It’s not performance art

Thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court, women no longer have a federal right to authority over their bodies. But they are now welcome to join the group standing around the high school football coach who has the unquestionable right to lead a postgame public prayer at his public school’s 50-yard line.

Though it’s not your business, I will share something personal for purposes of this column. I just prayed.

Right here, alone with my keyboard, my computer screen and my version of my lord, with eyes unclosed and hands unfolded and lips unmoving, I prayed.

I’ll even tell you a related personal story.

There was that time on a busy U.S. highway when a car coming in the opposite direction was over-corrected by its driver and caused to cross the centerline and head diagonally toward us from close range. My dear wife and I said in near-chorus “oh, God; oh, God” as I veered our car off the shoulder to avoid a head-on crash. Our vehicle teetered on an embankment before flipping upside down upon corner-on-corner impact with the other car.

We sat around the next day in a fog. How was it that our car came to rest on its top a few feet from those trees? How was it that we crawled out a shattered window unharmed save a few small glass cuts to Shalah’s arm and skin scrapes diagonally across the big man’s chest and stomach, reflecting the hard heroic work of legally mandated seat belts and shoulder straps?

It was German engineering, for one thing. It was a long-developed rote process of strapping in and buckling up, done unconsciously 20 minutes before at the gas station, for another.

But what greater force might be at work?

A friend said it was the God to whom we’d prayed in those fractions of seconds pre-crash.

Prayed?

Why, yes, the friend said. Hadn’t we told her that we’d said, “oh, God” over and over as fate zoomed toward us?

That was praying if she had ever heard of it, she said.

It wasn’t public-performance prayer. It wasn’t staged at a public school ballfield’s 50-yard line after a football game. But, yes, that was prayer all right, instinctive, desperate, bursting forth from its own power.

I’ll also share this spiritual moment: A nice young woman spent crash-site time with Shalah, worried about her daze that might have been shock as she slowly picked glass out of her arm and said maybe her neck was a little stiff.

An hour or more later, I walked into Shalah’s emergency-room compartment to find that same woman with her.

Who let her back there as if a family intimate? I didn’t know. Or care. I looked at her and asked with full seriousness: “Are you an angel?” She smiled and said, “I don’t know.”

And then she was gone, headed home late to her family.

Am I saying that an “oh, God” prayer saved our lives? Am I saying that young woman was an angel?

What I’m saying is that the angel couldn’t say whether she was an angel—that spirituality is a mysterious personal thing. Public professing of it from public venues, even by well-meaning football coaches not sensitized to church-state distancing, trivializes it.

Let me tell you only for column point-making purposes what it was that I sought in the moments-ago prayer before commencing composing.

It was that readers would come to better understand the essence of prayer, which government can never ban in school or anywhere as long as human need arises and gets expressed instinctively in private supplication— or, as Dale Bumpers put it, as long as there are pop tests.

Prayer is not performance art. It’s personal spiritual entreaty.

The “leading of prayer” in a church service is ceremony. Calling it that is not to say that a well-expressed public prayer can’t move the head-bowed congregant to meaningful communion with his lord.

It’s to say what the Bible says Jesus said, as quoted in the sixth chapter of Matthew: “But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you. … Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven.”

I’m widely considered a nonreligious person. That’s a judgment others are free to make that bears not on my truth.

It’s largely based on the fact that I have written that I eschew extolling or enforcing one version of religion over another. It’s that I decry the concept of America as a “Christian nation” when in fact it’s a free-religion nation where Jews, Muslims, Hindus, atheists and all the rest should be spared any tyranny of the professed-Christian majority.

A lot of what Jesus is quoted in the New Testament as saying makes soaring good sense, as do guiding principles of other faiths. But that doesn’t mean the government ought to let anyone—a preachy peacock or a football coach perhaps knowing no better—to try to establish any of them through public events at public places.

A prohibition against that appears in the Constitution, though not in the suddenly raging politico manifesto of our current supposed supreme guardians of that Constitution.