God who suffered with us,
Please remember what it was like
to be human,

Incarnate as a baby
Who could only cry for help
With the most basic needs;

Enfleshed as a youth
With tight skin and growing bones,
And awkward, rapid growth;

Enmeshed in an adult economy
With tight finances and growing commitments,
And new obligations to young and old alike;

Embodied in a fragile frame
That bends with age, and declines,
And falters, and slowly gives way to time.

Eternal God, we ask you to remember
What it was like to be us, without eternal sight,
And full of love for this small space and time

And all who dwell within it.
Be with us, and help us to love those who suffer as you did.
And remember us, we pray.

—-

I wrote this while thinking and praying this morning for a number of friends who are suffering from what seems like untimely cancer. I had cancer when I was in graduate school, not long after the birth of our third child. The doctor scheduled me for surgery two days after the diagnosis. When I asked if I could get a second opinion, he told me I might only have a few weeks to live, so I’d better get that opinion quickly. I opted for the surgery instead. That was 25 years ago now, during Holy Week in the year 2000. I had surgery on Good Friday. It’s not Lent yet, but for my friends who are either receiving chemotherapy or preparing for it this week, this year likely feels like a long Lenten fast, one which will leave them with hard memories and some bitter scars.

It is far from a perfect prayer, if by perfect we mean ready for inclusion in a breviary. I very much appreciate breviaries, because they tend to include prayers that others have found helpful to pray, and one has the sense of praying in community that stretches across time when reciting those prayers. They also tend to be poetic and memorable. I’ve tried in this quick writing to be poetic, mostly because the poet’s tools help to frame ideas succinctly.

As I prayed this morning, I wondered: does God dwell in eternity in such a way that makes “these momentary afflictions” seem unimportant? Intellectually, I can stretch my imagination to think that might be so.

But this prayer was one I wrote to invoke a God who has been God with us, and who has experienced pains both small and great. As Victor Frankl pointed out in his book Man’s Search For Meaning all pain is great pain, because pain, like a gas, expands to fill available space. The pain of an infant, the pain of a growing adolescent, the pain of a young adult, and the pain of an aged relative or neighbor (all people are our relatives and neighbors) are all real pain.

And in praying this prayer I am not so much trying to change God as to remind myself of a God who understands suffering. As I have written elsewhere, prayer is, for me, a stretch before a long run, and a preparation to act as I think a loving God would act.

I welcome your responses, but I’ll say in advance that if this prayer strikes you as failing to match your version of orthodoxy — whether that be a theistic orthodoxy or an atheistic one — I invite you to pray as you will. This is my prayer, and it might be helpful to someone else even if you don’t care for it.

29 January 2025