Interrogatory Prayer
Bill Gnade on the Questions We Don’t Ask
It’s the sort of thing you learn in first grade: that funny little looping squiggle with a dot; the cobra coming out of the basket; the melting, dripping candy cane. It’s exactly that sort of thing. But it is not generally the sort of thing that changes the lives of grown men.
Yet when I sat at the corner table of Santos-Dumont, a quaint old schoolhouse turned café hidden on the edge of a southern New Hampshire town, I wasn’t thinking about grade school. I was thinking about discipline in the Christian life; whether it was necessary, and whether I had any.
A Sedate Lesson
With me were Darren, a pastor whose ministry reaches from New Hampshire to Florida and beyond to Africa; Richard, an ordained minister holding a doctorate in preaching, whose ministry is similarly broad; and John, a pianist turned house-builder.
The topic was the same this day as it was every Thursday morning, when the four of us, middle-aged men all, would meet for cranberry scones and exotic caffeine. We were reading Devotional Classics, a collection of essays by a curious assemblage of Christian writers. We came together to ruminate on and encourage each other in the largely elusive practices of prayer, meditation, and fasting, and the dreaded (and far more elusive) mortification of the flesh.
On this day, something extraordinary happened. It wasn’t something miraculous; there was no sudden gust of holy wind, with golden tongues of flame dancing about (though there were moments of very hot air). Nobody levitated; nor did the heavens part in epiphanic glory as one of us channeled holy words. What happened was much more sedate: There was a lesson in punctuation. A lesson that, Darren said months later, was one of the most important lessons in his life.
What occurred actually began years earlier when I asked a simple question of myself about prayer. In light of Jesus’ words that we were to ask of him—liberally—for many things, I asked myself if I had ever asked Jesus for anything. Did I really ask?
To my brothers gathered around the table, I bemoaned what I thought was the disrespect—if not the loss—of that least of all biblical characters, not Saint Mark, but the question mark. I denounced the neglect of punctuation in prayer. I shared how I winced at prayers from pulpit and podium that blustered and fussed about asking without, in fact, ever asking.
I chided the Book of Common Prayer (I was the only Episcopalian among Evangelicals) for including not a single petition ending with a question mark. I wondered if anyone ever asked God a question. And I asked my companions if they could recall if they had ever inserted question marks in their communication with God.
“Whatsoever you ask in my name” and “Ask and you shall receive”; these are the words of Christ. But instead of asking, all one hears, from oneself and others, is this prayer, offered in simple or grandiose tones: “Lord, we just ask . . . we just ask that you bless us . . . give us . . . be with us . . . Lord, we just ask, we just ask.” Why then is so much asking bereft of a single question mark?
Bill Gnade works as a writer, poet, and photographer in New Hampshire, where he lives with his wife and son. He holds a BA in philosophy and theology from Gordon College.
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