THE FIRST WAR PRAYER

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

     Welcome back.  Let's think about Mark Twain's "The War Prayer.

     Last time I posted, I shared President Roosevelt's national radio prayer that he prayed the night our troops were storming Normandy, France during World War II.  

     The prayer was an intercessory prayer.  Americans turned to God and were involved in the war effort.

     However, I would be remiss if I do not write about the true meaning of a prayer to arms.  No one has captured this meaning as well as Mark Twain's "War Prayer."

     The nation was about to go to war.  Everyone's excitement reached a feverish pitch as bands played, troops mustered, and churches prayed.  

     The story takes place in a church where a stranger appeared who claimed to be from heaven.  He told the congregation that their prayer had been heard. 

     Below is the first part of the story.  Tomorrow, I will post the rest.  As you read, recall President Roosevelt's prayer.  Do you see any parallels?

     It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory which stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener. 

     It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety's sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way.

     Sunday morning came -- next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with martial dreams -- visions of the stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender! 

     Then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! With the volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy, and envied by the neighbors and friends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to the field of honor, there to win for the flag, or, failing, die the noblest of noble deaths. 

     The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said; it was followed by an organ burst that shook the building, and with one impulse the house rose, with glowing eyes and beating hearts, and poured out that tremendous invocation

     God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest! Thunder thy clarion and lightning thy sword!

     Then came the "long" prayer. None could remember the like of it for passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. 

     The burden of its supplication was, that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work; bless them, shield them in the day of battle and the hour of peril, bear them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them to crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory--

Blessings...

REACTION AND COUNTER REACTION

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth .

Welcome back .  Let's think about the history of the warfare between science and religion.

I was thinking today how fundamentalism was a reaction to the Enlightenment in general and Darwin in particular.  For decades no one has taken fundamentalists seriously as they started their own private schools and universities, teaching their own version of science and history.  

Over time their political clout has grown and their world view, which is too absurd to bear up against science, has sought credence as a viable explanation of the nature of reality based on 1st Amendment protections.  

I think we are finally seeing a counter reaction of the scientific community to fundamentalism.  For one thing, public scientists like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye are clearly responding to flaws in fundamentalist explanations with more accessible and well animated scientific explanations.  COSMOS has been outstanding in the way it compares flaws with facts.  

What fundamentalists , and evangelicals , for the latter are nicer, more hipster versions of the former promise about the past, present , and future is becoming less credible as years pass.  Rather, a synthesis of modern science and progressive religion is emerging.  Fundamentalists are becoming quaint like psychics and astrologers.

While science is becoming the truth.

Blessings...

THE LARGEST PRAYER MEETING IN HISTORY

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

    Welcome back. Let’s think a little more about intercession since it can be so iffy.

     Intercession isn't just praying for others. It is being for others in your prayers. 

   Sometimes we pray in a group called a prayer meeting. This can be led by one person or several who are asked to pray.

     During World War II, on the eve of Operation Overload, President Roosevelt led a prayer that millions of Americans heard on their radios. It was an intercessory prayer for our brave men storming Normandy.

     He was also praying for our country, where the evils of racism flourished without the concentration camps.

     What made the president’s prayer an intercessory prayer was the turning to God by Americans who had sacrificed with their hearts, their hands, and their wallets to defeat fascism. 


     You see, to be true intercession, a prayer requires more than what we do on our knees. 

     Below, without comment, is the text of President Roosevelt's great intercessory prayer: read on the radio, June 6, 1944. It was originally entitled "Let Our Hearts Be Stout." This was the largest prayer meeting in history.

“My Fellow Americans:

     Last night, when I spoke with you about the fall of Rome, I knew at that moment that troops of the United States and our Allies were crossing the Channel in another and greater operation. It has come to pass with success thus far.

     And so, in this poignant hour, I ask you to join with me in prayer:

     Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.

     Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.

     They will need Thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.

