Interfaith Day of Prayer

Today is Interfaith Day of Prayer.  Here's a prayer by the Rev. Dr. Traci Blackmon that came in an email this morning.  She is Senior Pastor of Christ the King United Church of Christ in Florissant, Missouri.  She is also Associate General Minister of the UCC's Justice and Local Church Ministries.

Holy One,

Here we are, called by your many names in many languages, to humble ourselves and pray.  Here we are, God, called together from diverse places and spaces to seek your face, to look upon the sickness that has infected our world, to acknowledge the wickedness of both our compliance and our complicity, and to lament the consequences of our actions aloud.  Here we are to wail.  Here we are to sound the alarm.  Here we are to groan.  Here we are, to cry out on behalf of Your creation.  And to turn.

For the voices gathered here as a cacophony of lament on this National Day of Prayer, I honor your power.  For the congregations and communities, both near and far, seen and unseen, heard and ignored, we represent, I honor your presence.  For creation wounded and trying to heal, I give you praise.  For the voices all around this world that never cease to call upon you for the strength to rise, for the courage to confront, and for the hope to sustain, we join our voices to theirs and offer these prayers.  We are crying out to you.

And we are listening.  We are listening for you in the wind.  We are listening for you in the quaking of the earth.  We are listening for you in the fire.  We are listening for you in cries of our people.  We are listening for you, listening in the stillness of our streets.  We are listening.  We are waiting.  Knowing that you hear our cries, we wait for your mercy as we turn our hearts toward your people and heal our land.

We pray in many names.
I pray in the name of Jesus.
Amen

In October 2019, I read White Privilege: Let's Talk ~ A Resource for Transformational Dialogue by Traci Blackmon, John Dorhauer, Da Vita McCallister, John Paddock, and Stephen G. Ray, that was published in 2016.  This resource is only 99-cents for Kindle, and resources for facilitators are available free from the publisher.  Here are some of my notes from that book:

"In the same way that a tinted lens will color everything seen through it, seeing the world through the lens of race changed the way I see everything" (loc. 119).

"Join efforts to repeal the 13th Amendment's exception clause.  Ostensibly, the 13th Amendment, passed in 1865, banned slavery.  But the exception clause still allows it.  The amendment reads: 'Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction" (loc. 2030).

"Rule 1:  Being a white ally is understanding the ubiquity of anti-Black animus held by a majority of white people, and therefore being inclined to believe Black people about the presence of racism in everyday life" (loc. 2233).

"Rule 2:  Being a white ally is not denying the power and privilege that your whiteness brings you, but rather asking how you can use it in the struggles to ameliorate the effects of white supremacy on Black persons and communities" (loc. 2262).

The "Do You Pray" illustration above was in the same email this morning from Parkway UCC.

Meditating on the limits of human language

A Woman's Meditation
by Ruth F. Brin

When men were children, they thought of God as a father;
When men were slaves, they thought of God as a master;
When men were subjects, they thought of God as a king.
But I am a woman, not a slave, not a subject,
not a child who longs for God as father or mother.

I might imagine God as teacher or friend, but those images,
like king, master, father or mother, are too small for me now.

God is the force of motion and light in the universe;
God is the strength of life on our planet;
God is the power moving us to do good;
God is the source of love springing up in us.
God is far beyond what we can comprehend.

That's from the 1986 book Harvest: Collected Poems and Prayers by Ruth F. Brin (1921-2009).  It's the second poem in the book (p. 4), following "God of Rain and Wind" (p. 3), in which are these lines:

I pray to You for myself, for well I know
That when a person dies a world is destroyed.

In the third (p. 5) of the five poems Amazon allowed me read of this book, I found these lines to ponder:

Help us through study and thought and meditation
To find the direction we are to travel,
With the same sure sense You have given the flying birds.

I first read the original poem (at the top) today, a week after Wilda Gafney shared it in her blog post Majesty, Mercy, and Mystery.  I found it again here, shared with the permission of the estate of Ruth F. Brin, z"l.  What does that z"l mean?  Why is it there?  A search gave me an answer:

It's the abbreviation of the common honorific "of blessed memory."  The Hebrew transliteration is "zikhrono livrakha" (m.) / "zikhronah livrakha" (f.).  In Hebrew that would be (f.) זיכרונה לברכה‬ \ (m.) זיכרונו לברכה.  It is often abbreviated in English as either OBM or z"l.  The Hebrew abbreviation is ז״ל‬.

Ah, yes, I've heard my Jewish friends say "of blessed memory" when mentioning someone who had died.  Back to Ruth Brin's poetry.  I am intrigued and have been meditating on these words, these concepts, these thoughts of a poet.  From the back of the book:

"Today it is difficult to find a Reform, Conservative, or Reconstructionist prayer book or anthology that does not include her writings."

Looking through the copy of the Jewish prayer book I got at the JCC book fair in 2015, I don't know how I'd ever determine which prayers had been written by any specific person.  The focus is on God, not which person composed each prayer.

To continue meditating, go read Wil Gafney's Majesty, Mercy, and Mystery.  By the way, I found someone online selling a used copy of Harvest (which seems to be out of print) and ordered it.

What is prayer?

Prayer is NOT "expecting things from God" or "asking God to do things" that we should do ourselves, as so many seem to think.  If prayer is the orientation of our whole body, mind, and spirit leaning toward God-ness in silent attention, as Merton says, then it's also these things:

• Prayer can be a feeling, a thought, or even a vibration, like giving a child a tight hug and saying, "Mmmm-uhmmmmm!"
• Have you ever cooed "Oooooooh" as you hugged a baby to your chest?  It follows that when you hug anyone, that's a prayer.
• When you forgive someone, that's a prayer.
• When you help someone in need by giving your time or energy or money, that's a prayer.
• When you cook something to nourish family and friends, that's a prayer.
• When you say "drive safely" as someone leaves, that's a prayer.

In the 1970s, I had a poster that said something like, "Your whole life can be a prayer, if only you make it so."  Let's make it so.  You won't have to "find time to pray" because prayer will be your whole life.

I've written about prayer before, if you are interested:

• How "they" begin
• Prayer of silence (or not)
• To sew is to pray (Prayer can be sewing, as you can see from a quote in the middle of this post beside this photo)

Welcome to the RevGals who drop by to read this blog post.   I'll link back so my readers can read other "Under the Surface" posts, too.