Can we reclaim "thoughts and prayers"?

As the sending out of thoughts and prayers has become a more and more automatic response to the traumas of our day, a backlash has developed. And no wonder. After the massacre in Las Vegas, in which 58 people were killed and more than 500 wounded by one gunman in less than ten minutes, politicians lined up to say that now was not the time to rethink gun laws. It was, rather, a time for thoughts and prayers. This response to gun violence has become so routinized that the phrase “thoughts and prayers” has its own Wikipedia entry, which explains that thoughts and prayers are frequently offered in lieu of taking meaningful action.

In the wake of each new tragedy, my students watch their news feeds and timelines fill up with people’s ridicule of thoughts and prayers. They struggle with how to respond. They too find it revolting that the appeal to prayer has been co-opted by political interests. But they also believe thinking and praying to be meaningful actions. They worry about how we are ever going to reclaim the language of prayer.

In a course on contemplative prayer this semester, we’ve been reading some of the great teachers: Origen of Alexandria, Howard Thurman, Simone Weil, and others. Their voices have echoed through the hurricanes, gun massacres, fires, and floods that have shaken the world—as well as through our own local traumas. We’ve searched in their books for a fresh way to talk about intercessory prayer. There is nothing like today’s mechanical appeal to thoughts and prayers in such writers’ work. But there is plenty of teaching about praying for others and about the relation of prayer to the life of the world.