Are Your Thoughts and Prayers Bullshit?

No.

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Over a month ago now, there was another school shooting.

Another, she tosses out, as if this is so commonplace as to no longer be notable. But this one hit home for me as it occurred up the street from my parents’ house. The house I grew up in. I have walked or driven past this Christian school approximately one billion times. I know someone who works there. I’ve been in touch with the librarian in the past about potential school visits. When I worked retail in high school, two of my coworkers were students there, including one I had an absurd crush on. He had boy-band hair. My school bus as an elementary schooler dropped kids off at the attached daycare after school each day. What I’m saying: this school was part of my upbringing.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: post-tragedy social media is the very worst of social media. It is salivating at gore, demanding salacious details and refreshing press conferences. It is the hashtags and the story shares; it is the proclamations that we could stop this and we’re failing our children. It is a race to hold ourselves up as The Most Caring, The Most Compassionate, The Most Concerned. It is the desperate finger-pointing, spitting out characteristics of Bad Guys before the bodies are cold.

Then a few weeks later, on the first day of school after winter break, in our teeny tiny town, a school bus hit a 4K student in the school parking lot and killed him. He died. He was there and he had his backpack on and then he died. He His mom sent him to school and then never kissed him again because he died. It was horrifying, and I can’t stop thinking about it. I love you, I told my kids as they got on the bus the day after. They barely said it back, k-love-you-bye, and I reached out, stopped them from getting on the bus, and held their faces in my hands. I made them all say it, right to my face. Okay, Mom! I LOVE you! They squirmed away.

It’s the guns. It’s the bus company. It’s the bus transfer system. It’s the bus driver. It’s the abuse. It’s the Christian schools. It’s the superintendent. It’s the teens. It’s social media. It’s the parents (it is always, always, always the parents—when in doubt, blame the mother for something). We swoop down corridors with blood dripping from our teeth, desperate to find someone to whom we can point the finger. Just clear that up. Just fix that issue. Just implement this policy. Just vote this way. Just fire that person. And then, then, it stops. This suffering ends.

Your God doesn’t make sense, people shriek, when suffering abounds. Your thoughts and prayers are bullshit.

No, I want to respond. These are the places where he makes the very most sense. These are the places where we feel the strongest that there is more to this world than bloodshed, and there is “light and high beauty” forever beyond our reach¹.

The majority of politicians are, and have always been, disingenuous grifters but that doesn’t mean your prayer doesn’t matter or isn’t action.

To see Christians—people who claim to believe that Jesus died and rose three days later for the salvation of souls—saying that prayer is bullshit tells me that they have no idea what prayer is.

This is where the great chorus of people comes in accusing me of all matter of things: ignorance, a lack of care, or the internet’s newest favorite term: spiritual bypassing.

I could write thousands of words (I have) on the importance of activism, the Christian’s moral responsibility to vote, the importance of educating yourself about issues affecting your neighbor. I could write thousands more (I have) on the importance of prayer and works, on the essential act of moving your hands and feet. I will go to my school board meetings, talk to my actual neighbors, listen to podcasts and articles and essays and spend time every week walking alongside you, the reader, encouraging you to try and make earth as it is in Heaven. I will sign pledges and send checks. And still, I will be told by a girl typing from her couch that I’m a shitty Christian because I don’t post enough carefully-designed Canva graphics about a particular brand of violence, or because I bring up Jesus instead of rolling around with her in despair. An overemphasis on the positive, someone indignantly emailed me last week. I am not using joy as resistance, in her eyes; I’m covering my eyes and ears to suffering because it doesn’t fit my aesthetic.

I care more than you is the prized triumphant cry of the Online Christian. These are the people who can joyfully pontificate on Instagram about charity to those around the world but are unable to give charitable assumptions towards anyone who doesn’t read the same news outlets.

Some days I long to not be a Christian so that I can say my first thoughts, which often involve the middle finger emoji. But so much of my Christianity is getting past those first thoughts. Feeling the wave of swear words and defensiveness and hurt feelings and then reaching deep, deep down between my ribs to something truer.

With the utter lack of imagination so characteristic of the self-righteous, this brand of Online Christian Warrior can’t conceive that I both believe laws are incredibly important and that our attempts to end all suffering are futile.

