c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a pastor, writer and software developer living in Winston-Salem, N.C.)

UNDATED _ Years ago, while an ardent seminarian, I went to a spiritual director and said,”Teach me to pray.” In response, he pointed me to Psalm 139. Its first line caught my eye:”Lord, you have searched me out and known me.”But not much else happened. After a few sessions with him, I moved on to other interests. I wasn’t ready to pray.

Oh, I tried. I worked at it. I sat in chapel and tried to muster spiritual depth. I took long walks and tried to commune with God. I read books. I took up causes. I’m sure my words were eloquent, even honest. But my heart wasn’t in it.

Real prayer didn’t happen until I exhausted my own resources. I faced wounds I couldn’t heal myself. I had questions no turning of pages or tapping of keyboard could answer. Only then, in an emptiness I hadn’t chosen, did prayer from the heart ascend to God.

Something similar happened to the first disciples. They asked Jesus for instruction on how to pray. They dutifully committed his words to memory. But their own sweet hour of prayer would come later, when Jesus was gone and they were alone, confused and powerless.

Maybe that’s the starting point of all prayer: not a determination to accomplish, but an emptiness that nothing else can fill.

I worry about public religion in America. Religion is hot stuff these days. Senators wave Bibles, preachers wade into politics, and politicians take polls to see how much public religiosity they ought to emanate.

Zealots bomb abortion clinics and mobilize highly focused energy against specific candidates. Like Chinese Communists quoting the”Little Red Book”of Chairman Mao, fundamentalists claim the Bible as an absolute mandate for their bigotry and hatred.

True believers are a frightening force. They are beyond reason, beyond negotiation and compromise, beyond ambiguity _ in other words, beyond the constraints that make democracy possible in a pluralistic society.

In time, bullies and charlatans get exposed. In time, politicians will abandon public religiosity, the way they abandoned anti-Communism once red-baiting ceased to have political currency. In time, the increasingly strident and extreme views of politically ambitious preachers will wear out their 15 minutes of fame.

But for now, the power-hungry are turning people’s deepest needs and emotions to their personal ends. Without understanding people’s hunger for God or respecting it, the power-minded see our faith needs as so much ore to be mined. They toy with powerful symbols. They offer easy scapegoats for our personal unrest. They distort our common sources of inspiration. They do, in other words, precisely what Jesus refused to do.

While the merchants of sound-bite ply their trade, wounded souls search for God. A woman writes,”I’m in an empty place.”A teenager says,”Pray for my mother. She has cancer.”A church leader begs for insight. A family struggles with how to care for their aging father.

The real faith work of this country isn’t done on a grand public stage. It’s done by the broken, the empty, the wounded _ a fellowship of saints that includes most all of us at one time or another.

I believe the voice God listens for isn’t the strident declamation of the true believer, or the Scripture-quoting certainty of the self-righteous, but the small voice that begs for mercy and says,”I thirst.” In the end, our neediness and emptiness won’t be resolved by hating gays or tinkering with the Constitution or bludgeoning school boards or bullying ever-adaptable politicians into digging out their Bibles.

In the end, we will discover that we cannot save ourselves. Public religiosity will prove an empty show. We will need the real thing. No matter how we vote on Nov. 3, we will wake up Nov. 4 with our souls still crying out for God. The politicians and preachers who so eagerly seek to harvest our discontent won’t have heard a word our souls are saying.

We will discover, like many proud folks before us, that faith is pure gift, and it comes only when we set aside pride, ambition and control. Faith isn’t about ballots or bullets. Faith is about bread that we cannot provide ourselves.

DEA END EHRICH