Real prayer leads to action, leads to what we can do for people. But it also saves us from fantasies of omnipotence, of imagining that we can do for people what we manifestly can’t do, and from the anxiety and guilt feelings such fantasies evoke. And praying for people also makes us sensitive to their deepest needs that are generally not the most obvious ones.
Thinking about our world today, what wakes you up? In what areas of your life and faith, love and hope do you need to wake up?
Get in touch with God/Jesus looking at our world – and because God’s thoughts are not our thoughts – ask what a loving, compassionate, non-violent and forgiving God feels when looking at you.
You are not the Messiah. You cannot do everything. But what can you do? Instead of living in denial, or staying numb with indecision and even despair, make a decision now to make one small step for change.
Prayer then is not so much about making things happen but opening ourselves up to the “larger context”, the transforming place where new meanings and possibilities emerge. But while making room to find new meanings can be very creative, it can also be very risky. Constantly, it seems we have to die to old formulations, ways and symbols through which in the past we had appropriated meaning. All this means that prayer is essentially about facing reality, of acknowledging how it is for us in the present, and doing that as courageously and honestly as we can. This is a risky business, and it’s good to remind ourselves that the root for the Latin word for prayer (preces) speaks to our English word precarious.
In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the centre of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream.
Thomas Merton
This is one of the most famous of all the things Merton ever said. It is an epiphany, a deep and transformative vision of ourselves, not as isolated or autonomous beings but always, reflecting the God in whose image we are made, always as beings-in-relation. Profoundly conscious of his own poverty, he discovered in silence and solitude a solidarity with the “most neglected voices that proceed from [the world’s] inner depths”.
This song is a perfect tribute to refugees everywhere and presently we could all do more to be there for our neighbours.
When I Needed a Neighbour was written by Sydney Carter.
