Prayer as the risk we take in being honest with God

This poem about God, prayer, and us, was written by Renita Weems in 1980, when as a young woman she needed to find a way of relating to God that was her own. Not inherited reverence, not borrowed piety, not well rehearsed habits, not words worn with familiarity – but the determination to be a young black woman whose voice has its own integrity, and whose sense of God resists the reductive pressures of conformity to 'the done thing'. It is reproduced in her autobiography, Listening For God. A MInister's Journey Through Silence and Doubt (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999). Professor Weems is a biblical scholar, an ordained African Methodist minister, an outspoken critic of systems and social attitudes of discrimination and exclusion, and a woman whose spirituality combines hunger for righteousness, impatience with injustice, and a relationship with God in which love and trust enable prayer to be a robust debate about the things that matter. Her blog is over here.

(Listening for God, page 35)