Spiritual Sunday – Pentecost
I love this Scott Cairns poem, which seems appropriate for Christians celebrating Pentecost. In “Possible Answers to Prayer,” Cairns shows God as a slightly bemused but infinitely patient administrator reassuring fallen humanity that their petitions “have been duly recorded.” He knows who is praying by the anxieties that show up in our prayers. Their “constant, relatively narrow scope and inadvertent entertainment value” give us away. (Cairns’s God is throwing a little shade here.)
In the battle between repentance and resentment, resentment at first seems to have the upper hand. Thankfully, God can penetrate resentment’s “burgeoning yellow fog.” (Cairns borrows the yellow fog image from T. S. Eliot’s lost-in-a-fog Prufrock.) Fortunately God can see that we have “intermittent concern for the sick,/ the suffering, the needy poor,” even though the sick, the suffering, and the needy poor may not see our concern. (More shade)
And as for all those people who offend us—after all, it feels “lipsmackingly” good to be indignant about them—well, God adores them. God is close to them, which means that God must be close to us as well, judgmental though we may be. Once we burn away our angers, our zeal, and our righteous indignation and begin loving those we passionately hate, we will apprehend how near God is.
This discovery is what Pentecost is all about.
Possible Answers to Prayer
By Scott Cairns
Your petitions—though they continue to bear
just the one signature—have been duly recorded.
Your anxieties—despite their constant,
relatively narrow scope and inadvertent
entertainment value—nonetheless serve
to bring your person vividly to mind.
Your repentance—all but obscured beneath
a burgeoning, yellow fog of frankly more
conspicuous resentment—is sufficient.
Your intermittent concern for the sick,
the suffering, the needy poor is sometimes
recognizable to me, if not to them.
Your angers, your zeal, your lipsmackingly
righteous indignation toward the many
whose habits and sympathies offend you—
these must burn away before you’ll apprehend
how near I am, with what fervor I adore
precisely these, the several who rouse your passions.