how priests handle customer complaints

A satirical customer complaint about prayer shines a light on the problem with telling people you can speak to a deity able to grant your desires in return for obedience and reverence.

Illustration by Koren Shadmi

If you’ve ever worked in any capacity requiring you to handle customer complaints, you know that quite a few of the requests you’ll be handling might not be reasonable or valid. That’s why sites like Not Always Right post a flood of stories from store clerks, helpdesk operators and retail managers about customers whose demands are probably best left unmet. To be fair, it seems to me like many of the tales on the site are exaggerated by a person who can’t pick up sarcasm or lacking a sense of humor, if not outright fictional for the sake of topping an already posted story. But there is an interesting story of a complaint about God made to a priest, one we should probably consider a very good question rather than a story about an unreasonable customer. You see, his issue is very simple. Why does he keep coming to church if he can’t actually see or talk to God himself?

Think about it. He comes to a church every week, a place often called the House of God in Christianity, so one would think that he could at least get a sneak peek at the deity itself and be able to pass along a request. If an incredibly busy and famous celebrity visits your city, she’ll at least sign a few autographs or do an interview on the radio or a local news channel, right? Why couldn’t a deity with an army of middle managing angels do the same thing and descend to its congregations once in a while? It would strengthen their beliefs, give hope to those losing their faith, and almost immediately do away with atheism and agnosticism. In this context, the big complaint about not seeing a God in a place called the House of God makes prefect sense, while the priest’s patronizing reply seems like a flimsy excuse of a bouncer at a nightclub who’s trying to explain why two skinny, barely legal girls in skimpy clothing showing off their significant bosoms didn’t have to pay a cover charge and were whisked to the front of the line, and knows not to state the obvious as not to compromise his job.

But as the visitor asks away, the priest is forced to admit that he is not really in direct communication with God and his qualification is being able to pray and read the Bible. In other words, an employee at a book store has more sway to communicate a customer’s concerns to the company’s CEO than a priest can to God. Then, you are generally expected to fork over around 10% of your income in donations to an institution which claims that it can put you in touch with God but actually has no power to do so? The closest analogy to that in a business setting would probably be P2P networks charging you to download pirated music and movies while claiming that this fee will allow you to communicate with your favorite CGI entertainers like the Gollum, the Na’vi, or Eve and Wall-e. Why wouldn’t you want to complain about that? Maybe, instead of treating his visitor as if he’s just crazy or incompetent, then submitting the story to a site cataloguing some people’s inability to turn on a TV or their new computers, then calling tech support demanding that someone comes to fix their mysteriously blank screens, our priest in question should consider whether he’s promising people a product he can’t deliver and rethink his amused condescension since the complainant isn’t the one with the egg on his face.