Spiritual Tinkering

On my nightstand is a beautiful Anglican rosary. For those who do not know what an Anglican rosary is, it is a set of prayer beads similar to the traditional Roman Catholic rosary, but the Anglican rosary does not have established prayers associated with it. You can pray the Hail Mary, or the Lord’s Prayer, or the Jesus Prayer or any other number of prayers. Each person can take the same beads and pray with it very differently, highlighting the incarnational, traditional, and diverse spiritualities of the Episcopal Church.
For me, however, that Anglican rosary serves as a reminder of one of my spiritual problems: tinkering. Every time I think I have figured out what prayers to do on the different beads, I stumble across another prayer and feel that I somehow MUST incorporate it into my prayer life. And so, those prayer beads are used infrequently, waiting for the day when I’ll have all the right prayers in place.
We sometimes talk about how “praying shapes believing.” How we pray shapes our language, metaphors, and images of God and the Gospel, and we recognize that the prayers we use will end up written on our hearts as they become part of us.
My tinkering with the prayers for my prayer beads, though, is the theology of “praying shapes believing” hilariously missing the point. Instead of praying, I’m looking for the “perfect” way to pray. “If I pray THIS prayer, then it will be complete and right!” Tinkering with the prayers and acquiring the “right” prayers (or spiritual disciplines, or books, or what-have-you) can sometimes displace the actual practice of prayer.
It is easy to get lost in preparing. We take our spirituality, our worship, our parish leadership, our stewardship campaigns, our preaching, our many duties all very seriously. Of course we should carefully prepare! We should also remember that we are called to pray, to worship, to serve, and to proclaim the Gospel, however imperfectly we do these things.
The world needs the Good News, and we need to love our God! How can we hold back the love and gratitude in our hearts for Christ crucified and risen just out of fear that we’re not going to get it perfectly right? We can recognize tinkering for what it is: perfectionism.
This perfectionism is always seeking.
Does it ever find?
Does it even know what it’s looking for?
How will it know when it’s found whatever it is?
You see glimpses of this tinkering any time you open social media: posts proclaiming the new leadership paradigm / the liturgical innovation the Church needs / the cool new thing you wish you’d thought up but someone else got the headline first and now you’ll look uncool for doing it, too.
Just as the remedy for perfectionism is not to stop planning, so the remedy for tinkering is not simply to keep doing it the same way. We must be aware while we plan that we cannot get it perfect or anticipate every problem that may result from our decisions. We may throw out something important, or we may keep something that we shouldn’t.
We’re not going to get it perfect, and that’s perfectly ok. God works with us anyway.
Where do you see tinkering / perfectionism in your ministry?
Fill in the blank: “If only we did ______, then everything would be perfect in the Church.” Is that true?
In what ways do you spend more time thinking about ministry or prayer more than ministering or praying?
 
The Rev. Joseph Farnes, MDiv ‘15 is currently the assistant rector at St Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Pittsfield, Massachusetts and was ordained a priest in 2015 in Idaho. He desires to help make the rich depths of the Christian theological and spiritual tradition engage in playful, respectful, and holy conversation with modernity.