     They will be sore tried, by night and by day, without rest -- until the victory is won. The darkness will be rent by noise and flame. Men's souls will be shaken with the violence of war.

     For these men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. They fight to let justice arise, and tolerance and goodwill among all Thy people. They yearn but for the end of battle, for their return to the haven of home.

     Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom.

     And for us at home -- fathers, mothers, children, wives, sisters, and brothers of brave men overseas, whose thoughts and prayers are ever with them -- help us, Almighty God, to rededicate ourselves in renewed faith in Thee in this hour of great sacrifice.

     Many people have urged that I call the nation into a single day of special prayer. But because the road is long and the desire is great, I ask that our people devote themselves in a continuance of prayer. As we rise to each new day, and again when each day is spent, let words of prayer be on our lips, invoking Thy help to our efforts.

     Give us strength, too -- strength in our daily tasks, to redouble the contributions we make in the physical and the material support of our armed forces.

     And let our hearts be stout, to wait out the long travail, to bear sorrows that may come, to impart our courage unto our sons wheresoever they may be.

     And, O Lord, give us faith. Give us faith in Thee; faith in our sons; faith in each other; faith in our united crusade. Let not the keenness of our spirit ever be dulled. Let not the impacts of temporary events, of temporal matters of but fleeting moment -- let not these deter us in our unconquerable purpose.

     With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogances. Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace -- a peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men. And a peace that will let all of men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil.

     Thy will be done, Almighty God. Amen."

     President Franklin D. Roosevelt - June 6, 1944

BEGGARS AND MAGICIANS

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back. I’ve been posting about the five kinds of verbal prayer:  praise, thanksgiving, confession, intercession, and supplication. Let’s think about intercession.

Intercession is problematic for many faith people. The lame adage, “God answers all prayer. He says ‘yes,” ‘no,’ and ‘wait,’” was created to offset the reality of orisons devoid of action.

The theology underlying such a perception about prayer suggests that poor old ancient of days God has nothing better to do than jump to our beck and call when we require room service from him. Well, jump, say no, or make us wait.

Thus Being-itself with all its infinite vastness waits upon little old me.

Intercession is much deeper than that. True intercession is when I pray for other people, and with other people, in such a way that I spiritually become them in order to heal them.

When I was a kid, I prayed this prayer every day, “Dear God bless everybody in the world.”  There is nothing wrong with a prayer like that. I still intercede for the world in the same way. Somebody has to do it.

However, such intercession is easy. There’s a huge temptation to believe we have done our duty to the world simply because we prayed.

However, everybody in the world is not being blessed. Millions die every day without ever having one chance for a cure. They feel forsaken, you know, like a son of God might feel.

Some say God is blessing everybody. Yeah, right. Such blessings have a funny way of showing themselves—like live possums playing dead in traffic.  

The longer we live, the more life teaches us about suffering. Millions die from disease. Millions die from natural disaster. Millions die from accidents. Millions die from suicide, homicide, and that great purveyor of both:  war.

When I was a baby Christian, I prayed like an infant for Jesus. When I became a man, life surrounded me on all sides, became more complex, and I had to grow up.   

I confess that I have been cynical about prayer, not because I stopped believing in intercession, but because I outgrew our evangelical culture of magical prayer. When people got sick and died, that was God’s will; when people got sick and lived, that was God’s magical love.

How many times have I heard good country people say, “The doctors told me that it’s a miracle I’m alive. Every single one of my organs turned into chickens, but the good Lord kept them clucking smoothly.”?

God gets all the glory when a brilliant surgeon saves an evangelical’s life. The surgeon gets a thank you note. Researchers in the science of medicine and developers in the techniques of care receive little or no acknowledgement.

That’s just another way to prefer magical thinking over science. It’s a shame. Medical science is everlasting intercession.

Theologically, it can be argued that it’s a wonder any one of us is alive.

