Reading Mother Teresa--Prayer Warriors

 

“Ask and it will be given to you. . . .” Matthew 7:7 

At the beginning of his book A Public Faith*, Miroslav Volf describes what he calls an “active” faith, a faith that exists in a clear and vital relationship to our everyday lives, and begins by talking about the importance of “blessing,” because, he insists (and we know), we always need it. Asking for it, however, can be off-putting and seem, sometimes, silly, as in praying for a fast pitch a kid can slam into the bleachers to bring home the winning run. You know – Tebow.

“Does God really care which team wins or what grade I get?” Volf asks.

What’s worse, he says, enlisting God’s help only on rare occasions may well turn us into Lance Armstrong types, using God almighty as if he were just another “performance-enhancing drug.”

Okay, I admit it – I tend to think of Tebow-types as having a cheap view of how the Creator and sustainer of the universe relates to this world, as if God almighty were little more than a rocket booster power drink. Besides, somewhere inside of me is the voice of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who insisted that leaning on the everlasting arms suggests we can’t carry our own weight.

“The sophisticated among us sometimes dismiss such prayers,” Volf says of people who roll their eyes at such “blessings,” as if they were little more than passing fancies. Ouch. Count me among the pseudo-sophisticates. Way too often I roll my eyes.

But then Volf says – and he’s no slouch, of course –, “It is important to connect God with success in work.” If for no other reason, he says, that’s true because asking for blessing is vividly and consistently scriptural. What’s more, God delivers. He does it. He does hand out blessings – this we know.

I’m not proud of my skepticism. I understand it. I can even attempt an excuse: I’ve been privy to too many well-meant prayers from too many people who should have – from my point of view – simply pulled themselves up from with their own bootstraps. Furthermore, if public praying wasn’t fraught with the potential for hypocrisy, Christ himself wouldn’t have told us to bring it into a closet, to make it private. See, I’m smart.

But then there’s this – a note, just two days ago, from a friend, a good man in a battle with cancer, who claims that he can actually feel the mighty uplift of the prayers of his friends have prayed a continent away, me mine included.

And this: one of the first things Mother Teresa undertook as her new ministry began was to enlist a whole cadre of prayer warriors, every Sister having a “second self,” a prayer partner whose duty it was, from afar, “to pray & suffer for her” (153). What she lined up with people both from the region and eventually the world was what she might have thought of as a circle of prayer, of pray-ers, who, like a fortress, bolstered the entire loving operation by, literally, suffering with them.

Especially important to her was the suffering of those prayer warriors. As her own team of prayer warriors, she wanted, – and enlisted, – “the paralyzed, the crippled, the incurables” – those who also were also suffering wherever they were;, “second selves” specially recruited to, as she often said, “satiate the thirst of Christ.”

This battalion of eternal reinforcements gave her great joy and those she served, she says, great comfort.

And there's this: see that picture up top? That's my grandson's truck. The accident he had at the intersection of a country road whose obstructions still today beg more carnage, would likely have taken his life if it weren't for the air bag. He's fine--just a concussion he's daily getting over. Thanks be to God. I could be in an entirely different world this morning if he wasn't home healing.

I can't help but wonder if my own skepticism – my “sophistication,” as Volf says – isn’t created by way of the ease with which I’ve been blessed to live my life. In comparison with those forsaken thousands on Calcutta’s streets – and even many of my friends' burdens – my own suffering has been barely worth mentioning.

What I know is that, the day will come, as it does for each of us, the day I too will need friends, fellow sufferers, to storm the gates of heaven. 

______________________ 

* A Public Faith: How followers of Christ should serve the common good (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2011), 25.