PRAYER AS NATURAL ECUMENICITY – a personal experience

Humorist, cynic, iconoclast, and social commentator Bill Maher said it most crassly, something like, “Would not human history have been better off if religion had not emerged across its pages.”  Whether warring   between each other or among each other, collisions of world religions have claimed millions of lives.  The aptly, sadly named “Thirty Year War” pitched Catholics and Protestants, intra-faith warfare among Christians.  The Christian conquest, then the sweeping Muslim conquest of Northern Africa and the Middle East, a succession of inter-faith wars.  The African slave trade and western expansion with genocidal impact on Native American populations carried out with Christian consent, arriving slaves baptized prior to stepping shackled onto the auction block.  A legacy inevitably re-enacted, as if by some insane repetition compulsion, generation by generation.  Sam Harris (End of Faith) names twenty-six wars over time, some extending into the present, initiated or exacerbated in the name of faith.  I write all of this as an ordained Christian clergyperson.  With sadness, awkwardness and a touch of guilt-by-association.

I am by nature a positive, hopeful person.  I believe there can be a better way.  I vision a world where adherents within a faith – mine being Christian – can choose acceptance, mutual understanding and high respect, even across significant differences.  And a world where those of differing faith can diligently seek common ground, shared values and principles, focus beyond that which divides to that which connects.  One might argue I being naïve, little evidence to support this vision I cast. 

A very personal experience in the midst of a family crisis has freshened that hope and shed a most promising light.  Our daughter-in-law, Mexican wife of our younger son, had a significant but not uncommon surgery two weeks ago and was apparently on track in her recovery process – when symptoms of severe complications surfaced.  Over the course of seventy-two hours she had two additional deeply invasive surgeries.  “It was close,” the surgeon later confessed, “we almost lost her.”  My wife and I flew to Mexico and have accompanied Erik and Griselda and their young sons through these anguishing, though now grateful days.  She will come home from the hospital in a day or two.

I sent emails to as nearly one hundred people – many participants in various groups in which we share membership, often groups gathered around common spiritual seeking – asking for prayer.  For reasons too lengthy to profile here, except to name my sense of blessing in it all, recipients of those emails included Egyptian Muslims, Iranian Baha’is, Persian Zoroastrians, a Pakistani Sikh, a Chinese Confucianist, Jews and Buddhists, Quakers and Unitarians, indigenous Nauhtls, Mexican Catholics . . . as well as Christians across a broad theological spectrum.

Their commitment to pray and individual prayers were expressed in a rich and broad variety of wordings, reflecting differing understandings of the Divine, varying understandings of just what prayer is or how it works.  But each prayer and pray-er shared a common focus – Griselda and our son and their boys and Betsy and me.  It was “lived ecumenicity,” a ready and unifying bond common to all, shared by all, expressed by all – undistracted by the reality of our differences, undiluted by varying theologies.

Hope does spring eternal . . . all the more profound springing forth in the eternal now!