Column on World Day of Prayer

Today is the World Day of Prayer. this is organized by women as they seek to link prayer and action. It is deliberately ecumenical. not only does it include different religious traditions, each year the material is drawn up from a different country. This year it is France.

Mary James, a Presbyterian, (I had to get that in) is credited with starting the movement in the 1880s. she was moved by the social needs around her: the plight of immigrants, health crises, and the crippling effects of poverty.the movement caught attention and has become a stable part of the worldwide religious landscape.

We often resort to prayer to find an answer to something we find incapable of solving on our own. Some see prayer as a flight from the needs of the world into an inner state of awareness. With the day of prayer, i see it as seeking to discover inner resources to face a tough world. i see it as trying to link to the source of all good. I see it as a way to try  to move into a mode of reflection and discernment. Prayer helps to mobilize our resources for action. It helps us to see them clearly.

This year the theme from Scripture is : “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” If kept at a safe level of hospitality that sounds fair enough. When it translates into political programs on immigration, then it no longer seems so harmless to many of us. so, god is dealing with prayer requests that may conflict, or be at odds with each other, even if they agree on a basic premise.
It seems to me that prayers for social causes require a gift of patience. when i get anxious about political change, I revert to to a quote of Max Weber: “politics is the slow boring of hard boards.” Weber once wrote of politics as vocation. He deliberately chose that word often associated iw th a religious calling toward one that can find a religious center in secular callings, a voice of the reformation.

Realizing that, we who pray may well be called toward a posture of humility.In a meeting yesterday I was rmeinded with some force by Rev. David marshall that we do well to be careful when we try to apply individual Christian spiritual tools and apply them on the public stage. Second, prayer often seeks better questions, that assuming a perfect solution. All of the different attitudes toward any social program should give us pause if we are hoping that our view of an issue could possibly be  only one  option in the capacious vision and wisdom of God. Third, it is an acknowledgment of our limitations of perspective and knowledge. We all tend to prize our ideas and beliefs, but we have much more difficulty in seeing their pitfalls and possible poor consequences. finally, I pray for a sense of options and possibility. When I pay attention to the crying needs in life, i quickly get overwhelmed and want to curl up and hide from the pain.

Often it seems that god work in the world with us as the agents. At other times, I detect a touch directly, beyond our hopes and expectations. those seem much more rare.Still, I never thought I would live to see South Africa change with so little bloodshed, or the Soviet Union fall. Sometimes, I have been in nursing homes and said that perhaps the prayers of folks in the new secular monasteries have been answered.Both worked in ways that I would not have imagined.Prayer is a seed who very life is beyond our ocntrol, but not beyond the vast expanse of divine intentions.world