God Talk and the Arts

***If you are not an Evangelical Christian, then this post might not make much sense. Even if you are one, then you still might not identify. However, there are those who totally identify with what I am saying and it is to you (and I) that I write. So, here goes...***

Evangelical Christians pray out loud in groups. It's sort of like you're talking to God, who is invisible, but other people are there. We take turns. Sometimes we read a little bit from the Bible, to give us some food for thought. Then we pray. We talk out loud to God and others "listen in" on our conversation with Him.

Needless to say, this is an awkward experience.

One of the things that has bothered me about praying out loud is that I have a "prayer" type of talk and I have "normal" talk in everyday conversations. In the past, I've always felt strange about this. Why would I have certain phrases, word patterns, and expressions in my "out loud" prayers to God that seem so contorted, so "not normal" talking.

The experience parallels what we call "teacher talk" in the ESL classroom which is more enunciated and formal to accomodate an ESL student, or maybe it might parallel "motherese" in which a mother talks with a higher pitched voice in repetitive patterns to a child. Barack Obama is another example which parallels "prayer talk". He has a different type of "talk" for addressing the nation than he does with his staff or with his wife and children than he does when he speaks. With God, we do the same thing. We have "God talk".

I guess what I'm getting to is that for Evangelical Christians (and other types of Christians who do this whole "praying out loud" thing in groups), some of us feel like we need to appologize for "praying out loud" in a way that is different from our "normal speech". We, or certainly I, have asked the questoin, "Why do I talk to God differently than I talk to these other sorts of people?" Am I trying to look eloquent or something? Am I trying to make sure my "speech" sounds nice and why am I so focused on that anyway? Shouldn't I just pray to Him like I would talk in "normal" speech, instead of treating Him like I'm talking to an audience or uploading a podcast or something? Yes, I understand that motives are part of how we speak and behave towards God and other people, but even though it is related to "God Talk", I believe that a person who theoretically had perfectly pure motives would still talk to God differently while praying out loud.

And here we finally get to my two points about why we don't need to get all uptight about how we pray to God. First, we never have "normal" speech. We talk in different ways to different people. We talk "teacher talk" or "motherese" or "friend to friend" talk or "father to son" talk or "son to father talk" for that matter. There is no type of speech that is independent from our relational dynamics, and there's no reason that we aren't going to have "God talk" either.

Second, I don't think we should preclude prayer from the category of the arts. What I mean by this is that we write music, poetry, stories, and create works of art, all of which we often dedicate as forms of worship to God. Think of a music worship service at church. We sing these completely "abnormal" types of things to God and they are absolutely NOT close to "normal speech" in our daily lives. However, it's not like I look at a Christian Singer-Song writer and say, "Wow. That guy is really weird, putting his prayer to music and then inviting us to sing our words to God." Well, maybe that does seem sort of weird if you think about it. However, we usually think of musical worship as a form of art that we create and present to God as a gift. It's almost as if I were Romeo reading poetry to Juliet. She is up on the second floor balcony and we are down below. The poetry is not normal speech. So, I think it's okay and not phony that the words, patterns, and vocabulary in our out-loud prayers to God are a little weird compared to normal speech. In singing a song or praying to God, we might as well paint a picture of a sunset, present it to Him, and tell Him that we enjoyed His sunset so much that we decided to paint a picture of it. That is a form of art that is worship, be it a song or prayer or a painting.

So, why not put prayer in a similar category as art and music or other forms of creativity? Why are we (primarily Evangelical Christians) so concerned with talking to God in a "normal way" when we pray out loud to Him in groups? Instead, why not treat our prayer "phrases" and "patterns" and "unusual vocabulary" as we might a song or poem or a piece of art that we are presenting to God as a beautiful way of reflecting Him in our creativity? Spontaneous and artistic.
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For a related talk on prayer to God, check out another blog entry called Dropping the F-bomb. It is the other side of prayer, beautiful yet rough around the edges.