October 22, 2000 A.D.
© 2000 by gallup@tmx.com.ni
In the public expression of prayer, we are all careful to ask, at least within the liturgy, for what is acceptable and appropriate. I had poor neighbors in Managua who for several years I had once a month given an order of groceries at the local mercado--rice, beans, oil, sugar, eggs, laundry soap. The gifts were regular, around the first of the month. A kind of "canasta basica", once guaranteed to the poor at low prices in the revolutionary Sandinista days. (Those days are now gone with the wind of U.S. counter-revolutionary imperialism.) Usually I would put in a whole chicken, or a bag of soup bones. Eventually I began to get little notes from the family, carefully and neatly written out, by one of the boys whose tuition in primary school I was paying, a few days before the first of the month, with a list of the groceries they wanted for the coming month. They would have slipped coffee and "galletas simple" onto the list--saltines. Almost a luxury, served with coffee at the wakes or parties of the poor. Or "queso blanco" ---white cheese--and "leche en polvo"--powdered milk, prized in casas without refrigerators.
St. Thomas wrote that in prayer it is permissible to ask for whatever it is permissible to desire. But our intercession list in the Sunday liturgy stayed pretty tame; we asked for healing, mostly of our physical illnesses: this one's surgery coming up, that one's heart disease, another's Alzheimer's or gout or failing vision. We also prayed for those in mental or emotional distress. (The Presbyterian prayer book had a prayer for those "in sexual confusion" -- they meant gay people, not those who find themselves with gender dysphoria.) We prayed for travellers--a habit left over from the age of highwaymen--although a commendable practice now that air travel has become chancy with low-budget maintenance. We pray for the dying, and we Anglicans and Roman Catholics pray for the dead. We pray for them because illness, and change, and dying nudge us closer to the throne of grace, and we sense the danger and the need for protection. We urge God's attention to these persons, and so direct our own there as well. We pray for those who are celebrating as well, for birthdays, and weddings and anniversaries, and in that lovely penultimate collect at evensong bid the Lord to "shield the joyous." We want God's attention to say "please" as well as "thank you" in our prayers.
Increasingly these days we pray for the unemployed and the destitute. Since the Counter Revolution of the Reagan Reich there's lots of unemployed and destitute in the underclass. There's lots of under-employed and disgusted, too, in the middle class. The full employment available to our youth in Wendy's or Kentucky Fried or Macdonald's has not fulfilled the ardent dreams of Camelot our young princes and princesses have waked from in a world where there is no right to food, much less shelter or medical care or clothing. These are not rights--"derechos"--in a capitalist society, they are privileges for those who are denominated for them in the class system. We ask God to preserve them from the perilous and life-threatening circumstances that attend the way things work--and the way we have designed them to work. This capitalist god is cobbled together at the bench of fantasy, like an objet d'art, or the household lares and penates, to ease our consciences when we fail to care for the poor. Eyes have they, and see not.
These are the kinds of prayers we hear in "the Prayers of the People" on an occasion of eucharist. We look for divine rescue in these matters, 'though we do not seek it ordinarily in what to do with bonuses, stock options, windfalls, or easy money. A relative calls to tell me there's a tumor on her husband's kidney, and again days later to say the surgery was successful. We organized hundreds of people in half a dozen churches to pray and it came out all right. The prayers helped. She was sure of it. I am sure of it. I used to think that the quantity of prayer was unimportant, that it was wrong to think "that they shall be heard for their much speaking," as Jesus himself noted. But I've now read that scientific experiments show that the more sick people are prayed for, the more likely they are to get well. In controlled experiments. Grab heaven by the hems!
So we are all confident that it is OK to pray, and to ask as many friends as we can to pray with us in our life crises, especially. The hymn that Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, "Men Go to God" says that we do so "when we are sore bestead--pray to him for succour, for his peace, for bread. All men do so--Christian and unbelieving." And Bonhoeffer adds that God goes to Man when He is sore bestead. We need to strengthen that God with our theology, our prayer, to face the Golgotha ahead of that God each day.
But there's a secret kind of prayer that goes on as well--there are categories of prayer that you might hear expressed on a TV evangelist's show, or in one of those seed-faith letters you get from Mail Order Miracle churches that peddle blessed hankies or a paper prayer rug to kneel on and name your prize. Maybe even some Anglicans are doing these things now, as the class system gets leaky. I remember some years ago a young man in a Chicago supermarket asking me to bless a slip of paper to put in his shoe--as an amulet to make a particular girl fall in love with him. The supermarket--a stodgy old Jewel--carried shelves of tall votive candles that would send away illness, draw money, bring a lover, or get a job. Down in Greek town on Halsted and Jackson in Chicago you could buy incense with the same powers. The Cuban religion of Santeria, an amalgam of old African religion and a gone-to-seed Roman catholicism, abounds now in Latino neighborhoods where you can find Botanicas, little shops that will sell you your dreams in the form of a candle or a stick of incense. Some will even sell you a sacrificial chicken whose blood will do the trick. None of us Anglicans (at least none we know) would be so crude of course. The most we do is risk the use of a pooper scooper on St Francis'Day, and have a procession of the animals--family pets, all, defanged and shampooed. There are strict limits as to what we pray for and how we pray it. At least in public.
