Christian Piatt Blog

There is No ‘I’ in ‘Prayer.’
By Christian Piatt

Originally printed in the Pueblo Chieftain newspaper

I was with my wife, Amy, in Mexico last week for vacation. She found a small store, sandwiched between a convenience market and a show shop, which sold more religious paraphernalia than I ever knew existed.

Amy was particularly drawn to the milagros (Spanish for ‘miracle’) which are little metal emblems, stamped in Italy – and I assume blessed by priests – with the images of various saints, scriptures and other religious icons. She enjoyed poring over the scores of glass jars, selecting just the right ‘miracle’ for friends and family back home.

When we went to the front to pay, I ducked to avoid a clothes line, hanging just over the counter. Although I am of average height in the states, I feel like an adolescent to big for his body in many Mexican structures. The line was covered in hundreds of rosaries, the small strings of prayer beads used in the Catholic tradition.

Right next to the rosaries were clothespins holding the most recent scratch-off lottery tickets for sale.

Now, that’s interesting product placement, I thought.

Although I’m sure the proximity of the prayer beads and lottery tickets was coincidental, it got me to thinking about the reasons we pray. Last year, Newsweek and an online service called Beliefnet joined together do conduct a prayer survey. When asked, “What do you think is the most important purpose of prayer?” The most popular answer at 27 percent was “to seek God’s guidance.”

Close behind that were along the lines of giving thanks and drawing closer to the Divine. Lagging far behind at an anemic nine percent was “To improve a person’s life.”

Call me a skeptic, but I think this survey reflects a lot more about what we think intellectually about prayer than what we actually do. At the risk of beating a dead horse, I feel the urge to revisit the Prosperity Gospel concept once more.

I’m not suggesting that we’re all praying to win the lottery, although it’s my guess that more than one in ten sends up a good word when the Powerball creeps up over $100 million. From personal experience, I like to think that I make prayer a regular discipline to help strengthen my spiritual connection, but often times, I find myself forgetting to make it such a regular habit: that is, until I need something.

The explosion of the popularity of what I call “self-help Jesus” spirituality, from the eighties and on into the new century, suggests I’m not the only one. Such teaching has many champions such as Joel Olsteen, Joyce Meyer and the Copelands.

It’s quite a system, really. The principal is that God want’s the world’s righteous to prosper (materially), and that one of the main ways you show your faithfulness, aside from praying for affluence, is to give significant amounts of money to these ministries. This comes in many forms, including outright gifts, as well as book sales, lecture admission fees and more. I don’t know if Joel Olsteen sells T-shirts at his gigantic rallies, but it would not shock me.

The effect is self-evident. If you’re not growing in material abundance, you’re not working the system right. Duh!

It’s easy to castigate such a distortion of the gospel that not only fits so easily into the greedy value system of modern America, but also makes its proponents incredibly rich.

It’s not wrong to ask God for things. The Lord’s Prayer teaches us as much. But Jesus asks only for daily bread, not the whole stinking factory. Also, the whole prayer is in ‘we’ language. Nowhere in his prayer is the first person ever introduced.

If Jesus was around today, what would our modern-day Prosperity Gospel mavens tell him about his life of poverty? They’d probably tell him to pray harder, or maybe say he just wasn’t giving enough.

Hope or wishes? Joy or happiness?

            Anyone who has watched the movie A Christmas Story understands the tenuous and fragile nature of wishes. From the beginning, young Ralphie is obsessed with getting his hands on a Red Rider bee bee gun, complete with a compass in the stock, for Christmas. Adults repeatedly warn him of the dangers of shooting his eye out, and scheme after scheme is foiled. Finally the blessed day arrives, and beneath the tree, he finds the object of his desire.

He dashes outside to give it a try and, with his first shot, shatters his glasses and narrowly misses shooting his eye out.

Pueblo falls victim to some of the same fantasies. Hardly a week goes by that I don’t open the paper to read about this rumor or that about a new business that promises to lift us from our economic sluggishness. Some of them work out, but often times, these stories dissolve into the ether, never to mature.

I too follow such starry-eyed longings. My friends know I’m a fan of Chipotle, the Mexican food restaurant, to the point of obsession. I got in the habit of eating there at least five times a week when I lived in Denver and Fort Worth. Now, at least once a week, I drive an hour each way just to chow down on a monster burrito at the nearest Chipotle in Colorado Springs.

For two years, I have heard rumors about a store opening in Pueblo. I was so convinced by the most recent anecdote that I drove by the prospective site to see how far along the construction was. Once again, my hopes were dashed as the signage for yet another payday loan store was being secured to the front.

The word “hope” as used above actually is misused. Ralphie, Pueblo and I all get focused sometimes on outcomes, over which we have less control than we would like. These outcome-based longings actually are wishes. Hope is something greater, and thank God, it transcends physical results as we assess them.

Hope is universal across the religious spectrum, but we generally confuse this with wish-fulfillment. Examples of this can be found in the “Prosperity Gospel” messages of religious hucksters, promising wealth if you get right with God, and also send them a monetary token of your commitment.

