Gott mit uns

The most common and traditional word for this change of consciousness was historically “prayer,” but we trivialized that precious word by making it functional, transactional, and supposedly about problem solving. The only problem that prayer solves is us!

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That is from Richard Rohr's post this morning, Saturday, as he finishes up a week about Paul, and calls us into prayer that takes us out of ourselves and unites us with the Being of Creation who named self to Moses as I AM, Being, All That Is.

Perhaps not only Pantokrator, but even Panentheos, God the All, In All, As All.

I've done that disappearance into prayer from Time to Time in my life, experiencing it as an ineffable sort of leaving oneself behind, if that makes sense. Concentration not unlike disappearing into a novel, which I always loved to do, regretting when it ends, wishing to go back, and to stay there. That sort of prayer involves determination and practice and concentration and abandonment.

When I was young, maybe eight to twelve years old or so, one of my favorite books for disappearing into was Dr Doolittle, his world of talking, active animals, including as I recall, a hen or goose who was his wise and faithful housekeeper. I loved being there, knew them as friends just as they knew me, missed them when a book ended, and could hardly wait for the next book to arrive. They were sent to me by my father's sister Evalyn, whom we called EG, who lived in WashingtonDC and bought them from the bookstore at Lord & Taylor's downtown.

I was that way about Narnia too, especially with my middle school students at HNES.

Lord and Taylor's was my first bookstore ever, ignited my lifelong excitement for bookstores, later in life especially seminary bookstores. I remember going to Lord & Taylor's bookstore my first time. Along with many exciting adventures that summer of 1943 or 1944 when I was eight, EG took me there when Mama and I stopped in Washington for several days on our way to New London, Connecticut where my father was in U S Maritime Service officer school.

The L&T bookstore was right inside the store's front entrance, maybe "step-down" into the store, the bookstore lightened by a long bright window right on the sidewalk, and it may even have been a canopy style window such that the sky was above me. Miles of bookshelves with books, the most exciting place I'd ever been.

Which may tie into my memory of Mama taking me to the Panama City Library for the first time, maybe I was six or seven, to get my first library card. My recollection, at that Time the library was a small building in that triangle that's now a fenced in paved parking lot for the Downtown Post Office. Later there was a public restroom building there. The library later moved to a small house on the west side of W Beach Drive, down the block across from Commercial Bank, next to the WDLP radio station with its tall radio tower in the back. I could be wrong, but seems to me that one of those two houses was later the architect office of Walter & Mandeville.

See, the mind really wanders, this is no where close to what I had in mind writing when I quoted from Fr Rohr's wisdom about prayer only changing us.

The wandering mind is even worse, see. That first visit to Lord & Taylor's bookstore I acquired a strange obsession with things in "matching sets". I remember wanting, and I think they may have bought for me, a matching set of Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass" in a holder. Later at home, our set of Grolier's "Book of Knowledge" fascinated me; in my thirties while I was at the Naval War College, acquiring a magical new set of Encyclopedia Britannica ostensibly for Malinda and Joe. More years later we also had matching gold-tan Ford Windstar minivans and still more years later matching silver Cadillac SRX cars. At some point it came to me that I needed to kick this oddity.

See, it's still on books that EG sent me from the L&T bookstore. As I budded into my teens, for my thirteenth birthday, she sent me "Blondes Prefer Gentlemen" so I could get my manners straight, which four and five years later helped me impress Linda's mother the first time I slurped a bowl of soup having dinner at their house (tip the bowl back, and scoop the spoon away from you). And one Christmas EG sent me a Floyd Clymer volume about cars, history and pictures: thoroughly and unendingly devoured for months and months after Christmas that year, that book, aged and wellworn, is on a bookshelf in my office/study/den, a life's treasure, for my heirs to deal with.

But prayer, Fr Richard's assertion "The only problem that prayer solves is us!" Hits me just right. What's the relationship between prayer and what happens, including liturgical prayer, including our prayers of desperation when a loved one is ill, or suffering or in danger or above the Atlantic Ocean overnight to London or Europe. Or the young Russian and Ukrainian soldiers fighting, one for his country, the other not sure why or for what he's about to die. Or, to get personal, me, body on OR table for open heart surgery, mind and soul in the darkest unimaginable oblivion of nonexistence.

So, prayer: we are deists or theists of some sort, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Unitarian, trinitarian, cautious agnostic, other, praying: does our prayer call us specifically to our Deity's attention: Does our prayer stir our Deity to intervene? To do as we ask? To change things? Change what? I'm not sure, not certain of anything, this sounds like a good topic for Sunday School class members to ponder.

If the Deity does intervene, in whose behalf? I'm thinking specifically of a song, "Ich hatt' einen Kameraden" - the drum sounds, and as my fellow solder and I walk along side by side, carrying our guns, someone on the other side fires a Kugel, a bullet is coming for us, who is it for, will it strike down me, or you? What about if one of our mothers suddenly prays, will that change anything? Or, what if my mother got in her prayer first this morning? Or your mother's prayer touched God's heart more? In just a few seconds one of us will be standing over the other saying, "You rest in eternal Life", does chance have the victory, or fate? would prayer change chance or is destiny foreordained, and if so could destiny have been changed by prayer and the lost be saved? What if no prayers were said? Or, conversely, what if heaven was overwhelmed with prayer?

See, I don't have the answers to these things where in our belief system God loves the puzzled, uncertain, and frightened eighteen year old Russian soldier whose mother is so worried about him, just as much as God loves the young Ukrainian father whose soon to be widowed wife and two children are safely in Poland but in prayer worried sick they'll never hold each other again.

Another book on my bookshelf, combined, "Common Prayer and Hymns Ancient and Modern" published for the Church of England and saved from Christ Church Cathedral, Nassau, (old, the prayed for monarch is George), now in my hands as I thumb through it for old prayers I've read in it over the years. Yep, pages 80, 87, 611, prayers for protection against and victory over enemies, God showing that he is our saviour.

Films, among WW2 films I've watched, troops gathered, young heads bowed as Wehrmacht chaplains pray with them for protection and victory in the battle ahead.

Wartime prayers, it's simpleton easy to rationalize that yes they pray, but God knows who're the bad guys, &c and comes out on our side; but that's not the point. The point is the efficacy of prayer. As this plane rises from the runway. As innocent people shelter in a theater somewhere in Ukraine. As a loved one is wheeled away for emergency surgery. As a Black teenage boy's mother watches him leave the house for the day. As an anxious student sits down for a final examination. A player as he crosses himself before taking a free shot. A helicopter pilot as he lifts off with his load of missiles. A teenage girl, someone's beloved daughter, walking home alone at night.

What's the efficacy? It is NOT nothing, zero. Someone or something is changed. What? God? The one praying? The surgeon? The kidnapper rapist murderer? The soldier with the antitank missile? The old women and children in the Canaanite village surrounded by Israelite warriors? How, who and why?

Again as I age, and accrue Time, retirement of sorts looms for me, withdrawal. What to do before then that could help someone, or me?

RSF&PTL

today's project - reading M Borg, "Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time"

image - Al Jazeera, someone, horrified and terrified, among the ruins, somewhere in Ukraine