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During a prayer meeting for peace this week, a Friend read this passage, ascribed to 'Anna', from the second chapter of Britain Yearly Meeting's Quaker Faith and Practice:
Prayer is an act of sharing with God, the Spirit, and not an attempt to prompt God to action. It is a promise that I will do my best, even if what I am able to do seems too insignificant to be worthwhile. When I pray for peace, and that the hearts of those in authority may be changed, it is a promise that I shall do such things as write to those in power, share in vigils, and above all lead my own life, as far as possible, in such a manner as to take away the occasion for strife between individuals and between peoples. When I pray for others who are in need, it is a promise to make my own contribution, perhaps by writing, by visiting, by a gift, by telling someone whom I know could help. When I pray for forgiveness, for strength and courage, I try to open my heart, making it possible for me humbly to receive.
(Link.)
I wish I were this mature! For me, prayer absolutely is full of my attempts, pathetic as they may be, to prompt God to action.
A few months ago I wrote about my prayers that God would send angel armies to the skies over Ukraine, fully conscious of my prayer's lack of logic or chances of being fulfilled. It's not that I believed that my tiny voice would push God over the edge, despite history's long evidence that, whatever God is doing, it doesn't apparently include restraining the hands of warmakers. It's more that, in the face of the constant stream of tragedies and agonies (for example, in Gaza) witnessed by the whole world, my relationship with God will suffer if I don't make this plea.
Consider the unnamed representative of God's people laying out their frustration in Psalm 44 (in Eugene Peterson's paraphrase, slightly adapted), starting with verse 8:
All day we parade God’s praise—
we thank you by name over and over.But now you’ve walked off and left us,
you’ve disgraced us and won’t fight for us.You made us turn tail and run;
those who hate us have cleaned us out.You delivered us as sheep to the butcher,
you scattered us to the four winds.You sold your people at a discount—
you made nothing on the sale.You made people on the street,
people we know, poke fun and call us names.You made us a joke among the godless,
a cheap joke among the rabble.Every day I’m up against it,
my nose rubbed in my shame—Gossip and ridicule fill the air,
people out to get me crowd the street.All this came down on us,
and we’ve done nothing to deserve it.
We never betrayed your Covenant:
our hearts were never false, our feet never left your path.Do we deserve torture in a den of jackals?
or lockup in a black hole?If we had forgotten to pray to our God
or made fools of ourselves with store-bought gods,Wouldn’t you have figured this out?
We can’t hide things from you.No, you decided to make us martyrs,
lambs assigned for sacrifice each day.Get up, God! Are you going to sleep all day?
Wake up! Don’t you care what happens to us?Why do you bury your face in the pillow?
Why pretend things are just fine with us?And here we are—flat on our faces in the dirt,
held down with a boot on our necks.Get up and come to our rescue.
If you love us so much, Help us!
Look at this comment in the New Interpreter's Study Bible:
Pledging innocence and faithfulness to the covenant, the people accuse, because of you we are being killed all day long (v. 22, cf. Rom. 8:36). There is no justice in God's crushing them. The text insists that there is no congruity whatever between the people's sin and the judgment that has befallen them. It is easy to understand why this text was so frequently on the lips of those facing death in the Shoah (Holocaust) of 1939-45.
And from today's Palestine, Munther Isaac of Bethlehem Bible College does not hold back, either:
We prayed. We prayed for their protection … and God did not answer us, not even in the “house of God” were church buildings able to protect them. Our children die before the silence of the world, and before the silence of God. How difficult is God’s silence!
'Anna' (of Quaker Faith and Practice) is right about the promises that we make, or could make, as we pray: promises to do what we can in the face of violence. But those promises are in the context of our plea to our God for justice. After we pray and lament and grieve before God in utter honesty, and confess our inability to match reality with God's own explicit promises, we face what it actually means for us, our limited and often discouraged selves, to be the Body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:27, context). So, even as I stubbornly ask for angels over Ukraine (counting on God and you to overlook my naïve ways), what I also want and need is for guidance on how we can rise up, in all our diversity of gifts and temperaments and levels of maturity, and be that Body of Christ.
Alice Walker wrote, "We are the ones we have been waiting for." Maybe God, the sovereign Creator, has been waiting for us, too....
Related: Anger. "Life is not a short story." "You can never learn that Christ is all you need...." What can love do?
Coming later this month to Youtube, the film For Our Daughters ("stories of abuse, betrayal, and resistance in the evangelical church") is based on the final chapter of Kristin Kobes Du Mez's book Jesus and John Wayne. Kristin gives some context for the film on her substack blog.
A "Catholic feminist," Kristina Traina, explains her journey with Orthodox saints.
Jeremy Morris on the Ukrainian invasion of Kursk, why the invasion registers so minimally among Russians, and (once again) the challenges of measuring popular opinion.
Exploring the spiritual significance of fasting: a webinar on September 30, presented by British Friends.
What are the specific challenges Friends face as we seek to embrace gifts of public ministry? Windy Cooler considers the results of Friends General Conference's survey on public ministry.
I'm delighted to see that Simon Barrow, long associated with Ekklesia, has just launched his substack column, Illuminations.
"Mellow Down Easy"—a version of Willie Dixon's classic, made famous by Little Walter. Here are Steve Guyger and his band at the Mojo Music Club in Kleinstaasdorf, Austria. Enjoy!
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