Mmmmm, prayer

A psychologist friend of mine once told me, mid-conversation, that the ‘mmmmm-ing’ I was emitting and the ‘mmmmm-ing’ she was reciprocating with actually had official names: they were minimal encouragers. Minimal encouragers, I thought, that makes sense. You know how it goes: a parishioner needs a pastoral chat, a co-raconteur is regaling you with a tall tale, a colleague is offering up their latest evangelistic idea, and you find yourself ‘mmmmm-ing’. Perhaps without knowing it, you’re urging them on to tell you more, anticipating the next nugget of news, humouring them so that silence won’t discourage them, agreeing with the overall sentiment of what’s being said (or, at the very least, agreeing that they agree with the overall sentiment of what’s being said).

And it’s not just the one-to-one, in-the-flesh conversations in which the minimal encourager makes its presence felt. Think of the multitudinous phone calls you make to various agencies and companies that require a transaction of information. If we haven’t given, we’ve certainly gotten. (Indeed, whether branded as such or not, minimal encouragers are most likely the bread & butter of telemarketers; minimal enough to not be a nuisance but not feeble enough to give you an out, leaving lots of room for the all-important pounce upon the sympathetic buyer to whom it’s just occurred that yes they do need a new mobile phone and yes they would like to change gas & electricity providers… But I digress).

All of this gets very interesting when we come to the presence of ‘mmmmm’ in corporate prayer. In my vast 2½ years of ordained ministry experience thus far, I’ve been in enough corporate prayer meetings to hear (and give) my share of mmmmm’s. But have I, have we, stopped to ask: why do we do it? Are we just applying the same minimal encourager modus operandi to yet another verbal transaction, or is there something more to it? Don’t we risk drowning out the tail end of a prayer by offering up a pre-emptive mmmmm? What’s the volume ratio – loud guttural outbursts for the really-agreeable and pipsqueak hums for the somewhat-agreeable? Who is our audience – God whom we think should hear our muffled agreement, or our praying sisters and brothers whom we think should hear our muffled agreement? Is this about vicarious praying, ie. employing the same amount of emotional force to the post-prayer mmmmm as though we ourselves had prayed it? Are we enacting Romans 8:26 and the Spirit-inspired “groans that words cannot express”?

Lest I sound soap-boxy, at this point I should come clean. In times past, I have occasionally been an ‘mmmmm counter’. A what?!, I hear you ask. An ‘mmmmm counter’: one who mentally notes the amount of mmmmm’s emitted and received by each respective pray-er. I know, I know, pathetic isn’t it? Apart from being a little bizarre (what was I planning to do with my results anyway – publish a weekly ‘most-mmmmm’d prayer tally’?), the obvious hiccup is that it renders one completely unable to actually listen to the prayer, thus hindering any encouragement one can give or receive. So I’ve endeavoured to stop.

But lest I sound flippant, there are other dangers to unthinking mmmmm-ing. There’s a temptation to mmmmm only to the prayers said like you’d say them; perhaps the ones starting with ‘as it says in your Word…’ or the ones littered with ‘by the power of your Holy Spirit’ or the ones that end ‘for your glory’s sake…’ scratch your itch. There’s the inherent temptation for those of us who seek man’s praise to seek man’s mmmmm’s instead, customising our prayers according to what will achieve maximum agreement. For a well-practiced ‘mmmm-ing’ praying group, there’s an unspoken exclusion at work when a visitor doesn’t mmmmm. And then there’s just the ambiguity of what’s actually going on when anyone mmmmm’s, sometimes leading to misunderstandings aplenty: who hasn’t heard a grunt-sized ‘mmmmm’ after someone prays humility for someone else?

I realise, however, they are called minimal encouragers for a reason. There’s nothing intrinsically sinful about ‘mmmmm-ing’ at all, and like all communicatory gifts from our Lord, it can be used for godly or godless ends (hello Facebook). What strikes me as I position myself as a public pray-er more and more is that God looks at the heart (not surprisingly), so He’ll know if I am concentrating or counting. What’s more, He knows the hearts of my fellow pray-ers, so He sees what motivates their agreement, He sees what they’re resonating with. Further, how can He not be honoured by a group full of Christians vocalising their shared passion for Him? Personally, I know the countless times this has achieved its end: I’ve walked away uplifted by the praises of the people of God. And in the end, how can I judge or begrudge someone worshipping the Lord with every fibre of their being, and it just happens to sound like a whispered post-prayer ‘yes Lord, praise you Jesus’?

The preacher who wrote the letter to the Hebrews stops me short of de-mmmmm-ing my prayer life altogether. "But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called Today, so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness… Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another – and all the more as you see the Day approaching" (Heb 3:13, 10:25). Mmmmm indeed.

"Unpaid volunteer"

I have a love-hate relationship with tautologies. There are the harmless unintentional ones (hello ‘ATM machine’ or ‘forward planning’), and whilst I don’t love these, I smile politely whenever they’re uttered, since they’re often uttered in ignorance. To do otherwise (eg. by interrupting the speaker post-tautology and pointing out the error) often only provokes spluttered dismissiveness, the strength of which has been summoned in order to counteract the rudeness of the original tautological observation.

