Naïvete in prayer
- William Tell 1
- Jul 20, 2024
- 3 min read
This is likely to be far briefer than I anticipated.
I stood on my back steps, looking out over the back yards behind mine, and the alleys. All the trash. Not what I want for my ‘hood.
How to pray for improvement?
By this time in my prayer life (By which I mean, 2024 as contrasted, say, with 1983.), I know enough to resist or sidestep the temptation to get all wrapped up in the excuses liberals make for squalor, the same excuses they make for violence and crime; all wrapped up in trying to figure out the whys and hows and somehow manipulate God or circumstances into what I suppose are the correctives.
What I suppose, as if I know.
The lesson taught by Ambrose Worrall is to envision things just exactly how I want them to be, and let it go at that.
Be profoundly and completely naïve, in other words.
By the same token, there is the labyrinth area in the garden behind my church, an area of trees and flowers and benches intended to be used for prayer and meditation. It worked fine, I suppose, for about the first ten years. Then, somehow, and I swear to God we have labored and worked and tried to figure out how or why this happened — the junkies took it over. And have been there ever since. This was perhaps ten years ago. And they’re still there.
And they’re the most squalid, disrespectful, arrogant, stubborn people you’ll ever meet. One is tempted not to call them “people.” They will not leave when asked. They will not interrupt their routine of preparing their “works,” and injecting themselves — right there in front of you — or tossing their used syringes hither and yon, or half-consuming food they “dumpster dove” from the supermarket across the street, and discarding what they don’t consume — garbage on the ground.
I am well aware of the dynamics of addiction, being an alcoholic myself and having lived in places that junkies frequented before; not to mention having spent twelve years among the homeless.
How to pray for improvement here?
Sure, I could get all wrapped up in the various scenarios I’m sure beset each one of them, or that beset different groups among them, or how we might get the cops to come fast enough to clear them out, or this, or that, or the other.
The only thing that’s going to work is to discard everything I presume to know, and envision the place and the people there just the way I hope for them to be.
As difficult as it is, to merely love the people, as they are. No ideas, no images, no words to the prayer; just the sheer emotion, of love for the people in that place — that constitutes, that is, the prayer.
Certain people I’m in prayer for daily, are entangled in knots of personal — entanglements — and I could easily get entangled in them, in my prayer life, too. That won’t bring positive results. The prayer needs to be naïve. It needs to consist, in the end, of no words, no ideas, no images, but sheerly and solely of love for the people, as they are.
Naïvete.
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