Biologically it can be argued that being here today, typing this post, is a wonder or sheer luck for me. Little-seed-me managed to out swim millions of  little-seeds-not-me free styling to be first to cross into my mother’s fertile membranous start line.

Indeed, Jesus’ powers to heal have increased as medical science has flourished.

I have a dear friend whose baby girl was born with a rare and lethal cancer near her optic nerve. We all prayed for his daughter to live.  A surgery was proposed. The medical team said, at best, the odds were fifty-fifty she would go into remission. Many people prayed for her and many churches.

My friend told me before the surgery about the cancer support group he and his wife joined. Others’ children did not live. Their souls followed their prayers on the way to god. My friend said that he did not believe that God would spare his daughter just because he and a lot of other people were praying for her.

If you think about, the whole kit and caboodle of this kind of prayer seems faithless. We seem to believe the rules of reality that work for us change for God.

We pray as we are begging God to change God’s mind. We pray as if we have to let god know the death of our dying children would irretrievably shatter our souls. We are afraid if we do not pray fervently then he won’t hear us. We believe with hearts we’ve flung to the floor that we must pray with as many prayers as we can or god will not be persuaded to grant our wishes.

What happens to some people when they lose a child is they are lost too.

Intercession must go beyond begging and magic. Our God of love works through minds and bodies. Love is the greatest intercession of all. Love urges us to rely less on knees that bend, more on hearts that give, and always on hands that heal.

Praise God for life!  Praise God for medical science!  Praise God for the strength to endure the edge of night!  My friend’s baby girl lives today. She speaks French. She loves art. She lives.

Let us give thanks.

Blessings… 

TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT ME

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  Yesterday, I wrote wrote about two of the five kinds of verbal prayer:  adoration and thanksgiving.  Let's think about confession.

We must tell the truth about ourselves.  That is confession.  We must be honest to God about ourselves.  That is confession.  

The problem today is that too many people think they are just fine, but no one is just fine, especially Christians.

I am often amazed at what a tiny tyrant is the god of Jesus when I hear it described in the mouths of loud preachers.  They imagine their divine dictator to be the source of all that is.  How can that be when that tiny tyrant is merely an imagined replica of themselves?  Why can’t people see that and confess it?

Many of us love to prattle about how much we love liberty, equality, and righteousness, but what we really love is superiority.  It is quite natural for each of us to believe that we are better than other people for whatever reason we can make up just to stoke our hubris. 

I drive a better car.  I go to a better, bigger church.  I cheer for the world champions.  I read the best books.  I am the strongest, the prettiest, the fastest, the smartest, the best, by god, the best.  I watch the best movies and television shows.  I live in the greatest country.  I hale from silver spoons.  I digest gold so my shit gleams.

Even the so called simple man, the ordinary Joe, sets himself up as superior because he knows nothing and hates everything complex.  Ironically, he cloaks his pride in humility, praising himself for not being all that special while at the same time glorying over his loyalty to his tribe.

Often, he is boorish, prejudiced, and ignorant.  He has managed to go through most of his life without ever reading a good book.  His conversation about sports and tools sparkles.  He rivets us for those few minutes it took for him to explain his tiny world view.  He demonstrates for us how he and his tribe are the salt of the earth. 

A truth about salt is that salt is unconscious.  It would never know when its flavor has departed.

There I go, setting myself up as superior.  It is an obnoxious human iniquity. 

The truth is the following:  not one of us is righteous.  We all need to confess how that is real for us and confess that to our God of love, our friends and family, and to ourselves. 

None of us are so wonderful that we can’t admit that all that fancy glow we see radiating about ourselves is easily revealed for what it is once the light of inexorable truth shines on us. 

What is that inexorable truth?  We are all sinners.  I do not mean we do sinful things.  Sin is a theological concept that points to the brokenness that exists between us and every single relationship in our lives:  God, neighbors, enemies, loved ones. 

We are all strangers to one another and ourselves. 

