Following the explosions in Boston yesterday, my timelines in facebook and twitter are filled with outpourings of grief and sadness for the victims, but the phrase "my thoughts and prayers" is frequently included in all online missives. This made me think - what does "my thoughts and prayers" actually mean?
Going on my browser history today, my thoughts have been on Nintendo's plumbing brothers Mario and Luigi, the maven build tool, footballer Sean McGinty, the casting of Splinter in Ninja Turtles, and some of the online reactions to the explosions in Boston. But I can honestly say I haven't really thought about the victims, or their familes.
What about prayers? While raised Catholic, I only attend mass infrequently throughout the year, the last time a little under a month ago, and I rarely pray for anything, except when explicitly asked to do so.
Has the phrase itself lost some of its meaning? Has it become one of these catch all, non offensive colloquialisms that people use? Another one in frequent use is "have a good one!" for an online friend's birthday. Particularly if you don't really know this "friend" or haven't spoken to them recently so you can't include any references to recent events in their life, and you don't want to wish them to have a bad one, do you? Having seen countless going away cards in my decade of full time employment, the phrase "best of luck mate" is another one in frequent use, often multiple times on the same card.
In both cases my internal translator reads them as "I can't think of anything else to say".
Maybe that's the reason why we use the "thoughts and prayers" phrase in cases of atrocity, we simply cannot think of anything else to say. Our own words fail us, so we use someone else's.
Maybe we need to think more about people and pray for them before telling people we are thinking of and praying for them.
