Sentimentalism and Honest Prayer

j.j.

“The great enemy of the church today is not atheism but sentimentality…” – Stanley Hauerwas

I am a bad prayer (pray-er).  There are probably a good number of reasons for this which can be easily diagnosed.  First off, I am a huge sinner.  If the option to open myself up to God, confess my sins, offer thanks, and ask for help is presented to me, I would rather run to the library and get my head in a book than put myself in that vulnerable position.  Which is closely related to the second reason I’m bad at praying: because I find it easier to interact with ideas than I do with real human emotion.  I’m not saying i’m necessarily bad at it, its just easier.  And if I am feeling particularly unable to deal with feelings, then I would rather run off into the world of ideas.

What’s interesting about this is that I like the world of ideas.  I feel at home there, and I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing.  What’s dangerous is if I use the world of ideas as an escape from a reality that I feel incapable of handling.  (I would make the same argument for the much-praised world of ‘embodiment’, which can easily become an escape from dealing with the real intellectual issues that plague our culture, leading to a ‘just do what you feel like’ ethic.)

What often happens is that I merely think through my prayers.  Instead of actually praying, I find that I will just run through in my head what it is I would like to pray for, and then leave it there.  It’s much safer that way – trust me.  And you get to skip the hard and time-consuming act of prayer itself, which can be left to the more ‘spiritual’ among us.

OK, so that is my confession.  As much as I like the idea of Kierkegaard’s “self before God,” I am scared to death to be that self.  I’d rather no one, especially God, remind me of my sinful pride.  I don’t like to be told where I have been wrong.  I fear rejection, even though I know that God is loving, forgiving, and slow to anger.  So I stick to ideas, hoping to appease God through good ideas and challenging people in the very ways I have fallen short so as to somehow prove to God I am on his side.

I would like to argue, however, that there is something else that has been my greatest barrier (besides sinfulness) to truthful prayer: sentimentalism.  Sentimentalism is one facet of what Leanne Payne calls the idolatry of feeling, which is an idol that is all too prevalent in the church today.  And I am turned off by sentimentalism so much, that whenever it shows its ugly head I have to flee the scene.

Sentimentalism is, according to Leanne Payne, “denying the evilness of evil, making a nest for it.”  She continues:

The qualities that sentimentality imposes upon its objects are the qualities of innocence.  A fiction of innocence must be maintained whereby such things as sweetness, dearness, littleness, blamelessness, etc. are imposed on the favored object.  And it is here that we come face to face with a direct impairment of the moral vision taken of its object.

If…one’s sentimentality is focused on a poodle, and all manner of good fiction is composed and imposed on this favored pet, then perhaps our sentimentality is harmless enough.  But when its objects are people or countries, we have quite another situation altogether.

She concludes with a passage from E.M. Forester’s A Passage to India: “To maintain the innocence one had projected upon a favored object it is often necessary to construct other, dangerous fictions about the things that object interacts with.”  Basically, sentimentalism is to reality what kitsch is to art: A nasty perversion which seeks not to emotionally manipulate, but is the result of an emotional manipulation which turns the object of sentimentalism into an idol.

Perhaps Jacques Ellul’s discussion of “Little Samuel” is helpful.  While Ellul never uses the term ‘sentimentalism’, he is clearly describing the same thing in this passage from Prayer and Modern Man:

Let us consider…the little Samuel painted by Reynolds and reproduced on so many First Communion remembrance cards.  He is a charming little fellow of four or five years of age, with a dimpled face and pretty curls neatly arranged, dressed in a lovely blouse.  He is kneeling, and his eyes are raised in ecstasy to heaven. He folds his chubby little hands in a graceful gesture, while a heavenly light breaks through the darkness at the upper left of the canvas and falls upon the cherub.  It is sweet, pleasing, comforting – all of which is supposed to be a rendition of the moving, gripping election of Samuel (1 Samuel 3), that divine election which burst in at a time when ‘the word of the Lord was rare’ and which fell upon a child who responded with the prayer, ‘Speak, for thy servant hears,’ and who began by receiving the tragic condemnation which he had to announce to Eli.

The drama of the prayer is here reduced to the level of the pleasant, the consoling, the sweet, the banal, the ordinary.  The prayer of little children is so nice.  This is how the bourgeois mentality has appropriated the sublimity of prayer to its own ends and has sugar-coated it.

Sentimentality is the sugar-coating of prayer and I want nothing to do with it.  The good thing for me, which I mentioned above, is that I prefer to run off into my head rather than work through the hard emotions of the inner life.  So, naturally, wherever sentimentalism is I am the first to notice it and I will gladly take the credit for being God’s whistleblower.  But this leaves me in the tough position of needing to learn to reject sentimentalism and not reject legitimate emotional expression.  I can’t pretend that a better option than sentimentalism is some sort of Godly intellectualism.  I mean, I’d like to pretend that, but I can’t do it in honesty.

Perhaps that is the word that I am looking for: honesty.  Emotional manipulation is nothing more than dishonesty, and dimming the lights (while softly picking the guitar) in order to obtain a certain emotion is hardly the narrow road we are called to follow.  So when people want to get together to pray, I am so sensitive to the rampant dishonesty in the room that I don’t have the slightest idea how to be fully myself in the midst of dishonest sentimental prayers.  This has its negative effects, as you can imagine, like I am so afraid of engaging dishonesty in a way that would compromise my integrity that I often decide not to engage it at all.  And unfortunately, this happens all the time.

So how am I to resist sentimentalism without despairing?  What might it mean for me to engage in prayer without giving into sentimentalism?  I don’t have many ideas, really.  All I can think is that it means I need to bring my whole self with me everytime I pray: my heart, my mind, my feelings, my thoughts, my desires, my hopes, my curiosities, and my contradictions.  Most of all, I need to bring my sin.  The great paradox in all of this is that I have avoided prayer because was both 1) afraid to bring my full self to God, and 2) I didn’t know how to bring my full self to God in the midst of sentimentalism.  So when I talked earlier about the tendency I have to go into my head and think instead of dealing with my emotions in prayer, that could have been my prayer! I didn’t have to run away, I just had to be honest.  I think God wants me to bring these thoughts to him in prayer because I think they hold the key to a deeper understanding and fuller engagement with my emotional life.

I hate sentimentalism – and I think that God wants me to pray about that.  In fact, that is probably the most legitimate prayer that I can offer God right now.  No, that’s not true.  The best prayer I can offer is this: Lord, teach me to pray!

S.D.G.