Phatic Language, Vulnerable Prayers, and Augustine.
Our cultural perfectionism is withering us.
(One note. These topics can touch on complex areas and can engage the mental health sphere. In that respect this short article exploration is only meant to work on the level of will and reflection. This is not at all to imply that mental healthcare and the church should be kept apart, rather they should work together for such need.)
Hey welcome—
As we begin these articles. We need a good place to start, so let’s start with an experiment in perspective.
‘Hello’ ‘how are you?’
‘Oh, I’m good thanks.’
Within the study of linguistics, as I understand it, there is a category of ‘phatic language.’ This is the kind of non-referential language we use when first meeting people (like the example above), and is often used to establish a rapport of sociability, build social bonds, and usually falls into ritualized formulas.
But like two dancers in a ballroom, if one lets down the rhythm, the whole interchange falls apart, and there appears a horrible silence. We feel self conscious.
Built into this ritualized exchange are elements of self-presentation. We want to be perceived by others in a certain way. There are some things about ourselves we wish to present, and others we want to conceal or push to the background. Now, this is key. The implicit within all of these proceedings is this: we feel that to present our best self to another, we have to present our happy, flourishing self. But in that silence, well, we feel the other things.
And so self-presentation makes an amount of sense when meeting someone at work or at a party for the first time, it makes less sense when it comes to a friend, and even less so with a very close friend. And so it leads to an uncomfortable question in us: how far do I extend my boundaries of self-presentation?
So, it’s now that I want to transpose this conversation onto the activity of Christian prayer.
Let’s take the example of the prayer Christ gave us, known as the Lord’s Prayer, to analyze how we understand what it means to speak to God—this, then, shining a light on how we understand the relationship itself. If we are tempted to think that the opening stanza, ‘Our Father in heaven, holy is your name,’1 might be pleasantry, perhaps we should reconsider this not as a formulaic greeting, but as an existential, referential statement.
He is Father, His kingdom is good and everlasting, and His holiness is of such a quality that even His name carries the shape of it. From there the prayer continues on, astonishingly to things we, ourselves, are concerned about. Far from the dissonance of saying ‘oh, I’m good,’ while understanding the untruth of it—pushing away that horrible silence—and wittering along with too many words to keep it away, we are invited to acknowledge every inch of our need, look it right in the face, and offer it to the God who desires to bring order ‘on earth as in heaven.’
There’s no need for pretense here. Nor for self-aggrandizement, or indeed, of keeping our shame in our pocket. We came into the grand courts poor, courts that were, to our surprise, not cold, but felt like the morning sun in a garden. God was omniscient before we said ‘Father,’ and yet He still wanted us to say it.
We are encouraged to offer all that we have stored in the recessed shadows. If we take the cross seriously, God already had a grasp on all of the short falls that dwelled within us—what he wanted was not theatre, but to save us from it all. He is gently inviting us towards this: to offer up what we have for what he has.
And so as we begin to slow down, ‘be still—and know,’ perhaps first we need to sit with our need. We may even take our dissonance and see it as a gesture towards something. In our desiring for happiness, for goodness—while aware of our incapacity for achieving or maintaining those things—we might see the shape of a God who, as he said, desires to restore all things, and ‘make them new.’ 2
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“O God, the light of every heart that sees Thee, the Life of every soul that loves Thee, the strength of every mind that seeks Thee, grant me ever to continue steadfast in Thy holy love. Be Thou the joy of my heart; take it all to Thyself, and therein abide. The house of my soul is, I confess, too narrow for Thee; do thou enlarge it, that Thou mayest enter in; it is ruinous, but do Thou repair it. It has that within which must offend Thine eyes; I confess and know it; but whose help shall I implore in cleansing it, but Thine alone? To Thee, therefore, I cry urgently, begging that Thou wilt cleanse me from my secret faults, and keep Thy servant from presumptuous sins, that they never get dominion over me. Amen.” —Augustine.
Matthew 6
Revelation 21