LORD hear our complaints.

It's easy to fall into spiritual whining as a form of prayer, but it shouldn't become a substitute for action or acceptance.

Wisdom sometimes springs from the most unlikely source. The following, for example. An book of cowboy wisdom quotes an 1880s cowboy: "Know the rules in a cow camp when they have no regular cook. When anybody complains about the chuck, they have to do the cooking. One cowboy broke a biscuit open and says, `They are burnt on the bottom and top and raw and salty as hell, but shore fine, just the way I like 'em.'"

How I love that quote. Is there anyone out there who can't relate to his situation or admire his response? Maybe it's the time you sit writhing at a meeting going nowhere, one in which trivia and democracy abound. You start to complain but suddenly realize that if you continue, you're going to be handed the responsibility for the next meeting, so you end lamely with your own version of, "It's just the way I like 'em."

Criticism decreases in direct proportion to responsibility. Studies show that in families that turn a task over to the complainer, griping diminishes dramatically. I can vouch for this. When one of our sons wrote, "Dust me" on a tabletop, he became our designated duster on the spot. Routine complaints about food and chores in our household suddenly diminished. They didn't disappear, of course, but there was a marked change in attitude. The kids made their gripes clear but quickly added a proviso, "I'm not complaining, but..."

A friend of mine worked in an office where complaining was the main staple of conversation. One particularly negative coworker harped constantly with a variety of complaints, but she specialized in the "deplorable" state of the employee lounge, which, to her, was too noisy, too cluttered, and too untidy because fellow employees failed to clean up after themselves.

A new office manager listened to her for one week and then named her Manager of the Employee Lounge in addition to her main duties. He explained to her that because she clearly recognized the problems, she probably had some ideas for improving employee lounge behavior. She was dumbstruck. Lounge behavior didn't change much under her stewardship, but it changed her, and the office became a happier place without her carping.

Someone has labeled ours a culture of complaint. Talk shows thrive on this. They don't have guests who are content, peaceful, or accepting of the idea that hardship is a natural part of life or that they are responsible for alleviating hardships, their own or others'.

We know that complaining is contagious. And it's either nurtured or discouraged in families and workplaces. Teachers recognize students who come from complaining families. Their first reaction to a new idea or skill is negative: "This is dumb," "Why do we have to learn this?" and, more commonly, "I can't do it," while children reared in other families welcome the new as a challenge.

Similarly, the culture of complaint has invaded religious institutions with breathtaking speed. Just as we have complaining families, we find complaining church families. These are the faith communities that react to anything new with negativity, invoking the same tired wails they used as students, "This is silly," "I won't be a part of it," and those seven last words of the church, "We never did it this way before."

They carp about their pastor until they get a new one, and suddenly the former pastor becomes retrospectively eloquent, pastoral, and wise. This selective nostalgia brings to mind a quip used to describe a certain type of disgruntled military family: "They always like their last post best."

Lest anyone think I'm calling for an end to criticism in the church, let me point out the difference between chronic complainers and genuine reformers. The complainers believe they have done their duty by registering their displeasure. Genuine reformers care enough about the situation to take some responsibility for alleviating the problem. Reform groups are natural magnets for the disgruntled, but it's always the few dedicated activists in the membership who carry out reform.

Our spiritual lives are affected by the complaint culture, too. Our prayer lives can so easily become a list of complaints. While it's easy to identify chronic complainers in society, it's a bit more uncomfortable to admit this trait in our own relationship with God. How many times have I caught myself asking God to lift from me some onerous task, personal weakness, or resentment while steadfastly refusing to accept my culpability for the problem in the first place or my responsibility in changing behaviors that underlie the problem?

I want change, not to change. So I complain (but call it prayer) about the problem and ask God to alleviate it while blithely living my own life in the way in which I have become accustomed--for me, by me, in me.

I think particularly about the years when I was on the lecture circuit, unable to say no to those who pleaded, all the while resenting my frenzied lifestyle and praying to God to alleviate my stress level. "Send me peace," I complained. "Send me quiet time to relax and to pray." It lifted my responsibility and put it on God's conscience.

How absurd that seems, now that I've become more skilled in saying no. God just permitted me to increase my stress level until it became more painful than my guilt level in turning down pleas to lecture. It wasn't easy, but it worked. I once read a helpful technique to use when someone is trying to put their guilt on you: Simply hand it back to them, saying wordlessly, "I'm not taking on your guilt, thank you. It's generous of you to give it to me but it's yours, not mine, and I don't intend to accept it from you."

