You Call That A Prayer, Do You? The Best Criticisms of Individual Prayers on Wikipedia

"Devoid of content;" "One of the things that God never said;" "Isn't even a true New Testament Prayer"

This past Tuesday was meant to be orientation day at a local nursing home to begin training as a certified nursing assistant, except on the day before I received the following email:

“______ will no longer run the CNA program. Class is cancelled effective immediately. If you have any questions please call _____. Thank you”

Disappointment can be very clarifying. It is difficult to make it past the interview process and not receive an offer, but I don’t think I’ve ever made it this close to a start date before losing a job before, and it did sting. I feel strongly about caregiving and working with seniors. I like it, and I’d like to do more of it. Someday I’m going to be old, and I’d like to be helped in my turn. Besides which, I think it bolsters my writing to do unrelated work that gets me out of the house, up and walking around and talking to people. You can only learn so much about people sitting in front of your computer.

Plus I’ve already bought a pair of non-slip shoes (thanks very much for all of your recommendations) and it seems like a shame for them to go to waste.

It is difficult not to give way to self-pity in such moments. I am already morbidly prone to self-pity, one of the least useful emotions on record, so I set a timer for forty-five minutes and once it went off I started looking for other programs in the Bay. I have an interview today with another CNA program nearby, so do cross a few of your fingers for me this afternoon if you can spare them.

“Awful…lousy…jejune…derivative…each prayer is worse than the last”

In the meantime, I’ve been keeping a running list over the last year of various Christian prayers on Wikipedia, almost all of which include tantalizing snippets of various criticisms they have attracted over the years. Some of them, like the Lord’s Prayer, are pretty widely in use across sects, while others are more particular to certain groups (like “asking Jesus into one’s heart” for evangelicals), and it’s a lot of fun to see interdenominational conflict summarized in the tidy, neutral language of Wikipedia editors, which means there is often a delightful bitchiness being filtered through at least two different frameworks of politeness. As a group, these judgments form a counterpart to slogans like “Nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee”: there is no prayer so brief, so anodyne, so open-ended that everybody likes it.

Please enjoy:

Asking Jesus into one’s heart (theologically unsound)

“The phrase does not occur in the Bible, and it has frequently been criticized.”

“R. Larry Moyer lists ‘If you want to be saved, just invite Jesus into your heart’ as one of the things that God never said.”

“Writing from a Calvinist perspective, Michael Horton regards asking Jesus into one's heart as a "popular misconception of the gospel.”

The Lord’s Prayer (idiosyncratic, incitement towards violence)

“On the other hand, Andrew Wommack says that the Lord's Prayer ‘technically speaking...isn't even a true New Testament prayer.’”

“In the 2002 film Spider-Man, Norman Osborn, as the Green Goblin, attacks and injures Aunt May while she is in the middle of saying the Lord's Prayer, causing her hospitalization.”