Prayer Meeting

I grew up in a family that went to church every Sunday. Most weeks, on Wednesdays, my dad would come home from work, throw the Frisbee with me in the backyard, eat dinner, and then take me to church for what was called “Prayer Meeting”. (My mom, God bless her, would more often than not stay home. I envied her.) In retrospect, those Wednesday nights were more meaningful than any Sunday morning sermon.

On Wednesday nights, the few people who attended would sing two or three songs; there’d be a brief message by the pastor, and then a round robin as voices offered up prayer requests for those in need, people who were sick, those that simply needed a simple prayer. There weren’t only supplications to God, but utterances of thanksgiving for the good things in our lives and the prayers that were answered. We’d then break up into small groups of three to four people for prayer, sit in circles, and each person would pray.

I now have returned to praying and meditating every morning before I start my day. It’s an important part of my daily routine. Forgetting all the other aspects of church that left a particularly bad taste in my mouth, looking back, those Wednesday nights were the essence of true Christianity, and I think it’s time for Christians to reevaluate their theology in order to discover what is most important in their religious belief systems that dictate the reality of their every day lives and relationships.

These memories came back to me this past week as I talked with friends about Christianity. Judge not lest ye be judged, but I can’t help but say that I think the evangelicals have got it completely wrong. I forget who said it, but someone stated that if Christ returned today and found out what Christians had done in his name, he’d nail himself back up on the cross. I don’t doubt it. If I was an avatar like him, I’d probably do likewise.

A friend recently brought up an interesting point: there are possibly, I repeat, possibly five or six verses in the Bible that might inculcate people with an excoriating thesis against homosexuality, however, there are also close to three thousand verses that express the vitality of love and charity towards one’s neighbors. Now take a step back and ask yourself, “Does God really give a tinker’s cuss about two men or two women loving each other and marrying, or is he more concerned with a starving, homeless child on the street and a supposed Christian’s response to this travesty?”

I have friends and family who say they believe absolutely everything in the Bible for what it is, at face value, and that there is no room for interpretation because “if the Bible says it, I believe it.” Okay, fine, but don’t be hypocrites. Besides the few mentions of homosexuality, the Bible also says you can sell your daughters into slavery, that you should stone your son if he’s disobedient, and that one must treat one’s slaves with compassion. Thank you Paul for that last one. Great. I appreciate that edification and affirmation of forceful subordination of brothers and sisters in Christ. I’ve brought this up countless times during theological discussions with relatives and their reaction is: “Well, don’t be silly. I wouldn’t stone my son or sell my daughter into slavery.” But you just said that you follow the Bible note by note. Flumadiddle!

Heaping piles of greenbacks – millions – were spent by Mormons and Christians to produce TV commercials in California that basically said if you don’t vote for Proposition 8, your kids will be victims of gay predators.

I just saw Gus Van Sant’s film, Milk. Not a groundbreaking bio-pic, but a fascinating character study. While I was watching the movie, there came a moment when Harvey Milk was fighting against Proposition 6 that would have made it legal to fire people from their jobs, especially teachers, because they were gay. The Proposition was defeated, but by a close margin. That’s scary. That was almost thirty years ago, and yet we’re reliving the past with the new Prop 8. Even the Terminator governor of California is opposed to this subordination of gay women and men as second class citizens. It’s all wrong. It stinks to high heaven, and I know God is shaking his head saying, “Poor things, you got it all wrong.”

There are people who really think that gay men are pedophiles. In reality the distinction between a victim's gender and a perpetrator's sexual orientation shows that many child molesters don't really have an adult sexual orientation. They have never developed the capacity for mature sexual relationships with other adults, either men or women. Instead, their sexual attractions focus on children – boys, girls, or children of both sexes.

The important point is that many child molesters cannot be meaningfully described as homosexuals, heterosexuals, or bisexuals because they are not really capable of a relationship with an adult man or woman. Instead of gender, their sexual attractions are based primarily on age. These individuals are attracted to children, not to men or women. In a Massachusetts study of sexual assault against children, researchers interviewed incarcerated offenders and found that there were no men who were primarily sexually attracted to other adult males.

I don’t want to disparage people who call themselves followers of Christ, or Christians. Live your life, believe what you want, but don’t hurt others or deny human rights with your religion. Many Christian beliefs and reactions to the world are the antithesis of Christ’s teachings. Those Wednesday night prayer meetings were for me the epitome of Christianity.

I believe prayer is a powerful tool for bringing light, love, and Christ consciousness to the world. It restores the great plan to earth during a great time of darkness. My hope is that pastors in churches that preach fear and bigotry, a belief in our separation from God, will jump down from the pulpit, set it afire, and sit among their congregation and simply talk and pray about what is most important – love, charity, respect for others regardless of color, sexuality, and creed.

I’ve read the works of Madeleine L’Engle and Albert Schweitzer. I resonate with their beliefs that doubts and questions are part of building a stronger faith; that the mystery of God is exactly that – a mystery. There’s no need to have definite answers. It’s more important to live the questions. The enigmatic nature of God is indescribable, and that’s correlative with the idea that mystery is tantamount to our experience as human beings. Einstein wrote: “The fairest things we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not, who can no longer wonder, can no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle.”

I had to grapple with the mystery of God this past year when my mother died. As my family and I sat around her bedside, I had several moments that reaffirmed to me that there is a Source, whether you call it God, the Creator, or the Jungian belief in a collective conscious. There was a moment when, after a day of being in a coma, my mom’s eyes and face lit up and she told us she loved us. There was a glow all around her head. My sisters looked and me and we all said at once, “Did you see that?” She shined and I think that was a glimpse, a shimmer of God; that it is there with us always, especially in the end of our life on this dimension and the beginning of a new one.

The day before she died, there was an incredibly violent, but beautiful storm that blew trashcans and debris across the fields. A trashcan lid just missed the head of the hospice nurse as she ran for her car. The storm, to me, was the expressive manifestation of all the emotions we had felt as a family as we watched our mother die. And then, afterwards, as the clouds rolled past, a blue sky appeared, and the sunbeams and remnants of rain formed a double rainbow over our house. The rainbows were a metaphor for my Mom and God abiding together; they also showed me God’s promise to always be with us in death and life.

When I recall the two rainbows, I think of the comforting (and questioning) words from Bernstein’s Symphony No. 3 (Kaddish):

Good morning, Father. We can still be immortal.
You and I, bound by our rainbow.
That is our covenant, and to honor it
Is our honor…not quite the covenant
We bargained for, so long ago.

Brahms’ German Requiem, Van Gogh’s Starry Night, a sonnet by Shakespeare. When I doubt, when I’m depressed and down, sad and lonely, these works of art remind me that I am connected to those artists and something beyond myself, a great unfolding mystery.

During this holiday season, a time of year that is special to me, I pray for a return to the light and love that Christ espoused. Let’s not forget why he came here. Let’s not forget all the great teachers like Schweitzer, Mother Teresa, Beethoven, Cezanne, Henry James, Emily Dickinson – people who reached deep down into their souls and found the spark of a source that connected everything to everyone in the universe. They worked for others, they created art, so that we could see peeps of God. And sometimes, rather than thinking that they have a complete and utter understanding of God, I wish Christians would say, “We don’t know. We’re not sure. It’s a mystery and that’s okay. But even a little glimpse of God through art, music, literature is better than pretending to have a handle on the truth.”