A Prayer

Dear God, Jesus, and the Blessed Virgin Mary. Help us in the hour of our need. The lessons you taught us about kindness, tolerance, and acceptance of others, have lost their value in our day. The love you demonstrated has been ignored and replaced with political power, religious hypocrisy, and a spirit of meanness and self-righteous arrogance.

We are not, as your followers or as good Americans, guided by the Beatitudes, but by branding forces of money and greed. We ignore the lesson of the Good Samaritan and, like the priest and the Levite who simply walked on by not wanting to get involved with the wounded victim, we too, are self-absorbed and blasphemous in our indifference to the hurting of others.

You taught us to love the little children, to care for the poor and forgotten, to stand up to evil, especially when it is disguised as Christianity, as God’s Will, as faith, and yes, as patriotism.

I know you cannot make us do what is right and honorable. To believe in you is not to give up belief in ourselves. To want to worship at your altar is not to deny our humanity but to enhance it. To find in the presence of the sacred a pathway for ourselves that leads us to be fully human.

For the sake of our children and grandchildren, for our own sake, we need as a people to find our way to some solid sense of morality, truthfulness, and integrity. As a nation, we no longer honor those values. We can’t keep saying there are good people everywhere. Yes, but they are not leading us. They have no voice, no power, no influence on our daily lives.

Our problem today is not unbelief, not a refusal to accept any of you ever existed or still have a presence in America or in the world. The problem is that faith in you is now, mostly, an act of betrayal. You are used to justify cruelty to immigrants, to stifle the freedom of women over the control of their own bodies, to praise a politics of lies and distortions, of immorality and corruption, in order to fill a Supreme Court that will overturn Roe.

All of you are snubbed by a crowd of your gullible believers who have traded your sacred teachings for the foolishness and treachery of a politics of gluttony, lechery, and endless lies. The fact you do not wipe out the whole lot with plagues of insects or disease is a testament of your independence from us, that you do not intervene where we ourselves must be responsible to make drastic changes.

That is not say that you each one must be in agony over the mess we are making of this beautiful existence you have given us.

In our hour of need we look to you for wisdom, for examples of how humanity should behave, and you point us to the heroes of life who stood with courage and will against the villainy of their day—Lincoln, Gandhi, MLK, Elenore Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, Frederick Douglas, Nelson Mandela, and today’s Malala Yousafazi.

I am not asking for a miracle. I am asking that we be the miracle. That out of the living of concerned Americans, we make the changes that call us to bravery, dignity, justice, compassion, and integrity.

I have attempted to follow you my entire life. And from where I am now, I have learned you are not idols of power, forces to be used for wickedness in the name of religion. I know now you stand above us not in palaces of glory, but rather in solidarity with humanity. You exist to show us how we are to exist. Your presence is not to dominate but to inspire, not to rule but to guide.

And so, in our hour of need, we look to you to be reminded of what we must ourselves do.

Amen.

© 2019 Timothy Moody