A school shooting. A hurricane. A friend’s diagnosis. A neighbor’s child killed on the highway. Within minutes, the same five words appear on our screens: Sending thoughts and prayers.
I want to be clear from the start: the people who say this mean well. The phrase comes from a good place. When we are confronted with suffering we cannot fix, we reach for something, and these words are what our culture has handed us. They say, I see you. I wish this hadn’t happened. I care.
But I spent years on the other side of that phrase, and I have come to believe it often stops short of what it intends.
For much of my life I was a Roman Catholic priest, or preparing for the priesthood. Every day, at every Mass, we offered the Prayer of the Faithful. We prayed for the sick. We prayed for the homeless. We prayed for those living in countries torn apart by war, for the hungry, for the dying, for the grieving. And every day, the news brought more stories of hatred and violence. Every day, more people slipped into poverty, and the number of people sleeping on the streets grew. Every day, someone came to me after the death of a loved one, and the worst of those conversations were always with parents who had buried a child.
For thousands of years, human beings have lifted their petitions to the heavens, pleading in tears for intervention. Somewhere along the way, without meaning to, we turned prayer into a transaction. We began treating the divine like a cosmic vending machine: insert the right words, with enough sincerity and enough repetition, and wait for the outcome to drop into the tray.
I did not learn otherwise from a book. I learned it in a hospital.
Esther
As a seminarian, I was sent to spend a summer working at Indiana University Medical Center in Indianapolis. I was assigned to Third Floor South. Each day I visited patients, listened to their stories, and prayed with them.
Each shift began with a nursing meeting to review the patients. At one of those meetings, the nurses asked me to see a woman named Esther. Esther was diabetic. She had undergone multiple surgeries and amputations, and the wounds had never healed. She had an open leg amputation and an open surgical wound in her abdomen. Four times a day she was taken to Physical Therapy, where the staff debrided her wounds, cutting away dead, damaged, and infected tissue so that the healthy tissue might have a chance to heal. Esther had grown despondent.
I made her my priority. When I went to her room, she would not talk with me. She lay in her bed and gave only the shortest answers. She did not cry. She was simply closed off, cold to any emotion. She was afraid.
I went back to the nurses’ station to ask what to do next. They suggested I go to her therapy session.
Later that day, I was waiting in Physical Therapy when they wheeled Esther in on a gurney. She saw me and said, “Are you here to listen to me scream?”
I had no words.
They moved her to a table, and she began to scream. I remember the therapist saying gently, “Esther, we haven’t touched you yet.” I stood at a distance as they pulled the gauze from her open wounds and cut away the dead tissue. Her agony made me feel weak and helpless. Afterward, they lowered her into a whirlpool bath of warm water and iodine. I could not imagine the pain she felt.
I pulled myself together and walked across the room. I reached out, rubbed the top of her head, and said, “Scream, Esther. It’s okay to scream. Scream as loud as you want.”
When the treatment was over, they rolled her back to her room, where she would wait six hours before the same ordeal began again.
The next morning I made a point of visiting Esther first. When I walked into her room, she smiled from ear to ear and welcomed me in. We talked about her family and a dozen other things.
I could have prayed for Esther from a distance. I could have told her, “I’ll pray for you,” and walked away believing I had done something. That is not what happened. There were no pious words and no religious rituals. There was one person reaching out to touch the pain of another. That was the healing. That was the grace.
“Sending prayers” would have accomplished little or nothing that day, for Esther or for me.
Here is what I have come to believe: true comfort and healing do not come from a distant, external force. They flow through the active, collective connection of human beings. The rest of this essay is my attempt to explain what that means, and what it asks of us.
The Illusion of the Vending-Machine God
Petitionary prayer, the prayer that asks, carries a hidden cost. When we hand a problem to a power outside ourselves, we can quietly hand over our responsibility along with it. The asking feels like doing. Having asked, we feel we have done our part. The sick friend, the grieving family, the people sleeping under the overpass are now in someone else’s hands.
This is not a cynical charge against people of faith. It is a description of how easily any of us, believer or not, can confuse expressing concern with acting on it.
Here is what surprised me, and what I think will surprise many readers: the best of Christian theology has never believed in the vending machine either. Thomas Aquinas, the Church’s great systematic thinker, taught that we do not pray in order to change God’s mind. Many theologians since have said, in one way or another, that the real work of prayer happens in the one who prays. Prayer, at its best, was never meant to move heaven. It was meant to move us.
If that is true, then petitionary prayer has value after all, though not as a request mailed to a distant address. It can be a summons. When we say, “I pray for the sick,” we might hear it as a call to something within us and among us: a call to notice the sick, to go to them, to care for them. The prayer is not the end of the matter. It is the alarm clock.
So I do not offer the failure of the vending machine as a reason for despair. I offer it as a wake-up call. If the universe is not a vending machine, then we must stop standing in front of it waiting for the delivery. Whatever healing is going to come will have to come through us.
A Living Force: The Music Between Us
If there is no king on a cloud, what is left? More than we might think.