What about the list we have in mind when we and Jesus are all alone, swinging on the outhouse gate? The epistle lesson today says we don't have in Jesus a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses. We can let it all hang out. We go confidently to the "throne of grace" -- the hilasterion -- the mercy seat -- and ask for what we could never say out loud on Sunday morning. A clerk in a bank, where I went to deposit my pension check one day told me what she was praying for, and because I am a priest asked me to pray for her, too. She asks each day that God will arrange for her to win the lottery. She was sure God would do it, as she had done some favors for Him, and some things to please Him. (My own prayers for recovery from two strokes were not far from that attitude of confident expectation of future good.) But I had doctors on my side, not just the lad who sold the winning ticket, and would get a percentage. Doctors get paid whether you get well or croak. And so do priests. Indeed, the honorarium for a funeral may be better than the pledge. (But clergy don't get sued nearly often enough for malpractice.)
We all have a list in hand in our secret prayers, that is not the list in hand for our public ones.
As one who for a long while was (before retirement) "in the job market", or to put it in religious terms, "seeking God's guidance in my vocation" -- I can sympathize with anyone who has ever prayed about employment. Almost everyone has prayed about their work, about a raise, a better job, or a complete change. But no one ever asked me to type it in the Sunday bulletin, "Pray for Clementine, seeking promotion at Atlas Buggy Parts Company" or "for Harry, hoping to edge out Helen for the Short Hills job." Or: "Pray that Nader wins in November".
Why not? It was St. Thomas Aquinas who said it was OK to pray for anything it was OK to desire. Isn't it OK to want a better job or a better President? More dignity in one's work, more success for one's friends, a win for a big time loser?
Two young fellows, upwardly mobile types, yuppies I suppose, or guppies (gay upwardly mobiles) who left their jobs in the fishing business to go into Kingdom Politics, to seek their fortunes, apparently, followed Jesus to the capital city, and on the way uptown asked him a favor. They started the way all prayers begin: "We want." (Presbyterians, fond of the subjunctive, say "We would want".) Jesus said, "What is it you want?" And they said, "Grant us". "Give us." Give us big important jobs, right next to yours. Give us glory.
Now that we've prayed for the sick and the shut-in, and given thanks for Frank Griswold's birthday, and prayed for the souls of Alan and Eleanor, our parents, now what about ME. How about my Needs?
"Are ye able", said the Master, "to be crucified with me? "Yea!" the sturdy dreamers answered, "to the death we follow thee." Or, "Yea! the conquering Christians answer," a variant lyric in the confidence of the church thirsty for blood.
So the words of the old gospel song. But Jesus says to his knowing followers, "He who is close to me is close to the Fire."
"You don't know what you're asking for, if you're asking to be close to me. It's fiery right here."
All I can promise you is, well, a bath and a banquet. Are ye able to be bathed in the blood and sacrifice up the road for us? Are ye able to drink Sangre de Cristo, Calix de Salvación? Not the sprinkle of churchfolks "christening", nor the sip of anemic communion wine, a spritz above Welch's. Are ye able to face a blood bath, to drink from the cup in Gethsemane garden? The bath of solidarity with all the stricken, smitten of God and afflicted, the wounded, bruised, chastised, the led astray, the oppressed, the slaughtered? The cut off from the land of the living? The ones buried in disgrace by bulldozers in landfills? Hung in Southern trees in the sixties as "Strange Fruit"? Kids murdered of starvation in their beds in Iraq, a price Madam Albright says "is worth it." Ethnic-Cleansed from Palestine by Israeli storm troopers? Can you live with the name "insurgent" and die of counter-insurgency in Central America?
James and John, young and full of confidence, say, "We are able." And they were, and so would join him forever.
Word gets around to the Ten, and they are indignant. We wonder whether they are indignant because James and John are impertinent, and because the Ten are so much wiser, and more polite. Or are they miffed that they didn't get their requests in before these two pushy ones? Wouldn't we be indignant if we heard self-serving prayers like those, in church? But Jesus wasn't indignant; only the Ten, says Mark, were indignant. Jesus sees that they all need some formation in the politics of God, and he calls them all to sit still and listen. "You apparently know quite well the model of power and authority around us in the world, the verticalism of the structure, the top-to-bottom arrangement, from President down to precinct captain." And those in positions have weight to throw around, to act like bosses. Megaloi--"honchos"--is the Greek word here. Great Ones. But, says Rabbi Jesus, this arrangement is not the one that's to be operative among us. Whoever wants to be a MEGAS--a great one--must first of all be your DOULOS--your servant, your domestic, your temp. The one who belongs to another, the one who "does windows." Because the Child of Humankind, this Innocente of our species, came not to be waited on, but to handle the chores, not to be a Big Shot, but to be a servant in the community. To give rather than to get, to give life, in the liberation of other lives. And to be willing to work in any capacity, so that the Liberation may come to all.
Babies scream at baptisms some times, and now that we feed little kids the eucharist, we sometimes see them frown at the taste of altar wine become the blood of the Victimi Paschali. Perhaps they have some prescience, some intuitive secret glimpse of what these things mean, which we grown ups, having lived with This Death so long we are no longer afraid, do not have. We would scream in terror if we realized what we are doing, dancing on this razor's edge. The sacramental splash at the Font, the sacramental sip at the Table, do not appall us, nor do they deter us from doing it again and again, promising blithely each time we do, like James and John the Sons of Zebedee: "We are able."
We are able to face the project of mutual service and responsibility, we are able to go on the pilgrimage to find the One Enormous Chair, Now Wouldn't that be Loverly. But Jesus keeps opening up his answer to James and John.
All of you ready and willing to embrace a life of slavery to Jesus the Poor Man, come to the altar rail today, and kneel before him with the affluent young man and ask the question of our rabboni here: "What must I do to inherit the life of the New Age?" Can you live with the answer? Can you get up and walk with it in the Pilgrim's Progress? Can we let Jesus save us in the way he has in mind?
GRANT M. GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
APARTADO RP-10
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
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