Column on World Day of Prayer

Today is the date selected for the World Day of Prayer. Its theme is : “let justice prevail” from Amos 5. (It also reminds me of the legal maxim that justice should be done though the heavens fall.” This year a group of women from Malaysia took the reins of the liturgy and prayers for this international event. Its consistent message is for “informed prayer and prayerful action” as inextricably bound in their view. This worldwide movement started with some Americans, one a Presbyterian from New York who made the call for it and two Baptist women who started it rolling. The prayers are composed from a different country every year. The women share information about their country. It is thought that we are then drawn into their struggle as we learn. So, this day of prayer is not generic generalities, glittering spiritual atmospherics, but based in street-level experience.

Often, too often, we see prayer as a last resort. At times, it is seen as a pious substitute for action. As I grow older, I see prayer as mobilizing us into action. Without it, we start to rely on our own limited resources and start running on fumes. Burnout is the result of expending energy without receiving more in return through rest and renewal. Recently, I had the privilege of getting to hear a local Lutheran pastor, the Rev. (I’m sure that it should be the utterly revered Reverend) Bill Veith make a presentation on Martin Luther King at the Unitarian Church in Alton. His knowledge of King is extraordinary, and he reminded his rapt listeners that king’s spirituality, his prayer life, enabled to him to carry on his exhausting schedule of work in the thirteen years or so before he was gunned down. He told us the story how King and his family were again threatened, and it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. In his kitchen, he prayed and he received the strength to ‘stand up for righteousness” out of his desperate prayer. He shared some recent work that has collected some of his prayers, testaments of tradition, eloquence, and social justice.

I never thought I would live to see the Soviet Union crumble and people under the boot of a foreign power find freedom again. At times, I think that its sudden disintegration, without a shot being fired, was an answer to prayer. When some good thing happens that I would not predict, I wonder if countless prayers moved heaven to act. I thought south Africa would end up in a maelstrom of violence, but it transferred power to the majority well.

Prayer also puts us in touch with the horizon of hope. I am not a natural optimist, as it seems to me that a moment’s reflection does not indicate that things just improve naturally and irrevocably. As the noted philosopher Bruce Springsteen sang sometimes life is “one step up and two steps back.” Our imaginations get hobbled by fear and failures. Prayer links us to the Source of Wisdom. It links us to the Future One, the God who is laboring to make a better future, a future where human life is respected and made worth living. The connections of prayer may help us break the bonds of our normal ruts and patterns and see things in fresh new ways, as God says, “I make all things new” and “remember not the former things.” Hope is not chained to the present, nor to mere facts. Hope can fly to a distant horizon to “see things that never were and ask why not?” Prayer can ally us with that hope to be a beacon, to guide us to a new and better day.