In my own work I use a phrase that sounds more academic than it is: immanent generativity. “Immanent” simply means within rather than above. “Generativity” means the power to bring new life into being. Put together, it names a creative, unfolding energy that lives within the fabric of life and humanity, rather than a ruler sitting somewhere beyond it. That is the last time I will use the term. The idea matters more than the label.
The best way I know to describe it is music.
Think of a symphony. Where is it? It is not in the score; the score is ink on paper. It is not stored in the concert hall, waiting to be released. A symphony exists only while it is being played. It comes into being in the bowing of strings, the breath of the winds, the listening of musicians to one another. When the playing stops, the music is not hiding somewhere above us. It is simply not happening.
I have come to think of the sacred in the same way. It is not a thing that sits apart from us, watching. It is something that happens. It is a verb, not a noun. It comes alive in the moment one person turns toward another with attention and care, and it falls silent when we turn away.
This shifts the question from up there to in here, and among us. The sacred is not a bystander we plead with. It is the spark of life and compassion waiting to be played, in each of us and between us. No one has to send it from far away. It begins the moment someone picks up the instrument.
That is what happened in the therapy room with Esther. Nothing was delivered from above. Something was played between two people, and for a moment there was music.
The True Power of the Collective
In 1841, the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach published The Essence of Christianity. His central claim was startling for its time: the qualities we attribute to God, such as love, mercy, wisdom, and the power to heal, are our own best human qualities, projected outward onto the heavens. We took what was finest in ourselves and placed it beyond our reach.
Whether or not one accepts all of Feuerbach’s argument, this part of it rings true to me. Look at what we ask of God in our prayers: to heal the sick, to lift up the poor, to comfort the grieving, to protect the vulnerable. These are not powers that belong only to heaven. When human beings align, when we act together with attention and care, we possess the very capacities we once projected onto the sky. We can heal. We can uplift. We can nurture. We can console.
I want to be honest about the limits here. The collective cannot undo a child’s death, any more than prayer could. Presence does not reverse a diagnosis or bring back the dead. Esther’s wounds did not close because I put my hand on her head. What we can do, and what no distant power has ever done for us, is make sure that no one bears their suffering alone. That is not a lesser kind of healing. For most of the pain human beings endure, it may be the only kind there is.
Consider the difference between two sentences:
- “I am praying for you.”
- “I am here with you.”
The first is passive. It hands the matter off to someone else, somewhere else. The second is active. It puts a person in the room. One sends a message; the other sends a human being.
Moving Beyond Thoughts and Prayers: Reclaiming the Pulse of Action
None of this means we must stop saying kind words. It means letting our words lead somewhere. Phrases like “thoughts and prayers” stop short of action; the task is to carry them the rest of the way. Here are three ways to do that, from the most personal to the most far-reaching.
1. The Gift of Presence
Show up. Sit with the person. Listen more than you speak. When someone is grieving, resist the urge to explain their suffering with theology: “Everything happens for a reason,” “God needed another angel,” “God never gives us more than we can handle.” These sentences are usually meant to comfort, but they often ask the grieving person to make peace with their pain before they have even felt it.
Silence is not failure. Sometimes the most healing thing you can offer is the willingness to stay in the room while someone screams, and to tell them it is okay to scream.
2. The Gift of Resource
Translate the energy of a prayer into something that can be held. A meal left on the porch. A lawn mowed. A ride to chemotherapy. A donation to the family’s expenses. An afternoon of babysitting so a worn-out parent can sleep.
And when the suffering has causes we can change, the gift of resource includes changing them: a vote, a letter to a legislator, an hour volunteering at the shelter, a voice raised in a meeting where decisions are made. Every Mass I celebrated included prayers for the homeless. The homeless did not need more of our prayers. They needed housing.
3. The Human Echo
Sometimes distance makes physical presence impossible. We cannot fly to every funeral or sit beside every hospital bed. But even then, our words can point toward action rather than away from it.
Instead of “Sending thoughts and prayers,” try:
- “I’m holding you in my thoughts, and I’ve set up a meal schedule with your neighbors.”
- “I can’t be there, but I’m calling you Thursday evening, and every Thursday after that.”
- “I’ve made a donation in her name. Tell me what else would help.”
The difference is small in length and enormous in effect. The first kind of message ends the conversation. The second kind begins a relationship.
A Call to the Emergent Self
Some readers will hear all of this as a loss: no one up there listening, no one coming to fix things. I understand that fear. I lived inside the other answer for a long time.
But I do not find myself abandoned in an empty universe. I find myself surrounded by a sea of creative potential, by music waiting to be played. We become who we are through what we do for one another. Every visit, every meal, every hand laid gently on a suffering person’s head is part of that becoming, for them and for us.
I have stopped looking to the sky for a miracle. What I have found instead is that when we stop looking up, we finally start looking across at each other. That, I believe, is where the real healing begins.
The next time tragedy strikes and the familiar words rise to your lips, go ahead and send your thoughts. Then send yourself.
A free guide for living with loss
If you are grieving, or sitting with someone who is, my free guide Living with Loss is meant to keep you company. It will not explain the death or ask you to find a lesson in it. It offers stories, questions, and practical ways to find the people and support that can stay with you. Enter your email address and I will send you your copy.
