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Morning Reflection
June 20, 2025
“You can’t pray a lie – I found that out.”
Huck Finn, from Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Reflection by Peter Vanderveen
Some statements don’t need a lot of commentary to be understood. They just need attention enough to be taken in. It has always seemed to me that Mark Twain was a master at delivering observations that were so candid, so unvarnished, and so reflective of human experience that their truth was immediately evident and surprisingly uncomplicated.
There are a lot of books written about prayer and praying. It is my occupational hazard, periodically, to have to wander into these. I think I can justly say that I have never found a single book, or a single chapter, or even a paragraph in all that I have read on this topic that was insightful or edifying. We get caught up in the hapless task of trying to explain mysteries, so that we can give exact form to rituals that can then be invoked for maximum effectiveness. With prayer, such attempts squelch the very thing they’re meant to encourage.
I think that all one really needs to know about prayer is what Twain noted. It’s a mode of speaking that allows no lies. Huck had tried to pray. He said, “So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn’t come. Why wouldn’t they? I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing… but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie – and He knowed it.” Huck gives voice to such an important, vital impasse.
We have come to a point in our culture where lying no longer matters. It’s no longer considered a vice. It’s just part of the endless gaming that happens between us. Lying is justified as being expedient, advantageous and a very useful ploy, sometimes, the more outrageous the better. For when no one can really take you at your word then no consequences stick; you’re not bound to anything; you can say whatever you think that in the moment will give you a step up. And nothing said has any substance or any lasting effect.
If this is how we choose to speak, meaning is emptied out of everything. Maybe, then, we can simply entertain ourselves to death.
But, then, maybe the church stands as an impasse to this downward spiral. Maybe it’s best thought of as a house of prayer, where all the easy words of our lying are stymied. And maybe this leaves us in silence, which, at very least, can be cleansing. But the promise remains that prayer can create the space where truth can be spoken – the truth that reveals who we really are.
The next time you step into a church, just remind yourself that “you can’t pray a lie.”
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