As we move through this tumultuous time, when we feel overwhelmed by events and weighed down by grief and fear, it is easy to feel helpless and hopeless. While “thoughts and prayers” have gotten a bad name in recent years, and while it is not a sufficient response to the challenges of our day, it is a necessary one. There is power in prayer!
Walter Wink, goes so far as to declare that
history belongs to the intercessors, who believe the future into being . . . The future belongs to whoever can envision in the manifold of its potentials a new and desirable possibility, which faith then fixes upon as inevitable.
This is the politics of hope. Hope envisages its future and then acts as if that future is now irresistible, thus helping to create the reality for which it longs. The future is not closed. There are fields of forces whose interactions are somewhat predictable. But how they will interact is not. Even a small number of people, firmly committed to the new inevitability on which they have fixed their imaginations, can decisively affect the shape the future takes. These shapers of the future are the intercessors, who call out of the future the longed-for new present. In the New Testament, the name and texture and aura of that future is God’s dominion-free order, the reign of God. (Engaging the Powers, p. 298-299)
In our prayer, we place ourselves in vulnerable trust before God and seek to articulate God’s desire, God’s dream for the world. We name it so that we can claim it! Intercessory prayer isn’t simply a projection of our own wishes and fantasies, but rather a bold attempt to reflect back to God the prayer that God already is praying in and through us. God, ultimately, is the intercessor!
This is good news, because the pain and hope of the world are too much for us to bear alone. As Wink reminds us,
We human beings are too frail and tiny to bear all this pain. The solution is not avoidance, however. Refusal to read the papers or listen to the news is no protection. I am convinced that our solidarity with all of life is somatic, and that we sense the universal suffering whether we wish to or not. What we need is a portable form of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, where we can unburden ourselves of this accumulated suffering. We need to experience it; it is a part of reality. Our task in praying is precisely that of giving speech to the Spirit’s groanings within us. But we must not try to bear the sufferings of the creation ourselves. We are to articulate these agonizing longings and let them pass through us to God. Only the heart at the center of the universe can endure such a weight of suffering. Our attempts to bear them (and our depressions are evidence that we try) are masochistic, falsely messianic, and finally idolatrous, as if there were no God, as if we had to carry this burden all by ourselves. (Engaging the Powers, p. 305)
God is with us. In our prayer, we act as a two-way transmitter connected to the Source. We take in the suffering of the world and pass it on to God, who, in the alchemy of love, transfigures it into hope, and passes it back through us into the world. Prayer is how we work with the energy of love to make God’s intention our reality. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
As one of my teachers once put it, the difference is not between contemplation and action, but between action with or without awareness. We cannot afford a church in which some pray while others act. We need a church of people who act rooted in prayer. We need intercessors, not for the sake of the church, but for the sake of the world that the church is meant to serve.
Let us pray.
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