Etiquette & Prayer: Matters of Practice

---What follows is my response to a friend, edited and made anonymous, who wrote me a sincere note about, among other things, his struggles with feeling genuine empathy with someone like myself in the midst of serious illness. It turns into a reflection on the relationship of a loss of faith and feelings of inauthenticity in spirituality. ---

There is always an element of uniqueness or incommensurability to any kind of grief or suffering. This uniqueness makes a truly empathetic response difficult. I think at the core of this difficulty is not just the awkwardness that doesn't know what to say in a given situation, but has more to do with the difficulty of mustering a truly heartfelt and sincere response, a response that would feel as though it did some justice to the weight of the matter at hand. It is really a question of the place of politeness and etiquette vs. pretending and hypocrisy.

We all know there is ample reason to be wary of excessive emphasis on any code of conduct and plenty of evidence for the worst kind of hypocrisy hiding behind them.

That said, I don't think one should be too quick to dismiss etiquette. As I argued before, in the case of the responses that are expected to news of an illness: no matter how formulaic and repetitive the messages, a genuine sentiment really can penetrate the surface, even though sometimes merely mouthing the appropriate words can be just plain wearying.

As I talk about this question of etiquette vs. hypocrisy, I will also explore interesting resonances in the question of authentic vs. inauthentic actions in general but especially in regards to the spiritual life.


I take the position that even simple rules of etiquette: saying "please" and "thank you" or greeting someone with a smile or at least greeting them instead of ignoring them etc. etc. are a basic lubricant for the gears of civil society. Imagine navigating a complex civilization where nobody observed these rules, or rules like them. It would be maddening and utterly depressing. It would be a world where every interaction felt like a day at the DMV. (I'm picturing here especially Marge's sisters in the Simpsons.)

On the other hand, I do understand the impulse that rejects the seeming inauthenticity of surface politeness. I think, if we're honest with ourselves, we all struggle with feeling fake, or just plain false in situations where we're expected to make such-and-such a response. (I think this is most intensely felt in adolescence when we first peer behind-the-scenes of the adult world and see that they're not all they're cracked up to be.)

I think, though, that there are two different responses to this feeling of inauthenticity. One is to reject the rules of etiquette because they apparently lead to inauthentic actions. This is the response of the surly teenager who won't smile at a stranger or wish anybody a good anything if they don't good and feel like it, (unless, of course, they're being paid to do so by their fast-food employer). What this response really is, is the absolutizing of one's ego, the dwelling on of one's own feelings above all else. This is the response encouraged by most all of American culture. It is the Disney philosophy of following one's dreams, whatever the cost and regardless of whom it affects.

An alternative response might be to really listen to the source of this feeling, to try and learn from the fact that one's response feels as though it falls short of some standard, and do something to cultivate the character trait that would naturally give rise to the desired response: friendliness, gratitude, empathy etc.

Someone reminded me today of one of the slogans of Alcoholics Anonymous which is to "Fake it till you Make it." The idea of faking something in order to make it is really an insight into character development and parallels neatly with the history of spiritual disciplines and also with what I've been trying to say about the proper response to false-feeling etiquette. (I wrote before about a similar parallel between moral and spiritual development here.)

I think, generally, the same things could be said of proper civil behavior and proper religious behavior. There is a kind of performance of "proper behavior" that is aimed at manipulating what others think of one, which is hypocrisy, and there is a kind of performance of civil or religious duties which recognizes how short one's own impulses fall from one's ideals, but which persists in the activity in order to mold and shape one's own character, to become the kind of person one wants to be by doing what that kind of person does. The behavior might be the same. The difference is in the attitude with which the behavior is undertaken.

Another way of putting this is in the words of Aristotle who said "We are what we repeatedly do." So if we want to be grateful, we should act with gratitude; if empathetic, with empathy; if pious, with piety. This is not to reduce these virtues to simple automatic outcomes of external activities like the bouncing of so many billiard balls. As I've said before, there can be different motivations and intentions behind performing the same activity. There is a politeness that crassly covers up hatred and there is a politeness that strives for deference to and respect of one's fellows, just as there is a piety that aims at reputation maintenance or the manipulation of others as well as a piety that persists through the feeling of the absence of God in order to make oneself available for the God who speaks in silence. From the outside these vastly different actions would look identical.

Which brings me to my last point on the topic of etiquette. The very fact that one is aware of the inadequacy of one's own feeling towards another's grief says that they are in no danger of hypocrisy, and the fact that one is troubled by that lack and open enough to admit it, says that they would be putting themself in a position to grow through these experiences.

I think there is a connection again with the spiritual life, especially in the basic practice of prayer for example. I wrote before about the idea of praying even when one doesn't feel like it and I think the same thing goes for the feeling we often have of not knowing how. I certainly don't believe that not wanting to pray, or not knowing how to pray, has anything to do with genuine prayer. I believe this for exactly the same reason that I believe things like friendliness or empathy don't always require the interior emotion first and the action second in order to be genuine.

At the beginning of prayer is the desire to pray. Knowledge of how to pray comes later, if at all. As with the dynamic of the virtues where action is born out of desire which develops into character which affects future desires, so too with prayer. The "authentic" prayer that is a goal of the religious life can only be reached by means of prayer. To learn to pray, one must just begin praying.

Thomas Merton, a man of prayer if there ever was one, wrote in a very famous prayer: "I believe the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing." Merton is referring to actions in general, but this layering of motivation - action, desire, hope - applies as much, if not more so, to prayer. This picture then gives us not one degree of removal between the "authentic" prayer and the muddling activity we mortals or even monks undertake, but two: not only does one desire to pray, but even while praying, one hopes one is desiring to pray. This is, in fact, to be expected.

Prayer is a vast, deep and complicated subject I am not really capable of doing more than touching on. I mean just to say that prayer is not merely a matter of lists of requests and thanks, though it probably essentially involves these. Christian prayer is a very different matter from prayer in general, if there were such a beast. Centered as it is in the Trinity, Christian prayer is nothing less than the means by which the creature is invited into a participation in the divine life. One does not need to look to mystics to find an expression of this mysterious truth. The Bible itself says that "we do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express."

I know there are often people who, maybe feeling they have outgrown or lost their prior faith and the ability to sincerely pray, but who might feel this as something genuinely lacking in their life. Might this not be because they were frozen in inaction with regards to a spiritual life in the same way one can feel at times in regards to simple matters of etiquette - because the uncomfortable feeling of "inauthenticity" has allowed the perfect to become the enemy of the good?

I said above that it seemed to me the very fact that one was troubled by inadequacies in their own response to grief could put them in a position to grow through these experiences towards a perhaps more genuine ability to share in grief. I guess what I'm wondering is this: If one were troubled by the loss of prayer in one's life, could it be that there is an equal opportunity to be open, through that very sense of lack, to genuine prayerfulness which would always only be through imperfect attempts at prayer, no matter how inauthentic feeling.

I have come to believe that there is. Indeed, I can only hope that there is.