And then there are the hate-hate me-tautology relationships. ‘Past history’: what else is history going to be?! ‘Added bonus’: it’s already a bonus!! ‘Unsolved mystery’: that’s why it’s a mystery!! And ‘unpaid volunteer’: this must rank among these other monstrosities. It’s a recent discovery (again, whilst driving – coincidence?), and was plastered on the back of a garish fluorescent vest, the kind that accompanies the International Noise for Fundraising: money rattling in tin. I can’t remember what the cause was this time, and I don’t say ‘this time’ with any sense of denigration or resentment, but gosh: could you find a single traffic light in this town unmanned by a sunglasses-and-heart-on-sleeve-wearing devotee on any given bright Saturday afternoon? I think not.

(Perhaps I’ve got compassion-fatigue… Speaking of which, has anyone else noticed the strange logical follow-through here? When you’re fatigued usually, you’re meant to stop whatever’s tiring you out. Ipso facto, are we licensed for malice & callousness for a prescribed time? )

In any case, walking the well-trodden path shared by pedestrian & motorist was this “unpaid volunteer”. Now, I can deal with the tautology readily enough, gritted teeth notwithstanding. I understand the respective charity/organisation/cause is attempting to convey that these salt-of-the-earth men & women are giving up their own time to be there, with little more than an overheated water bottle & fold-up chair to keep them company.

What gets me is the fact that these ‘unpaid volunteers’ are being branded as such whilst asking for money. What an oversight from those at the higher echelons (…or whoever orders the garish vests)! Have Mr. & Mrs. Citizen become so untrusting that it’s not enough to call them volunteers but rather ‘unpaid volunteers’? Am I to be persuaded more forcefully to donate because of the fact that my $1.15 won’t be pocketed by the smiling bandit at my car window? Do I really need reassuring that my hard-earned dollars are going straight to the charity coffers, rather than to buttressing a kind of volunteer paradise where champagne & truffles flow on the corner of Smith & Johnson Streets? Is the absence of pay to be worn as a badge of honour, as distinct from those-dodgy-you-can’t-be-sure-about-them-‘volunteer’-types at the local Salvos? Am I so dim-witted that I can no longer do the mental math on what ‘volunteer’ means but rather need fluorescent reiteration? Does not this ‘unpaid volunteer’ label undermine the very Aussie spirit it is seeking to trade on, turning what was once regarded as ‘doing a good turn’ into ‘making sure everyone knows we’re doing this out of the kindness of our hearts… the KINDNESS of our hearts, did you hear?’?

As with all tautologies, I am thankful for the deafening clarity ‘unpaid volunteer’ brings, superfluity aside. Better this than ‘working for the dole’.

"Need a personal trainer?"

This was the question posed to me (and assumedly every other driver-by who perchanced to glance) last week, emblazoned as it was on the rear window of an earlier-model Hyundai. Not for this sticker the modesty and obscurity of bad formatting; this quad-word inquiry was brashly orange, unashamedly italicised, even outlandishly outlined by the kind of EXCLAMATORY black one associates with the Important To Know. It intrigued me for a number of reasons, (I thought it noteworthy at least, in-tracks stopping at best) for its blatant lack of follow-through. No contact name underneath, no business attached, no number provided; just an invasive, unsettling, presumptuous, and abrupt question.

Now now, yes yes, of course and naturally, I am not so misguided nor such an ignoramus to miss the wood for the trees here. The probable answer behind the Mystery of the Aimless Sticker lies in a small business venture that sought commercial cachet by vehicular vaunting, a venture and/or a vehicle that has since ceased trading, transferred owners, or changed numbers. So yes yes, now now, of course and naturally, I understand (with all the sympathy that gentle smiling and head-nodding can convey) that there is most probably an innocent explanation to the Curious Incident of the Sticker at Day Time (apologies to Mark Haddon).

But no amount of ‘trying to walk in its shoes and understand its point of view’ can disabuse, unburden, or jolt me out of that enduring sense of Thoreau-like ‘quiet desperation’. Having so brazenly raised the question, “Need a personal trainer?” and failed to deliver on context or follow-up, I am left panicked and self-doubting. ‘Do I? What can they see that I cannot? Have I so long ignored my training regimen that I’ve become ‘personally’ flabby? I must find out whether there’s substance to this question. I am now desperate to know whether it’s really true’. Notice the key word ‘whether’ here. Where previously there had been neither hint of insecurity nor shadow of self-consciousness, there now intrudes into view an ugly possibility, an insidious germ of an idea, which is ready to sprout Unattractiveness of such magnitude that it will be (to anyone with eyes to see) indubitable evidence of no commitment to ‘personal training’.

In this way, this sticker was the adhesive equivalent of a politician standing before parliament and positing, ‘Does the Member for Coonawarra need deodorant?’, and then sitting down. By virtue of asking, he has done a terrible thing: he has made the inquiry an accusation, and so infused the seemingly redundant with an assumption so potent that it will take all manner of defending and justifying and rationalising to erase the question’s memory.

And this is to say nothing of the unassailable ambiguity of the ‘personal training’ in question. What part/s of my ‘person’ need be ‘trained’? If an English-reading driver unaccustomed to our colloquial use of the term was passing by said sticker, what would they think? Must it always have to do with fitness? With sculpting and toning? Need it concern only that oddly intimate trainee-trainer relationship, which is at once deeply satisfying and yet fraught with two parts gratefulness, one part disdain? One could be forgiven for hearing the question come, 'Need (inter)personal training/need a life coach/need a personal hygiene trainer/need a trainer who can deal with the unmentionables and the undesirables of your life?'

I may be thus thought variously harsh, overwrought, or paranoid. Granted.

For a long-suffering pent-up fellow blogger

This one's for you, Phil.