Prayers for the Distance

 
Last week, I took a break from unpacking and organizing all my things into drawers and bins, which I’ll likely soon misplace, to visit one of my favorite museums: The Tenement Museum in New York. Have you been?

The Tenement Museum is a set of guided tours inside two tenement buildings on Orchard Street in the Lower East Side, which once housed many immigrant families in the late 1800s. It’s a very immersive tour. Rather than put all the things the owners found, when they bought the building 30 years ago, into a different space to observe as artifacts in glass cabinets, this museum offers an in-depth look at what was once the neighborhood and home of real people. And, in that, throughout the tour you get to deeply connect and listen to someone’s story.

You walk through their hallways. You look at the knitting of the tablecloth on their dinner table, the fray of the carpet on the rug in the bedroom, the clothes hanging on a thin string by the fireplace where coal furnaced the apartment, and you see the whole floor’s shared toilet, the deck of cards they used to play. These are all accessible, within your reach.

The tour moves you through a home while sharing the story of the family who lived there. You learn when and why they came to that Tenement, what their experience was as an immigrant at that time, and what their family did to survive, if they did,
before leaving the Tenement for the next thing. It’s a remarkable and intimate experience.

As a person who loves museums: sometimes, when I visit a museum, I find myself in literal awe of what I’m seeing. I just can’t really wrap my head around seeing something from 500 BC or before. When all I have is a glance at an object, it seems very mysterious to me and I try to conceptualize the time - okay, this is from thousands of years ago - and I end up feeling the distance between that object and its time and my own.

But the Tenement Museum is different. During this recent visit, I toured the tenements of two Prussian/German immigrant families who lived in the building in the 1870s. A time that feels, still, far away. But, on the tour I learned about a woman named Caroline who ran a saloon in the basement of her building. One year her upstairs neighbor Natalie’s husband went missing and Natalie needed to start working as a dressmaker to keep the apartment and care for her three children. So, she went to Caroline at the saloon downstairs and Caroline helped her get other women in the building to buy dresses from her.

When I heard this story, I started thinking about all of the friends and neighbors that I’ve met in apartment buildings and how close you can become to people you see every day. When I looked again at the clothes hanging on Natalie’s thin string, I thought about all the side businesses that people I know have started to support themselves and family as a single parent.

One of the reasons why this is my favorite museum is because every time I take a tour there and explore a tenement, I find myself learning something I feel like I would never get in another museum or from a history book. Learning about a period of time from a person’s story, I get to understand why people had the objects they did and absorb some of the emotion behind their experiences. I end up discovering that I can relate to a part of this person in the 1870s.

And this close encounter inside someone else's story makes the distance between now and then start to feel smaller.

When I looked at the scripture passage for today from the book of Psalms, the intimacy of the Psalm reminded me of my time at the Tenement Museum, mostly because the first thing I asked myself was, “What can we learn from this close encounter inside someone else’s prayer?”

Because, sometimes, even the Bible feels distant. Not just in that the story is time tried and tested, but also distant in the way it moves and takes shape in our life. Our own intimacy with Scripture and God can feel mysterious and far sometimes. In moments where we feel distance between ourselves and what we are feeling and what we want and what we know, where can we go?

I personally think the Psalms are a good place to start.

The Psalms are unlike other books in the Bible. It’s not necessarily storytelling, in the way other books are, rather it’s a compiled collection of intimate conversations with God, a collection of prayers. In the Psalms, many authors speak very honestly with God in their conversation. The Psalms are about honest prayer. When reading, I find it equally refreshing and terrifying because I've gone through my own teachings over the years from multiple faith traditions and theologies about what prayer can and can’t be, and about what I feel comfortable saying in a prayer and what stretches me.

The Psalms liberate us from all of that. Read some of these Psalms, the words can be graphic and strange and severe. The authors use their words to call it like they see it and feel it. That’s what honesty looks like.

We have 150 Psalms in our Bible. There are Psalms about joy and praise, and a lot of them, most of them in fact, are laments about anger, frustration, conflict, fear. They are making demands of God to change things in life and in the world that they feel are wrong. Sometimes they call out other people they’re struggling with and sometimes they call out God.

In Psalm 58:8, the Psalmist is furious at another person, and they ask God to “Let them be like the snail that dissolves into slime.”
In Psalm 6:6, a person in such anguish paints a vivid picture for us and says, “I am weary with my moaning; every night I flood my bed with tears; I drench my couch with my weeping.”
In Psalm 44:24, a person feels deeply betrayed and asks God directly, “Why do you hide your face?”

That last one feels particularly poignant to me, asking, God, where are you? The Psalmists, too, felt that distance at times.

What’s intriguing, and beautiful to me, about these Psalms, is that they often, not always but often, in their lament and anger and grief, find a moment to name something they know about God and life that is good.