That's what God did to me, saying wordlessly, "You're asking me to do what you aren't willing to do. When you're serious about simplifying your life, you'll take action." I am chagrined that it took me so long to stop praying for God to take on my responsibility. I realize that the grace to say no came from prayer and God, but earlier I wanted it both ways: the lecture circuit and a peaceful lifestyle. I just prayed that God would remove all the stress that resulted from one and prevented the other. Pure foolishness.

I recognize now that what I thought was prayer was really complaint, and I've come to suspect that prayer is often a substitute for action. How many of us pray for a change of behavior in another person or in our society but decline to take even a tiny step to alleviate the situation? I think of this during the prayers of the faithful at Mass: "that there will be a decrease in violence," "shelter for the homeless," and "an increase of coworkers to spread the kingdom of God." Why don't we pause after each prayer and pledge silently in our souls, "and to accomplish this, God, this week I will..."?

Why don't we? Because it puts prayer where the action is, and that's intruding on our autonomy. Much easier to anguish over it and turn it over to God. Art critic Sister Wendy Beckett writes, "It is not difficult to intellectualize about prayer--like love, beauty, and motherhood, it quickly sets our eloquence aflow. It is not difficult, but it is perfectly futile. In fact, those glowing pages on prayer are worse than futile; they can be positively harmful. Writing about prayer, reading about prayer, talking about prayer, thinking about prayer, and longing for prayer and wrapping myself more and more in these great cloudy sublimities that make me feel so aware of the spiritual: anything rather than actually praying. What am I doing but erecting a screen behind which I can safely maintain my self-esteem and hide away from God?"

Her words apply to our tendency to complain through prayer. God must get weary, for example, of hearing prayers for the victims of land mines when only 1 percent of those praying will write a letter or make a call or join a protest that might lead to a ban. Like the cowboy's biscuits, they are horrible, but if you ask me to improve them, I like things just the way they are.

It's easy to fall into spiritual whining as a form of prayer: Lord, lift the pain from my hip, save my daughter's marriage, don't let them close our parish, and so on. We could each write a list of 100 items for God's daily agenda, and probably do, while failing to recognize that we're simply putting a spiritual spin on the complaints we share with friends in daily conversation.

This kind of prayer lays a subtle blame on God, who has allowed these things to happen, a thinly veiled complaint like asking my spouse to rub my back because I ache so much from raking the leaves all by myself.

God gets the message but sends it right back to us: Stop complaining and start praying. Pray for the grace to accept hardship and pain, to recognize your limitations, to be my voice in righting injustice, to be and do what I created you to be and do, to bring your will into oneness with mine, to give up trying to be Me and then complaining when things don't turn out the way you want.

When we really trust in a loving God who allows us to grow through our crosses as well as our blessings, our prayers of complaint become prayers of acceptance. Ultimately, our prayer becomes simple: "Send me the grace to handle whatever you send, God." Prayer becomes less a list of instructions to God on how to improve our lives and more a declaration of trust in God's all-loving presence in our lives right now at this moment.

Mary Sue Taylor has a lovely little prayer in her Prayer for Daybreak and Day's End (St. Anthony Messenger Press, 1993) that helps lead me, throughout the day, to an awareness and reliance on God's presence and wisdom:

   Let me die a little, Lord,
   to my ways of doing things,
   so that I may always be ready and alert
   to alter my course for you.

If I am willing to alter my course for God, I accept the hip pain as part of God's plan for me at the moment. I don't like it, and I'll do what I can to relieve it--walk more, sit less, seek medical help--because I can't ask God to take on my responsibility for it. But, if it continues, then God has a reason for allowing it, a reason presently unfathomable to me.

If, like the widow and judge in scripture, I keep nagging at God to lift the injustice of my pain, it might work. God might tire of my complaint and give in. That's what we count on in the prayer of complaint, and we say joyously, "God heard my prayers. I didn't give up."

Maybe that's why God allowed the pain in the first place, to teach us perseverance. But one thing's sure: There will be more pain ahead to teach us acceptance because we were not capable of handling it earlier. Difficulties will keep on coming, and we will keep on nagging for relief until we "die a little to our ways of doing things" and trust in God's. Then, the suffering may remain, but it is overshadowed by the joy that comes with acceptance and renders it a nuisance, a mosquito on an otherwise good day.

Like cowboy biscuits.

DOLORES CURRAN is an author and family specialist from Littleton, Colorado. Her most recent book is Tired of Arguing with Your Kids? (Sorin Books, 1999).