All of us turn away from God.  To turn back, we need to acknowledge what blinds, hurts, or kills us.  To acknowledge that is to make confession.  Only then, can we follow Jesus on the path of self abasement that turns our ways to love.

When we look in the mirror, we see the one who is screwing up our lives.  That is discernment.  When we look in our God of love, we know the One who knows who we truly are.   That is confession.

Blessings…

VERBAL PRAYER

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  Let's think about prayer.

Prayer is as natural as breathing.  Often it cannot be helped.  Often it surprises us like a love letter in the mail.

There are three kinds of prayer:  verbal, meditative, and contemplative.  I will write about verbal prayer for this post.

There are five kinds of verbal prayer:  adoration, thanksgiving, confession, intercession, and petition.

ADORATION

Adoration is praising God.  This prayer is easy to pray, but sometimes I wonder if God really wants us to keep telling Him or Her how great He or She is.  Is it annoying?

However, somehow our hearts cannot help but express our love and awe for the ground of our being.

My brother once attended a Pentecostal revival where he "fell out" and began speaking in tongues.  We argued somewhat about this.  He insisted that all Christians must speak in tongues to be truly blessed by God.  I refused to denigrate his experience, but I insisted that my devotion to theology, writing, and Bible reading were just as much a connection to God as speaking in tongues.  What we give to God adores God.

Thanksgiving

We must thank God when it rains if we thank God when the sun shines.  I believe Satchel Paige said that.  I agree.  I thank God for everything except suffering.  

I never pray, "Thanks, God, for my chronic back pain," but rather I thank God for my being able to love my life-with-pain.  

Suffering sucks.  Life, with or without suffering, is a gift.

I will never thank God for anyone's death, or my own, for I do not believe everything that happens is the will of an all controlling deity.  Rather, I believe we reside in our God of love whose will is grace everlasting.  I grieve the loss of grace my loved one's presence gave to my life, lingering only within my heart's memory.  For knowing that, I thank God always.

So in all things let us give thanks…if not only because we still live to give it.

Blessings…

VAST INTERNAL INFINITY OF BEING

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  Happy Saint Patrick's Day.

Let's talk about prayer.

It's natural to pray.  Atheists should pray and often do, but believe they do not when they fail to fall to their knees or invoke a deity by name.  

The moment life blows us apart, and we wish for things to be otherwise, we are in a moment of prayer. We yearn for that time before the disintegration of our complacency, or a time better and beyond falling apart, and it is the yearning that shakes off our finitude like an old, long skin. We arrive before the vast internal infinity of being, our course having veered to new possibilities.  

That is prayer that wants no god to fetch for us.

The instant we sense life's sinister creep growing like the Blob, smothering our spirits, strangling our vitality, and we wish things to be otherwise, we are in an epoch of prayer.  

This instant may extend everlastingly:  as felt within a day, a month, a year, or a decade for some. 

We may not invoke God's name, which is not a name that anyone can actually say, but our hearts having become brooding, anxious sparrows may yet fly to nest securely in the vast internal infinity of being or may yet fall and be known.

What I mean by "vast internal infinity of being" is our sense of awe, of absolute time that seizes us when life would crush us.  It is that moment when all compass points vanish and all navigable stars in the night of our lives have been extinguished.  

We live, enduring the duration of not knowing, of fearing the terrible ends of no good choices, of either sharing our anguish or hauling it silently.  

I am describing the dark night of the soul.  We do not have to be Christian mystics to know it.  All we have to do is live.  

The thing ever true about night is we might dream it lasts forever, but it never does.  The spreading dawn overcomes the creep of night.  If we dream of eternal starless night skies, then when we awaken, we will know the glow and warmth of light that has always been.

I am writing about prayer...wordless prayer.  There's no need to ask for anything...praise will do...thanksgiving is always appropriate.  

If we must supplicate, then ask our God of love to make us carriers of love, infecting the entire universe, and spreading to infinite universes beyond us, so that life, not hate, names us.

Next time, I will write about how to pray.

Blessings...