Confessing Evangelical

Garrison Keillor on prayer without heroics

John H Tuesday 6th June, AD 2006

OK, so I guess Garrison Keillor isn’t Lutheran, after all. But this is still a great interview on the CT website.

The interview coincides with the imminent release of the movie version of Prairie Home Companion, directed by Robert Altman (who has clearly forgiven Keillor for his spoof Altman film on PHC, People Standing Around Talking and Using Hand Gestures). PHC the movie does not include any references to Lake Wobegon, but Keillor does hope to produce a film about Wobegon, one planned script for which he describes as follows:

[I]t has a pontoon boat and it has a wedding and it has 24 Lutheran pastors and it has a man who loses his pants. And I really like it. It’s sort of a knockdown drag-out comedy. And it would give you a chance to cast the parts of 24 Lutheran pastors, which would be a beautiful opportunity for middle-aged male actors in Minnesota.

Keillor also describes his attempts to teach young, serious students that “comedy is another way of telling the truth”:

I feel that among writers of fiction there is a great deal of pretentious gloominess. Gloominess is nothing that an older person has a right to impose on young people. Young people can be very pessimistic and dark all on their own without us adding baggage to what they already have. And I like the idea of being 63 and trying to get people in their 20s to lighten up.

However, the best part of the interview comes towards the end, when Keillor describes his experience of attending St. John the Evangelist Episcopal church in St. Paul, and the contrast between that and the separatist-fundamentalist preaching stations of his youth. He describes the “tremendous preaching” he heard as a child, and how hard it has been for him to find anything to match up to that:

Along with that great preaching came a sort of intolerance that I found unbearable when I was a kid: These were separatist people, an isolated group. So you gave up one in order to get your freedom, but then having gotten your freedom you missed what you have given up and you never found it any other church.

And I loved (and can strongly identify with) Keillor’s description of the blessings of attending a liturgical church:

I love the liturgical church where we say words together that are not my words and not your words. That really means a lot to me. I grew up listening to men stand up and invent prayers and the idea was that the Spirit was leading them, but in fact they were composing them in their heads and they were writing in a kind of faux King James style – big prayers and they were impressive, and they were seeking to impress, there is just is no other way around it.

And in the name of Devotion they were doing these big set-piece prayers in which they were bringing in stories from Scripture and admonishing people – that’s not prayer. But, when we kneel down and go through a list, and we begin with prayers for leaders of our country and for the nations of the world and then we come down to prayers for other churches and for bishops and priests, and then we come down to those who are in need and those who are sick and we think or we speak their names – to me this is prayer. This is prayer in which one throws oneself before God without a heroic pose.