Tell Papa what you want.

Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. Philippians 4:6

My two year old nephew was standing at the sink with a cup in his hand, pointing at the tap and whining, while my mother and I sat at the kitchen table trying to have a conversation. Every now and then Mom would turn to Greg and ask him if he wanted something, and he just kept whining and pointing. Eventually, becoming frustrated with the interruptions, I took up his cause. “Mom, how would it be if we just give him a drink of water? He obviously wants a drink.” But Mom declined the suggestion and eventually Greg toddled over to us and said, “Water Gramma?” Mom got up immediately, took his cup, suggested to him that he might prefer some juice or a drink of milk, got him a drink, gave him a hug, and sent him on his way. Then she sat back down and helped me understand what had just taken place. And, out of the subsequent conversation came an illustration of the development of prayer that I have used for many years.

As I said in my last post, I believe prayer begins where all social interaction begins, in the inarticulate expression of our needs and desires. A baby is hungry or uncomfortable in some way and cries out. This is a mere reflex, but it has a social context of which the baby is, presumably, unaware. When Mama hears these cries and responds it is the beginning of social interaction and a doorway to a lifetime of personal relationships. Of course, there are also coos of contentment and gurgles of satisfaction, but we begin our lives as needy creatures. The cries are clearly set, in decibels, pitch and frequency, to get attention.

My mom’s first point was that my little nephew, who, at the age of two, was in the process of developing language, needed to learn to articulate his needs and desires. And we, as responsible adults in his life, needed to encourage him to do that. We might be tempted to anticipate his needs because we dislike the whining – I certainly was – but Greg needed help to leave this baby stage behind. He needed to discover that crying, whining, grunting and pointing were becoming ineffective. And it was up to his grandma and uncle to make sure they actually were.

But why should he articulate his needs when they are perfectly clear to us?

Well, apart from the fact that they aren’t perfectly clear to us, they probably aren’t particularly clear to him. Once he did ask mom for water she suggested some other options (juice or milk) that he might actually prefer. That’s one of the great things about words. They suggest other words and, thus, facilitate reflection.

As a child gets into using words to express his or her desires he or she will discover degrees of subtlety that might be hard to imagine without words. There’s juice, milk, pop, and eventually coffee, tea, beer and the kind of wining that actually goes well with dining. And then there’s a whole world of drinking that has little to do with being thirsty. To go for coffee is not essentially about thirst. (I asked someone once if he’d like to get together for coffee sometime. He declined because he didn’t drink coffee. Obviously a victim of inferior parenting.)

I believe, on this level alone, it’s important for us to ask God for things in prayer. Not in spite of the fact that he knows us better than we know ourselves, but because of it. As we articulate our needs we discover many things we might not otherwise see:

• how many we have,
• how few really matter,
• how many we don’t have because they’ve already been met,
• how selfish we are,
• and how many of our deepest needs we hadn’t even noticed until we started praying about them.

How many of us would have ever noticed our need for forgiveness if we’d never learned “Forgive us our trespasses” in the Lord’s Prayer? How many would think to ask to be led away from temptation?

The psalmist writes:

Search me , O God, and know my heart;

test me and know my anxious thoughts.

See if there is any offensive way in me,

and lead me in the way everlasting. Psalm 139:23-24

In conversation with God we discover ourselves, our own hearts. And we begin to discover that prayer changes us. In fact, I believe that’s mostly what it does.

PRAYER

Well, I’m going to give this census thing a rest now.

• For one thing, I’m tired of it too.
• For two thing, I find the bickering among politicians, as opposed to reasonable discussion, very discouraging.
• And for three thing, next year, depending on who wins the argument, one in three of us will have it to do (the new household survey), or one in five of us will have to do it (the traditional long form). Then all the squabbling will start up again and I’ll probably have more to say. In the meantime, however, I’d like to devote a few posts to the topic of prayer.

A while back my sister, Mary, asked me to pray for her. – She has a heart problem and if God brings her to mind from time to time it would be very cool if you would pray for her too. – As we were sharing she told me about an intellectual problem she has with the whole idea of prayer. To paraphrase: What sense does it make to go to God and ask for things when he already knows what we want and need, and we believe he is committed to providing the very best for us? It’s a great question that everyone who prays eventually has to deal with. I’ve been thinking about it, and about prayer in general, and over the next few blogs I’d like to share some things that have occurred to me:

1. I don’t think we can really help asking God for things. It’s part of how he made us.

In the Harry Potter books for example, though the kids are thoroughly secular British children with no trace of any kind of religion, when they face a challenge they quite instinctively begin to throw their desperate desires into the air, “O please, don’t let this happen!” or “O no, not that!”

I believe these cries are prayers in rudimentary form, just as the crying of a hungry baby is a rudimentary request for food. It’s been said that there are no atheists in foxholes, but, to be fair, I expect there is very little theology of any king, positive or negative, in foxholes. When the bullets are flying we all do what we do, then we (theists and atheists alike) reflect upon what just happened and try to understand what it means.

