Pious Gossip

Les chuchoteuses (The Gossipers) in Montreal, by Rose-Aimee Belanger (photo found on the web)According to my dad, the ripest time for gossip is the time for prayer requests. That, he says, is when the worst gossips in the church come out of the woodwork, wrap their news in religious language, and get their kicks from trotting out the juicy stories behind a shield of false piety. (Well, okay, some of that is my vocabulary, not his.) Here's what it sounds like:

"Let's pray for Shelly. She just found out her husband is having an affair with his office nurse, and he's now left the house. She's really feeling awful, and needs our prayers."

"We need to pray for Marvin. You know he's been having cancer therapy" --no, we didn't know-- "and the prognosis is iffy."

"I hear that Sandra's daughter is battling with anorexia. Sandra and John have entered family counseling with her, and they're very worried. We need to pray for them."

"You know, Darrell and Maude's son isn't coming to church anymore. We need to pray for him. Maude mentioned to Ethel that she's really concerned for him because he's getting so rebellious."

"We need to pray for Penny. Her daughter was arrested for shoplifting the other day, and she has a court date coming up."

It looks pretty innocuous in writing, doesn't it? The clues can be spotted in the tilt of the head, the brightness of the eyes, the extra delectable detail thrown in here and there, and the obvious relish with which the speaker voices his or her prayer request. You may sniff the suspicious scent of pious gossip in printed prayer requests in a church bulletin, or in a "pray for so-and-so" message passed around by e-mail.

By the way: after many years of observing all of this, I truly think the men do more of this than the women do. Or perhaps I think men gossip through prayer requests more because they tend to make it sound more pious. Or maybe it's because I run with so many men who have been taught to speak up front and express themselves in articulate and smooth verbiage. I happen to believe I can spot the hollow motives at ten paces, at least. But I could be wrong. Maybe this "man" is just the person who, in the medieval times, would have been hired as the town crier. And every town needed a crier; it was at that news spot in the old towns, so we learned from one of our tour guides, that Community happened.

As I ponder it all, I think what irks me the most is that these bits of gossip are shared as prayer requests. It's that connection between telling tales, and calling on God. And I think it irks me the worst when this is done on a leadership team of some sort, be it church leadership, school leadership, or whatever. Leaders should be about a higher standard.

I have a lot of questions circling in my mind about this, and they feel like they're about to dive-bomb and grab some prey. Humor me while I work my way through them.

For starters, what if we just said, "Hey, we need to share what's going on among ourselves so that we're aware of the lay of the land; What's the news?" and then we shared, keeping those stories apart from prayer requests?

Or what if we had some sort of communally agreed upon rule that we weren't going to share "prayer request gossip" unless we personally had committed to a course of action that would minister to the person we're talking about? And what if we then held each other accountable?

Or even more radical: what if we just shut our traps and prayed for these people and situations on our own, silently? Does God hear us any better if we tell each other about it? Does He do any more to address an issue if higher numbers of people are praying about it? Unless the pray-ers are committed to becoming the hands of God, reaching out with His healing touch, do we have any business spreading tales around among us? What good is there in many words that reveal the struggles of others, except to make us feel falsely and briefly better about ourselves?

The more I think about all this, the more I think my sensitivity to it may be due to my own temptations. And so many of us should bow quietly, convicted.