Whenever we pin our faith on outcomes, we’re setting ourselves up for disappointment, and we’re setting God up for what we perceive as failure. It presumes we know what we really need, and it also assumes God is more concerned with what’s going on around us than what we’re experiencing within.

Fulfillment of wishes does bring happiness, in some cases. However, this feeling generally is fleeting, as we realize we replace one want with another, or that the thing we expected to fill the void we carry around didn’t do the trick.

Beware of any religious leader who tells you God wants you to be happy. True, we’re called to joyfulness, but like the difference between wishes and hope, joy transcends the bumps, bruises and abuses of daily life.

Things around us don’t have to change for us to have hope. Our ever-growing wish list doesn’t have to be satisfied for us to understand joy.  In fact, the more we focus on wishes and happiness, the less hope and joy we’ll have. Real hope doesn’t ebb and flow with circumstances, and joy isn’t a mood: it’s a state of being, transcendent of any suffering, disappointment or unfulfilled expectations.

Now, that’s a gift that keeps on giving.

Faces of Death: Halloween to coffee, we’re obsessed

By Christian Piatt

            This Halloween was the first time my son, Mattias, truly enjoyed all of the excitement available. He insisted on dressing up as Dash from the movie, The Incredibles. I swallowed my disdain for children acting as walking media billboards and conceded. It made him happy, after all.

            I noticed that, the older the kids got, the gorier and more frightening their costumes became. Pumpkins and superheroes gave way to horror movie icons, dismembered zombies and other mavens of mayhem.

It’s all a thin façade. Even in moments when I feared Mattias would be scared by the ghouls, he plopped a handful of candy into their bag and proclaimed, “You’re not scary. You’re a nice monster.”

Across the city, there a are symbols of our morbid fascination with death.  Even in the front yard of Mattias’ day care center, they have mock graves, mounded up with fresh dirt, complete with skeletal hands, reaching for unsuspecting prey. Cartoon ghosts, makeshift graveyards and haunted houses reveal that we’re terrified of death, yet we have no idea how to talk about it.

Recently, I listened to the testimony of a cancer survivor who had undergone extensive chemotherapy. The most frequent question she received during her treatment had to do with her hair loss. Few had the nerve to ask about her physical suffering, he fears, the risk to her life, or even the more violent side-effects of the poison they pumped through her veins to annihilate the tumors.

After all, when your fighting for your life, she suggests, isn’t your cosmetic appearance a little farther down on the list?

An article on the anatomy of the human taste bud in The New Yorker explains what takes place in our brains when we experience flavors. Our gustatory system actually is a critical survival mechanism, attuned to telling us what is safe to eat and what is toxic. Those things that are sweet, savory and salty generally include nutrients our bodies crave.

Spicy and bitter foods, however, send immediate warnings to the brain that we may be ingesting something that can harm or kill us. The resultant chemical response is a rush of endorphins, similar to a “fight or flight” experience.

Though the initial prompt is to respond quickly – in this case, spit out the offending morsel – the following endorphin effect is quite pleasurable. This causes us ironically to crave spicy or bitter food, along with other adventurous and life-threatening activities.

We can even get a voyeuristic thrill out of watching others risk life and limb. If this wasn’t the case, the new “Jackass” movie that features sophomoric acts of self-abuse would not have grossed nearly $70 million.

We spend billions of dollars celebrating a holiday that glorifies death, and we flock to movies where alligators snip at the genitalia of deviants. We even crave the bitter nectar of our morning coffee, sipping our “cup of death” so-described by The New Yorker article, just to help us feel ironically more alive.  The caffeine doesn’t hurt either.

As innately mortal creatures, we long to understand our end in its many expressions. We make jokes about it, scare ourselves in safe doses and take curious pleasure in the suffering of others: as long as it’s not too real. The moment the shadow of death looms too closely, we retreat into a paralytic state. We avoid even saying the “D” word.

Churches often capitalize on this collective neurosis to make the transcendence of death the cornerstone of their ministry. Who hasn’t been approached with the age-old question, “if you died today, do you know where you would go?” The answer for all of us is “no,” and that’s scary.

We believe a number of things, but knowledge suggests a direct line into the mind of God. We’re better served when our churches provide opportunities to learn how to safely grieve, discuss loss and death, and to explore the mysteries of what exactly lies beyond.

The best we can hope for is a faith in the promise of something better, and a commitment to making the best of life, simply for the sake of life itself.

Spiritual, not religious: Your own personal Jesus

Brian, the pastor of a new church in Plano, Texas, works evenings at a coffee shop to make ends meet. His wife stays at home with their children, and their church is not to the point that it can support a full-time pastor.

As coffee shops grow in their social importance, pastors like Brian are realizing the value of spending time there. Some ministers have started book groups, knitting circles and even one-on-one counseling sessions at the corner coffee shop. Starbucks has become an extension of twenty-first century ministry.

As Brian prepared a drink for a young customer, they got into a discussion about occupations. He mentioned that he was the pastor of a church, to which she replied that she was spiritual, but not religious.