2. Prayer, as we generally think of it, is, in part, a refinement of this rudimentary impulse. But if God gave us this impulse why should it need to be refined?

I once had a friend who sang on a worship team, and she became very upset at the request of the leader that she work on her vocal technique. “This is the voice God gave me.”, she insisted, appealing to me to intervene on her behalf. “Who is he to tell me it needs to be improved?”

Well, resistance to instruction is the besetting sin of new singers, new worship leaders, new preachers, pretty much new anythings; and the name of the sin is “Pride”. So my answer was pretty simple. “Just take a turn in the nursery and listen to the voices God gave his children.” (I obviously said more than that in the course of our conversation, but that was the nub.)

The cries of a baby are really quite amazing, but by the time children sing, let alone lead people in singing, their vocal technique has been improved considerably. Everything God gave us has to be refined, developed, improved. And part of how we do this is by taking feedback and instruction from people who’ve been doing it longer than we have. In the end my friend lost faith in me too. And she moved on to look for a worship team leader who was more appreciative of her gift. Not the end of the world by any means but, knowing the gifted and experienced leader she left behind, it was certainly a setback in her development.

To change the analogy slightly, the impulse to pray is like a child’s impulse to draw a picture. I’m sure our heavenly Father delights in the most primitive and basic things we bring to him, and he finds room on the fridge for all of it. But if we delight in the delight God has in us, surely we will seek to grow. Surely we will want our next pictures, our next prayers, to be even better and more delightful to the one who so delights in us.

So, tell me a little about your prayer life. Do you pray? Why and why not? What are you learning? What’s hanging you up?

Sorry, but this census thing continues to intrigue me.

The census has changed since 1851 when it was first administered in pre-confederation Canada, but it has never been limited to simple questions about name, age, sex and place of residence. That early census asked about: occupation, religion, marital status, race (“coloured” or “Native”), education level, and infirmities (blind, deaf and dumb, or lunatic). It also asked many questions about physical dwelling space (construction materials, number of stories, number of families residing there, etc.). In 1861 “mulatto” was added to race options, “idiot” to infirmities, and literacy to education (persons over 20 who could not read and write). In 1871 the census asked no questions about race and asked only if one was “of unsound mind”. But it divided the literacy question into “cannot read”, “cannot write”.

In 1901 immigration and naturalization questions were introduced, and detailed employment questions were added. French and English were distinguished, and the category “from childhood” added to infirmaries. In 1911 the census was expanded again to include more employment details, and Infirmities were detailed as: blind, deaf and dumb, crazy or lunatic, idiotic or silly. And in 1916 mother tongue was added, reflecting the increased immigration from various parts of the world.

In 1971 major changes were made. The census was divided into a short form comprised of basic population questions plus nine housing questions, and a long form comprised of the short form questions plus an additional twenty housing question and thirty socio-economic questions. The former was sent to 2/3 of Canadian households; the latter to the remaining 1/3. Also, for the first time, in response to privacy concerns, people were allowed to fill out the questionnaire themselves rather than having to report their answers to a census worker.

In 1996 the short form was reduced in size and new questions were added to the long form including Aboriginal identity, population group, household activities or unpaid work, and mode of transportation to work. That year 80% of Canadian households were to complete the short questionnaire which now had only seven questions, while the remaining 20% completed the long questionnaire with fifty-five questions. 2001 saw questions about common-law relationships introduced, and in 2006 same-sex marriages and common-law relationships were added.

The census, as we might expect, has evolved over time. We no longer use the words “idiot”, “lunatic”, at least on official forms, we self report, and we sample 20% of households for most questions rather than requiring all households to answer all questions. These changes reflect shifting social attitudes and developments in the science of demographics. And every change has been accompanied by concern for the quality and continuity of the data. But changes have, and always will come.

Today the concern is about privacy (the right of individuals to refuse to answer questions they consider too personal or overly intrusive). – Not to be confused with confidentiality (the right of individuals to limit the sharing of their personal data once it has been collected). – And the privacy concern is not just about whether people should be allowed to withhold information, but the fact that an increasing number of people do withhold it. In the 2006 census 168,000 households refused to submit the form and many thousands submitted blatantly dubious data, claiming to be Jedi Knights for example. Indeed, one of the problems with compulsory surveys is that false answers are often submitted precisely because blanks are not allowed.

Personally I think it’s time for the politicians in Ottawa to give the whole matter a rethink. Do we need to force people to answer questions they do not want to answer? Do we need to simplify the process? Should we make the entire census, the long and the short of it, voluntary? In this day of constant data gathering, do we even need a census? StatsCan says we do, and the Brita folks say we need to filter the water, but I’m not so sure.