, write it down for yourself. Take a look at it again later.  Or write something different when things change, and when you need to also. So here we go:

Oh God who…..

We ask that you…..

So that we may….

In Christ’s name, Amen.