“Hey,” proclaimed Brian with a smile, “I’ve read a lot about you!”

In his book, Spiritual, but not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America, Robert C. Fuller says that one-fifth of the American population identifies themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” Approximately one in two Americans who do not attend a church identifies themselves in this way.

This means there are sixty million people in this country who feel some affiliation with a higher power, yet who are not connected to a religious organization. This is enough to make any pastor’s mouth water. The issues with reaching these folks in a meaningful way, however, are complex.

Prior to the 20^th century, says Fuller, the two terms “religious” and “spiritual” were used almost synonymously. This was partly because people considered spiritual life to be a public, shared experience. Since then, spiritual experience – along with many other experiences – has become increasingly private. While churches historically have been built to accommodate a corporate worship experience, the values of the culture around it have moved away from the model we still use.

Another big issue is a negative perception of church. From emotional, physical or sexual abuse to a more vague sense of alienation, people have been hurt by church. There is accountability for both parties in this case. Many churches still are reticent to engage people about the pain they’ve experienced in church, and chances are the last place people want to do this is at a church.

However, negative past experience isn’t an excuse to give up on organized religion. I have been hurt by church too, but I’ve also been hurt by family, friends and pretty much any other group of which I’ve been a part. Generally, we don’t walk away from these, so why should church be any different? Walking away not only means that the person who was hurt loses the chance to find healing from the source of their pain, but it also allows the harmful dynamics within the church to continue.

Finally, research shows that most people who identify themselves as spiritual but not religious don’t see the church as the only means – or even the best means – for spiritual growth. The perception is that we’re not doing our job in offering a large contingency of the public what they feel they need to be spiritually enriched.

We need to ask ourselves whether making connections with people is more important than our church membership. If we could meet weekly with a group of people at the coffee shop, but who would never attend our church, would we invest the time?

Those who solely measure success by worship attendance and giving totals will continue to struggle to reach this group of sixty million. Ministry to this group may not pay the bills, but it’s as important as any work we do within our institutional walls.

Intelligent design: Making a mockery of science

By Christian Piatt

(This column originally appeared in the Pueblo Chieftain newspaper)

I listened to a sermon series on intelligent design recently. The minister went through the many sophisticated organs, cells and systems within the human body, and after each example, he pulled out a coin. He went from cellular mitochondria to the visual cortex, pointing out each time how unlikely this system was to occur by accident. Each point was punctuated by another coin.

Many systems within the body are built upon preceding ones, and conditions had to be just right for us to become what we are, he pointed out. By the end, he had fifteen coins laid out on the lectern. The odds of flipping those fifteen coins and having them all land heads-up was about one in thirty-three thousand. How much more unlikely, then, are we to be here?

That depends. If you believe in infinite time and space, then you have to accept the concept of infinite probability. Given time and space without boundary, it’s reasonable to expect that everything that can happen ultimately will. This would include earth, humans, and other forms of intelligent life.

At this point, we can’t say how big or old the universe is, any more than we can claim whether or not this is the only universe there is.  For all we know, there are millions of other universes that existed before ours, or maybe they even exist in parallel to ours right now. If time has a beginning and an end, or that there are limits to the boundaries of the universe, our existence becomes less likely the product of random chance.

Asking ‘What are the odds?’ alone doesn’t really bother me, although I think it’s a weak argument for the existence of a Creator. But this same argument is the cornerstone of many proponents of teaching intelligent design in our schools, as an alternative to evolution.

There’s one big difference between evolution and intelligent design: the former is science and the latter isn’t. For an idea to be part of the scientific body of thought, you first have to develop a hypothesis and test it using scientifically recognized processes. If your findings support your initial hypothesis, you share your findings with the rest of the scientific community and allow them to try to replicate your results.

Over time, if your hypothesis continues to be supported, it becomes a theory. If evidence arises later that challenges the theory, it’s either changed or discarded. There’s no such thing as a scientific absolute. We only have theories waiting to be disproved.

Some may cry foul, claiming that intelligent design can’t be tested like this. After all, if we can’t prove the existence of God, how can we prove that any of the resultant byproducts are of God’s hands?

That’s why intelligent design isn’t science.

Although I believe personally that God created the universe, I don’t confuse my beliefs with the human-conceived scientific system. There are places in school for discussions such as these, including philosophy and comparative religion classes. I also think each family can impart their beliefs to their children, both at home and at church. But to cloud our understanding of what science is, promoting a religious agenda under the thin veil of scholarship, threatens to contaminate both science and faith.

Some scientists are guilty of making a religion of science. They confuse theory with fact and proclaim the human intellect as the prevailing standard by which all things must solely be measured.

Aristotle, the father of modern science, wisely recognized the limits of science and logic. Thomas Aquinas later claimed that this point where logic breaks down is where faith helps complete the picture.

The difference is that both Aristotle and Aquinas knew not to confuse faith and logic, and both understood the limits of each. The current creation-versus-evolution debate suggests that we haven’t evolved toward a greater truth in the meantime.

(Christian Piatt’s new book, “Lost: A Search for Meaning,” is available for pre-order at most online bookstores now.)