Issue 225 - Praying in these Days
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July 2020
A global pandemic. Widespread protests about racial injustice. Angry, mean-spirited political campaigns. Massive unemployment. How can we pray, how do we pray during these difficult times?
While we don't have all the answers, we would like to share these reflections.
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Discerning What Lies Within
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Last week, the prayer book we use offered this petition: “Redeem our national life so that we cease to promote hatred, dishonesty, and violence.” “Wow!” I thought. “There is a prayer directly addressing our current situation,” and fervently prayed the response, “Lord, make haste to help us.”
Then I read the next petition in the litany, which hit even closer to home: “Enlighten us to discern the anger within us and let it not rule us.”
[1] Ouch! Directly on target. “Lord, make haste to help us.”
Is anyone else out there angry? Angry at the shutdown, angry at the politicians, angry at China, angry at the people who refuse to wear masks, angry at the people who insist we wear masks, angry at one part or another of the news media, and just generally fed up and ready to snarl at the least provocation?
“Enlighten us to discern the anger within us,” says the prayer. But note what comes next. It does not ask God to forgive our anger. It does not ask God to eliminate our anger. It does not even call us to repent of our anger. It simply asks that, once we have discerned our anger, we not let it rule us.
Anger is a normal part of human life. Anger can even be a healthy part of life. “Anger,” writes David Whyte, “is the deepest form of care, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly, about to be hurt.” He goes on to say, “Anger always illuminates what we belong to, [and] what we wish to protect….”
[2]
So let us discern our anger. Let us discern what anger reveals about our deepest values. And let our actions be informed by our anger, perhaps even guided and energized by our anger, by what we care about most deeply. But let us never simply be ruled by our anger, lest we strike out in destructive ways, thus adding to the “hatred, dishonesty and violence” that we rightly deplore.
As
the old song says, “Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me….”
-- Bill
[1]
Benedictine Daily Prayer: A Short Breviary
(Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2005), p. 1115.
[2]
David Whyte,
Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
(Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2019), p. 13.
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Do any of our Reflection readers want – need – look for – an uplifting moment during a day fraught with fear, anger, or hopelessness? In the midst of a raging pandemic, do we look down at our empty lap, empty hands, or empty dreams? Often, while at my desk, I look . . . seemingly, at nothing . . . wondering. Then my eye will catch, on the top of the bookcase,
a framed quote
from
St. Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-97)
: “…for me prayer is a surge of the heart. It is a simple look towards heaven, it is a cry of recognition and love, embracing both trial and joy.”
This saying originally came to me as: “prayer is an
uplifting
of the heart” from a different French translation. A saint and Carmelite nun known as the Little Flower of Jesus, Thérèse’s prayers have long interested me, particularly those of selfless abandon. When she, barely past her teens, was diagnosed with tuberculosis, she approached God in her prayer with childlike simplicity;
“I am quite resigned to live or to die,
I am even willing to recover
and go to Cochin-China
if it is God’s will.”*
Thérèse learned early on that “C’est la confiance, et rien que la confiance, qui doit nous conduire a l’amour” that is: It is trust, and nothing but trust, that should lead us to love. It is trust that sustained her during the death of her mother at an early age, her father’s being institutionalized in an insane asylum; her dark night of faith in which she could no longer believe in an afterlife; and her intense physical suffering from tuberculosis that led to her death at the age of twenty-four.
Shall
we
, also, look up with confidence, allow our prayer to be an upsurge of the heart, and recognize that our cry of recognition and love, embracing both trial and joy, is the way to love?
-- Jan
*Coincidentally, when Therese made this reference c.1876 to Cochin-China (now Viet-Nam), the territory was being ravaged by a disease that killed scores of soldiers and sailors. The disease was sometimes asymptomatic, but often manifested with pulmonary and gastrointestinal distress.
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Prayers and Blessings for Difficult Times
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Recent Issues
Issue 221 - Delight
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Copyright (c) 2020 Soul Windows Ministries
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Sincerely,
Bill Howden and Jan Davis
Soul Windows Ministries
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