Maybe it is September in the air. Maybe it’s the sense of new beginning just around the corner. Or maybe it’s that the Spouse has relocated his tower of books to his new office and thus vacated my new study. (Yes, that’s what I said. My. New. Study. With a desk. And a door that I can close. I haven’t had a room like this in ten years. There might just be a little delight hovering somewhere right about here.) One way or the other, I’m finding myself sitting at my desk on a Monday, looking over the lectionary readings for the week ahead. It feels so good to step into this practise again.
Today, my eyes are drawn first to the words of Psalm 146. It’s one of the praise-rich songs at the end of the Psalms, and I hear in it the lines Mary will follow with her strong song of praise at the beginning of Luke’s Gospel. Like her, the psalmist sings hope for the humble, justice for the oppressed, food for the hungry, and a new way into tomorrow. These words are a strong wall of promise and praise, and they did not begin with Mary or her deep knowledge of God at work within her; these are the foundation of our relationship with God.
Yesterday in church, we sang Mary’s words in the great Magnificat hymn Tell Out My Soul, and, my mind filled with images of those who all too clearly need these promises realised today. The hungry, the poor, the oppressed, the migrants and the refugees. Those who, like Mary, have to travel far from home to keep their families safe. The news has been full of stories of people on the move, desperate people fleeing war zones and risking everything to find a better place to be. It’s horrifying and humbling.
From our comfort, it is difficult to find anything we might do. Do our songs help? What about prayer? Is that enough? Is it useful? Yes, perhaps. And no, never. But yes, of course, and no, as well. The world is wide, and it is hard to know how to help. How can words spoken in the quiet of our hearts or the order of our safe churches do anything to ease the suffering of the world?
The gospel reading from Mark gives us two stories of helpless situations – that of the Syrophoenician woman’s afflicted daughter and of the deaf man with profound difficulty speaking. Each story tells of someone’s personal suffering, and each story is also bracketed by Jesus’ own desire for silence and solitude, as if he, too, was overwhelmed by the horrifying needs of the world. Yet in each story, we hear Jesus petitioned by someone other than the one who is suffering. Both the mother and the deaf man’s friends are described as begging Jesus to help and to heal. The mother even argues with Jesus as she tries to coerce him to save his daughter. And it works. Jesus heals both the girl and the man and, for each of them, life begin anew. Healed. Hopeful. Strengthened again.
Last week, I wrote about the reflective work of prayer, and today I feel that I need to take those thoughts a step further. Because sometimes when we walk the messy wrackline of our lives, we find more brokenness than silence or solitude can address. Sometimes, we find that the world is very broken indeed. In those stretches, prayer becomes a place where we can reach out for justice. A place where we, too, can beg God on behalf of the broken world that we feel we can do little to heal. We long to put our hearts into words and when we do so, we are closer to the heart of God.
Pope Francis suggests that this kind of intercessory prayer might be explained like this.
“You pray for the hungry. Then you feed them. That’s how prayer works.”
Maybe that’s it. When my heart has been wrung out by the needs of the world and I bring those aching prayers to God, my eyes begin to clear. Then I can see need around me, too, and I can find ways to heal that need. Maybe prayer changes all of us, whether we are psalmists or disciples or prisoners or strangers or mothers. And that begins to change the world.
