In The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain tells of visiting a cathedral in the Azores, and surveying the icons:

“…they have a swarm of rusty, dusty, battered apostles standing around the filagree work, some on one leg and some with one eye out but a gamey look in the other, and some with two or three fingers gone, and some with not enough nose left to blow–all of them crippled and discouraged, and fitter subjects for the hospital than the cathedral”

He meant it unkindly; Twain didn’t think well of the Portuguese (or most foreigners for that matter, being a prototype of the modern American), calling them “slow, poor, shiftless, sleepy, and lazy,” and he thought little better of the Church, Catholic or otherwise.

One doesn’t have to mean well to be right, however, and it struck me, when I read this, that Twain had it right. This is what the path is, for many of God’s most ardent followers. They are worn down, beaten up, poured out, all for the sake of a set of truths that they can no more escape than an atheist can will himself into an obedience to the God he despises. It was little wonder, then, that Paul wrote of the Christian’s life as a race, and his task to persevere.

I don’t know about you, but some days I feel like I’m limping along, battered by doubt, fear, temptation, regret. I think sometimes we assume that a good Christian is one who is always cheerful, energetic, optimistic. Even at funerals, there is this odd effort to rejoice, as if mourning is not something Christ did. But when one reads Paul’s last letter, the worn-down quality comes through. Please come soon, he asks, more than once. Bring my cloak. Everyone deserted me. I am being poured out like a drink offering.

“But the Lord,” Paul wrote, “stood with me.” He stands with us, of course, precisely because we are worn down and broken. Where we are weak, after all, He is strong. And so I think of those battered apostolic icons Twain ridiculed, and think that the truth of the Gospels was there, right before his eyes, perhaps the only time in his life. We are those “rusty, dusty, battered apostles,” because that is what the world makes of many of us, and how it sees the rest of us. We are more fit for the hospital than the cathedral, and yet we are brought in regardless, wounded and unsightly, we battered saints.

It is a humbling and holy and mysterious thing to be prayed over, to have a hand lifted to God on your behalf, and you standing, or kneeling, or perhaps lying ill or dying or hoping to die, mute for that moment, naked in your need. Maybe it is this nakedness that keeps us from seeking it out, which is perhaps why we offer it so seldom either. To offer to pray over someone is to become almost as vulnerable as when we receive it, because the person you accost can say No, or worse, reluctantly accept it while thinking you a freak or an interloper. So instead we promise to pray for someone, and sometimes we even remember to keep those prayer promises.

Prayer is a mystery to me because it doesn’t seem that God needs our help in healing the world, or even that he is concerned with doing so. He calls whom he will call, and heals whom he will heal, and doesn’t consult us about it. And yet we are enjoined to pray, and even promised that the prayers of the righteous accomplish much, though much isn’t defined. I’ve not yet cultivated the sanctification necessary to consider a pediatric burn unit and tell myself that God materializes miracles whenever the righteous pray, or to expound such a theology by dint of pretending pediatric burn units don’t exist. I pray sometimes because I ache for the presence of God, and other times because he is here, in the midst of my family, in the midst of me in my brokenness and need, and my prayer is simply: Thank you, over and over.

Prayer is a drawing close to God, and perhaps that is its purpose, or one of its purposes. We want to believe, when we bow our heads or perhaps when we whisper his name in our minds, that we are coming into the presence of him who will heal the broken things, who will bring justice and rest. To be prayed over, then, is to be taken by the hand when we feel we can’t walk alone, and guided into the presence of holiness. No wonder we often weep when someone does this for us, and what a pity that we don’t do it for one another more.

I thought about all this in church yesterday, as we rushed from the nursery, where we had been spelling the on-duty folks so they could receive communion, back to the sanctuary, because my wife didn’t want to miss the benediction. Sometimes we sense the worship within our worship, don’t we, the yearning in a pew neighbor’s voice as she sings a hymn, or an infant’s contented sigh in the midst of a sermon? I saw it when we slipped into the back of the sanctuary, the pastor’s hands raised to invoke the blessing and peace of God, all of us undeserving including the pastor himself, and my wife with her head down, eyes closed, palms upturned as if God’s blessing is the purest rainwater that you can catch in your hands if you will only be ready to receive it, and me standing there loving her and thinking that maybe it isn’t so far from the truth, this notion of God’s blessing as rain, and knowing in that moment that it quenches even the most parched of hearts.

All of this coming from one sin-filled man raising his hands over other sinners, this prayer uttered from human lips in the presence of world-weary ears to a God who mysteriously listens and, though he does not bend to our wishes, works miracles all the same. He works miracles we have not thought to ask. We haven’t thought to ask them because they are too small and too wonderful all at once, like the miracle that left me searching for him the rest of the day in the smallest places, in the squeal of my infant, in the sunlight on turning leaves, in an upturned palm.