In one of the sermons featured in Weight of Glory, CS Lewis talked about how one upside of war is that it reminds us all of our own mortality. We’re often far from death, seeing it as something distasteful that will only happen to other people. Not us and ours; no, we’ll surely live forever before dying happy, peaceful deaths in hospice care while folk music plays softly in the background. We’ve forgotten that life is temporary and precious. It’s all a gift that we are not entitled to. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away², Job said. Blessed be the name of the Lord.

The hubris required to insist that if only the world did what you thought it should do, suffering would end, would baffle my mind if I didn’t see it so often. And at the same time, it makes the deepest sense. It’s a way of holding things at arms length: well, of course horrible things are happening, because someone somewhere is doing something I don’t think they should do. That line of thinking is safe and secure. Other people suck, and it’s because of their suckiness that sucky things happen. That there would be mystery in this world, or calamities, or 4-year-olds getting hit by school busses—it must be someone’s fault. It must be something we can fix. There is no being at work, after all, larger than my senator, who fills his pockets with the coins of the NRA. Capitalism, man, they type on iPhones.

Fires rage across California. People lose homes, and dogs, and photographs. I beam my thoughts across the world, refraining from posting them—I am thinking of you, reader. May my humanity touch your humanity. I hope you can still somehow feel the tender love of the God of the universe. Endless stories are posted about eating the rich: it is their fault, it is their hubris, they have stolen the water from the indigenous populations, and who really cares if a bunch of Malibu beach houses burn? Isn’t this like Sodom and Gomorrah? Didn’t they stop funding their fire department? Isn’t the captain a lesbian or something? Didn’t Elon Musk do something stupid? Don’t these people care about Gaza?

I wonder if they know that there are 75,000 homeless people in Los Angeles.

I say to pray, but know this, too: last night as I watched dishes, I muttered "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” so many times that the 3-year-old started repeating it. And isn’t that, too, a prayer? Isn’t that “a surge of the heart; a simple look turned toward heaven . . . a cry of recognition and of love, embracing both trial and joy”³?

If you think resharing someone’s Instagram reel of them crying in a car while ranting about AR-15s is more meaningful than prayer—well. What do I know? There but for the grace of God go I. I’ll be over here, with my rosaries and rituals, forcing my kids to look me in the eyes before they get on the bus.

I will take your thoughts. I will take your prayers. My hands are open, begging for them. I will rip my heart out and show you its insides and there, you can pour those thoughts and prayers in. Layer ‘em up, people. Bring it on.

I’m prepping for our next Ask Me Anything letter. Please feel free to leave any questions in comments here or in a response to this email. You do not need to be a full subscriber to submit a question. Past examples here and here.

On My Nightstand

• Be Ready When the Luck Happens by Ina Garten: I’m admittedly not a huge Ina Garten fan but I really enjoyed her memoir, and have been binging Barefoot Contessa episodes ever since I finished! I had no idea her childhood was so abusive, and it’s really refreshing to see a celebrity so over the moon in love with her husband. A sweet read for the start of the year, and an uplifting light in some heavy days lately.

• My Kardashian Soft Spot: Fantastic, compassionate piece on finding empathy for all people who struggle with body image. “A better body culture will not spring from perpetual fury toward people who are suffering under the same standards as the rest of us even if they have their riches to keep them warm at night.”

• The Outrage Over 100 Men Only Goes So Far: This was incredibly hard to read, and if I believed in trigger warnings I’d give a thousand. But it was a meaningful look at how our sexual culture harms women—even when they claim they’re doing legal, empowering actions. “In a more liberal, less religious world, do we know where the lines are, and where to go and where to stop?”

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In case you missed these Letters:

Mary as the OG Strong Female Character

Mom Shaming is Anti-Family

The Idolatry of a Well-Ordered Plan

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1. Is she going to reference Tolkien in every letter this year, the Year of Lothlorien? Maybe, folks! Stay tuned!

2. God did not make death, nor does he delight in the destruction of the living (Wisdom 1:13). Do not twist my words to suit the theological position that God sends school shooters as part of his plan or some other nonsense.

3. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2558, citing St. Therese of Lisieux—my girl forever.