We see this happen in Psalm 90. Psalm 90 is a prayer for what cannot yet be seen. This is a prayer for someone’s deepest hopes. It’s the only Psalm attributed to Moses suggesting that it's the oldest Psalm and a Psalm written by someone who definitely felt distance. Moses grew up fostered by a family he wasn’t born to, he felt very inadequate when God called him, and he traveled with the people of Israel, leading them to a promised land that he himself never even made it to.

Still, in moments of doubt, Moses found reassurance in God, the people around him, and in the remembrance of those who came before him. He remembered that his work was interconnected with that of God’s people through-out time, no matter the distance.

In verse 4 we read,
“For a thousand years in your sight
are like yesterday when it is past,
or like a watch in the night.”

Here, the Psalm moves from a thousand years to a passing day to a watch in the night. Moving through the prayer, it closes the gap from what feels like eternity, to this moment in the dark night of the prayer. Where Moses knows God sees them.

There, they name that in that moment they feel that they are consumed by God’s anger, that their sins are laid bare, and their life is like a dream in the night, only coming to an end with a sigh. At the end of this prayer, after naming all their feelings, Moses prays for the frailty of human existence to our God of the ages, everlasting to everlasting, that they may have as many days of gladness as they do affliction.

And that God’s steadfastness, compassion, and wisdom and love,
“be manifest to your servants,
and your glorious power to their children.
Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us,
and prosper for us the work of our hands—
O prosper the work of our hands!”

So, perhaps one thing to learn from a close encounter inside of a Psalm is that what we are feeling and what we know are both our truths. And when we offer up our honesty in prayer, we make room for grace and praise to enter the open space we may feel between.

One of the foundational truths of counseling is that we have to be honest with ourselves in order to begin healing. It’s true for our mental well-being and for our spiritual well-being, as well. “Over and over the Psalmists attest to the reality that when we open our minds and hearts fully to God, then we open ourselves, whether we know it or not, to the possibility of being transformed…”

By naming what we feel, we let go of some of the things in our way, to make room for joy and happiness and laughter. We remember how our story is connected to God and to those around us and to those who came before and those who will come after.

This next year as we work and discern and embrace joys and challenges, there will be a lot of prayer, I’m guessing. Sometimes it's hard to find the words to name what we are feeling. There may be times where we feel distant from each other, and we might feel distant from God. I feel comforted and reassured to know that, if ever we do feel that way, we don’t have to go very far to find some prayers for that distance.

If we go to the Psalms, we have an opportunity to immerse ourselves in a close encounter with honest prayer and gain some words, and hopefully some wisdom from it. If we listen deeply, to ourselves, to each other, and to God, we will learn something. It doesn’t mean that all the problems will be fixed or healed in the way we ask, noticeably the Psalms themselves don’t ever tell us what happened next. Perhaps that’s not the point. But I find it true that the more we are honest ourselves, the more we listen to others as they share their truths, and the more we open up ourselves to let go of what we are holding tight and share that burden with each other and with God - the distance between ourselves and what we are feeling and what we want and what we know will become smaller.

Claudio Carvalhaes is a professor of worship at Union Seminary and he wrote that… “...when we pray together, we tap into a force that is within, around, and beyond us. Through that power, we learn to adapt and create unthought possibilities. The world as it exists is never the final answer. With God, the world is always open to becoming something else, always looping and circling into new ways of flourishing. Praying with one another teaches us that we are never done. Through prayers God changes us as we change the world, and God becomes more significant than we first thought.”

The distance between us and God becomes smaller.

“With God we move, we cry, we survive, we become, we organize, we struggle. Prayers remind us that, through God, we understand that to become human is far more than the indoctrination of any human domino. Instead, we learn that we are always collective, in our own communities as well as our communities with other species and the earth. Our prayers are liturgist where God transforms the world through us.”

Even though these Psalms were written a long time ago by ancestors no longer with us, they tell us the stories of hardship, the stories of pain, the stories of loss, the stories of celebration, the stories of praise. Sometimes opening the Bible is very hard to do and sometimes having a conversation is very hard to do. In those times, when the distance feels so great, these Psalms remind us that there were others before us tapping into that same force that is within, around, and beyond us.

The Psalms are a book where God isn’t speaking to us, but we are speaking to God. And this is our Holy Scripture. God cares about our yearnings, God cares about our honesty, our asking, and our trying. God lived on earth in Jesus Christ, flesh to flesh, to be that much closer to us as we share these things.

It’s a great reminder for this morning that, while we too will perish, undoubtedly, eventually, the work we do will not. The lives we lead will not. The stories we share, the actions we take, the love we extend, the care that we give, and the risks for the greater good we lean into, or even attempt, will not.

It might not be preserved in a museum, but it is a part of the larger narrative of our story as God’s people. It is a testament to our experience, just as the Psalmists shared theirs.

Our time in ministry together, will be its own testament. And I’m excited for this year. I’m excited to see what we will learn. I pray that in all that we do, and in the ways we listen and grow and change, we be continually reminded, in our prayers, of the wisdom around us, in us, and gained through us.

Prosper the work of our hands, for the journey, God. Amen.

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