Jesus, du weisst is the title of an Austrian documentary I saw about fifteen years ago and have never got out of my head. Jesus, You Know. Six Catholics are shown, each alone in a different empty church, having agreed to pray aloud while kneeling and facing the camera that has been set up on a tripod in the chancel. These ordinary believers, three men and three women, have a lot on their chests, they have a lot on their minds, there is oh so much that they want to tell Jesus about. The phrase “you know” is repeated several times. (In fact, You Know, Jesus would have been the more accurate title, since it’s the informal conversation filler and not the Lord’s omniscience that is the meaning here.) These intimate one-sided talks, mostly about family problems, are more like something you’d expect to hear a person telling a shrink or a confessor than what comes to mind at the word prayer. Not quite the love letter to God, not the raising of the heart and mind to God or the requesting of good things from him as defined by the Catholic Church.

One woman is depressed because her husband has suffered a stroke and now spends all his time watching bad TV shows. Another complains of a husband who’s cheating on her. Maybe, with Jesus’ help, she can find the right words to make an anonymous call to inform the other woman’s husband. And might Jesus also give her the strength not to murder her husband with the poison that she confesses already to have obtained.

An elderly man emotionlessly questions Jesus about the abuse inflicted on him when he was a child: Why did my father beat me. Why did my mother spit in my face.

A young man goes from bemoaning his parents’ failure to understand his religious devotion to describing his bewildering and sometimes religious erotic fantasies.

A young couple takes turns discussing the unhappiness that has arisen in their relationship because she wants one thing in life and he wants quite another thing.

They drone on and on, the six. There is no other way to put it. As there is no way to ignore the fact that a considerable amount of what we hear from them would have to be called whining. A defensive tone creeps in: each person seems to have felt a pressing need to explain his or her feelings, to present his or her situation as though laying out a case before a judge.

Of the handful of people who were in the audience with me, not everyone stayed till the end.