Slot machine prayers

Representative Josh Breen walked out of last Tuesday’s prayer service, offended he said, by Bishop Budde’s hijacking of a religious service for political purposes. I came to pray, he said. For many things. For the newly inaugurated president, for his family, for success of the new administration. And for the nation — though apparently not for all the nation. Certainly not for the immigrants, or the LGBTQ+ community, or others frightened by the cruel and vindictive rhetoric that flows from the Trumpian right wing.

It struck me that Breen has a very limited idea of what constitutes prayer. That prayer is a solely a divine request line, directed at letting the Almighty know what we want. As if the omniscient God doesn’t know. Or perhaps, since not every prayer gets the answer we want — something Rep. Breen is surely aware of — a holy slot machine. Pull the handle and if you are lucky or deserving(?), three angels pop up and you get what you asked for.

Who does prayer change? Us or God? What do we hope to accomplish in prayer?

I was further stunned to hear Breen flat out accuse the Bishop of lying when she said Christianity asks that the stranger be welcomed. The Bible only means welcome the stranger who conforms to the norms of the society, says Breen. I went back and read (in Greek) Matthew 25:35: “ For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in” ξένος or xenos, is rendered as “stranger” here. None of this carries any hint of limitations. The call is not to feed or offer water to or welcome only the deserving. Breen may not agree with my exegesis (or the Bishop’s) but to call it a half-truth, or an untruth? Or is it that it is an uncomfortable question that Breen prefers not to entertain? 

Breen says we might be better off if more people got up and walked out of churches in righteous anger. I agree. I have prayed and listened to the Gospel and a righteous anger is upon me. I will stand up and walk out of church, and seek to feed the hungry and see that the thirsty have something to drink and that the stranger is made to feel welcome. Without limitation. As was done for me on Calvary.

May God have mercy on us all, that is what I am praying for.

The ratio

"The ratio" on Twitter is the ratio of replies to likes: when replies far outpace likes, the tweet is radioactive. The ratio here is the time it takes to prepare dinner to the time it takes to eat it. It's been running between 4 and 5. In large part this is because we've been making more things from scratch than I usually do. Loaves of bread, tortillas, pizza sauce, pasta. Things I often buy without a second thought.

I've been doing more from scratch for a lot of reasons. It's given me family time, cooking alongside Crash has been a delight. I've learned new recipes and new techniques from him, including a great chickpea stew. It's been some alone time as well, a time off Zoom and my email and all the management I've been doing for classes and colleagues. It's been contemplative time, kneading a ball of pasta for 8 minutes is deeply prayerful, at least for me. It's a way to leave loaves of bread and boxes of pasta on the grocery store shelf for those who need them.

It's a reminder, too, of what it takes to put food on the table, not just the cost in dollars, but the cost in time. A homemade loaf of bread costs me just 80 cents, far less than what a similar loaf would cost in the store, and not quite half the cost of a loaf of sliced white bread costs at the Acme here. But thrifty cooking takes time and energy, both of which I am privileged to have.

My awareness is all well and good, but as Pope Francis notes in Laudato Si', the goal is "to become painfully aware, to dare to turn what is happening to the world into our own personal suffering and thus to discover what each of us can do about it."[19] I'm not suffering when I bake my own bread, but if the experience doesn't lead me to discover what I can do about the reality of hunger in my own community, in my own nation, then the awareness, painful or not, is for naught.

____________
The ten most needed items at Philadelphia food banks. More than 200,000 children in Philadelphia go hungry. Roughly 80% of adults who are food insecure are working, 25% are senior citizens. Hunger is linked to our society's unwillingness to pay a living wage to those who work.