The Fruit of Prayer, By Jim Wayne

When the dark powers seem to be winning, our impulses tell us to get angry, fight back, win the argument of the day. As human as such reactions may seem, there is a stronger, more profound response necessary: that we respect our opponent, pray for our enemy and speak truth with love. And again, this can only happen with prayer.

Jim Wayne is a member of the JPIC Committee and is retiring from nearly 30 years of service as a Kentucky legislature where he was a tireless witness for peace, justice and a moral public policy.

​The instant-news overload wears on the most serene among us. The slaughter of high schoolers, the weeping Syrian mothers bent over the stilled bodies of their children, the lies pouring out of Washington, the rising rate of poverty among American families, the barking threats of world leaders pushing the world to nuclear destruction, the environment growing more deadly each day and the severe tribalism around the globe can deplete hope in the most faith-filled among us.

As followers of the Gospel, our immediate response to news of suffering and destruction must be to turn to prayer. It is in prayer that we reconnect to our center: Christ living within us. In our deepest centers we find serenity, confidence and hope. It is from prayer… in our quiet moments focused on God, in our rooms with our doors closed…that answers and actions form. In prayer we discern, as best we can, the will of God. In prayer we decide which actions fit our life and circumstance for our moment in history.

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In Western societies, despite our long history of as a “Christian” civilization, we are taught to value our lives less by our prayer and more by what we accomplish. We idealize the achievement of wealth, power and status, especially in America. Witness the popularity of the best-selling book “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” and many other similar self-help titles.

A deep reading of the New Testament, however, holds up a different value than achievement. We are called to be faithful people who follow God’s will by loving our neighbors – the fruit of prayer.

When the dark powers seem to be winning, our impulses tell us to get angry, fight back, win the argument of the day. As human as such reactions may seem, there is a stronger, more profound response necessary: that we respect our opponent, pray for our enemy and speak truth with love. And again, this can only happen with prayer.

Such has been the prayerful response of the great witnesses of the faith of our time: Archbishop Oscar Romano, Dorothy Day, Sister Thea Bowman, Franz Jaggerstatter, Sister Dorothy Stang and Daniel Berrigan. None of these faith-filled people lived to see the results of their efforts. Each was a witness to the Gospel…several were martyred for their faith. They are modern day models for us in how prayer leads us to speak truth, define sin, and resist evil.

Thomas Merton, in his remarkable book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, wrote: "In times like ours, it is more than ever necessary for the individual to train according to objective norms of good, and learn to distinguish these from purely pragmatic norms current in society. Thus we come to know the difference between the “ways of God and the ways of Satan.” We cannot trust our society to tell us this difference. Everything is confused, and people of our time blindly follow now God and now Satan, blown this way and that by every changing wind of urgency and opportunity, judging only by what seem to them to be the immediate consequences. We must recover our inner faith not only in God but in the good, in reality, and in the power of the good to take care of itself and us as well, if only we attend to it, observe, listen, choose and obey."

Gandhi pointed out very wisely that our feeling of helplessness in the presence of injustice and aggression arises from “our deliberate dismissal of God from our common affairs.” Those who relinquish God as the center of their moral orbit lose all direction and by that very fact lose and betray their humanness. (p.119)

These are encouraging words for our day as they were when he wrote them over 50 years ago. When we rage against news of injustice, murder, war, destruction of the planet, let the rage happen. It is a healthy response. But we next must quiet ourselves in prayer, to listen to God in the moment and learn to trust that God will indeed make all things well, in God’s good time.

The beautiful words of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ give us perspective for such a life of prayer and love:

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability---
and that it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you.
Your ideas mature gradually---let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say grace and circumstances acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
And accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.
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Image credit: Kevin Sprouls, http://www.sprouls.com/blog/2012/02/trees/fruit-tree/