God intervenes in our lives at many points and in many different
ways. During the first arduous years of the Bruderhof, a time of dire
poverty, our members experienced this intervention repeatedly,
through friends and strangers, and through unexpected gifts of
money.
In the summer of 1922, our community became embroiled in
tensions. Though the community’s basis of faith was a hallmark of
its founding, several members had begun to criticize it as
financially unwise. As the crisis came to a head, there were some
major payments due, but, as usual, no money. My grandparents,
away on a mission journey, set off to return, trusting that God
would intervene; they mentioned their need to no one. Just before
they left, they were approached by Maria Mojen, an acquaintance
whose father was an Indonesian prince. She handed them an
envelope, “for the cause.” In it was sufficient money to repay all
the outstanding bank loans.
In 1926 the community moved to an old farm in the Rhön
mountains, several miles away from its first location. The place was
rundown but had a favorable asking price: 26,000 marks. No one
knew where the 10,000 marks required for the down payment
would come from, nor how they would ever be able to finance the
repair of the houses. Nevertheless, they decided to take a step in
faith and buy the place. Ten days before the money was due, there
were still no funds, yet the members held firm in their belief that
God would show them a way if it was to happen. Then, the last day
before the down payment was due, a local nobleman, the Prince of
Schönburg-Waldenburg, sent 10,000 marks. As my grandmother
wrote in her memoirs, “Our jubilation knew no bounds! Everyone
gathered in the house, and we sang one song of praise and
thanksgiving after another.”
Finances were constantly tight at the Bruderhof in those years,
and in 1928, when the community seemed in danger once again of
defaulting on several large loans, the courts decided to auction the
entire property. Again, disaster was averted at the last moment by
the unexpected gift of 5000 Swiss francs from a friend.
After the Nazis seized power in 1933, government regulations
became more and more repressive, and week by week there were
new developments for the community to contend with. By the end
of the year, the Bruderhof school was closed: the children were to
be sent to a public school. At that juncture, the community whisked
all its school-age children, including the orphans and foster children in its care, across the border to Switzerland, where they and
two young women, their teachers, found temporary lodging in a
vacant children’s home.
By spring long-term housing in the form of a spartan but roomy
summer hotel high in the Liechtenstein Alps was located but, as
usual, there was no money to buy or rent it. Around the same time
a twenty-year mortgage payment was suddenly demanded with
only two weeks’ notice, the community’s permit to sell books and
other merchandise was revoked, and all government support was
withdrawn. On top of this the children’s home in Switzerland
announced that it could not extend its hospitality any further – not
even for one more week. Just during these days, my grandparents
visited Julia, a guest at the Bruderhof the previous summer, who
was hospitalized with back trouble. As they left, Julia pressed into
their hands the sum of 6500 Swiss francs, enough money for the
first installment on the summer hotel.
One could go on for many pages with stories of timely help when
things looked hopeless. Each time, it seemed, God intervened in
answer to prayer – or simply in answer to our need.
Few of us experience
great personal miracles in our lifetimes;
answers to small prayers are more usual. Yet many people do not
even believe that God responds to prayer. Archbishop Alex Brunett
of Seattle, an acquaintance, feels that no matter what skeptics say,
it has power to change lives and outcomes.
I remember when I was a chaplain at the University of Eastern
Michigan in Ypsilanti, and there was a serial killer going around
raping young women and killing them. The atmosphere at the
college was very, very tense. People were afraid. When was this
man going to strike again? And people turned to prayer. And
the intensity of prayer became so powerful that they felt sure
the man would be found, and why? – because the whole place
was filled with prayer.
Within a week’s time he was arrested. That was only one of
many times in my life when I felt that prayer moves mountains.
Anna Mow, a missionary in India in the 1920s and 30s, and later a
professor at Chicago’s Bethany Seminary, was a close friend over
many decades. She had a wonderful sense of humor and an
inimitable cackle, and everywhere she moved she took her favorite
painting: a picture of Jesus laughing. During her long life she
experienced countless incidents of answered prayer, but this never
seemed to surprise her. To her, it was the natural consequence of
turning to God.
At ninety-one, Anna suffered a stroke that left her partially
paralyzed, and though her faith and humor were not affected, her
speech was. Jane, a speech therapist, offered a regimen of
exercises, but Anna felt insulted and would not cooperate. Finally,
Jane was advised by Anna’s family simply to converse with her. If
she shared a burden or need with Anna, they said, she would surely
feel stimulated and respond in some way. Over the next several
sessions of therapy, a warm friendship developed between them;
they talked about life, about God, and about faith. Jane even
revealed the greatest sorrow of her life: for years she and her
husband had wanted a child, but despite the best help she had been
unable to conceive. A few months later, Anna died. Her involvement in Jane’s life was not over, however. At the funeral, Jane
whispered to one of Anna’s granddaughters, “I’m pregnant!”
Unexpected outcomes from illness or medical conditions may not
be rare, but the person who believes in God will often sense his
love at work. Skeptics claim that such things “just happen” now
and then, that it has nothing to do with God or miracles or prayer.
Nonetheless, such happenings remain humanly inexplicable. And
what is a miracle, if not an unexpected outcome in which we see
the hand of God?
In my book
Why Forgive?
I wrote about Gordon Wilson and his
daughter Marie, who was killed by a bomb in Enniskillen, Northern
Ireland. Gordon died recently, but his widow Joan is carrying on
their work for peace. She writes:
The day of the bombing we waited and watched and prayed. At
first I was very angry. I felt, how could anyone do such a thing?
And then I thought of the Lord’s Prayer – how we ask, “Forgive
us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us” –
and of Jesus’ words, “Father, forgive them, for they know not
what they do.” These words kept ringing through my mind regarding the men who set the bomb; I felt they just didn’t
know
what they were doing. People would say, Oh, yes, they do, they
just don’t care, and one day they are going to have to face their
Judge, and it’s going to catch up with them. But I prayed that
they would realize what they had done, and that they would ask
for forgiveness. It took me a long time to sort this out and live
with it. I still go over it in my mind every day – the bomb, my
daughter’s death, forgiveness, prayer. I hate what they did, but I
don’t hate them.
Before the bomb I was sometimes very flippant about Good
Friday. I remember saying, “I really don’t understand Easter very
well.” But after Marie died, I prayed. I remember grieving very
deeply one day and wondering, “Is there no one who can help
me?” Suddenly a voice seemed to say, “I am a man of sorrows
and acquainted with grief.” And then it came to me: on the
cross, Jesus went through every sorrow there is. He is the only
one who can help me and bring me through. I also realized that
what I went through was nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to what Jesus suffered.
One can pray in many different places and in different ways.
Sometimes prayer doesn’t come easily; at other times it flows.
Prayer can be silence, singing, reading, even walking, for we can
talk to God anywhere.
For me prayer is a daily pattern, a daily discipline. I’ve
reached a stage where I feel I must pray about everything. Yet
prayer is not a duty, it’s a privilege. It’s a blessing to talk to God
and to know that he will hear and answer. I pray for my neighbors and loved ones, for people who come to my house, for the
sick, and of course for the political situation. There is the whole
world to pray for! I could spend all day on my knees. But I can
also talk to God as I go about my daily tasks. That is the great
thing.
In Thessalonians 5, Paul gives us three wonderful commandments:
to rejoice, to pray without ceasing, and to give thanks in all things.
In a sense, these three are all one, for to a person who has a living
relationship with God, all three –rejoicing, praying, and giving
thanks – will be as much a part of life as eating and drinking.
Kierkegaard once said, “Why do I breathe? Because otherwise I
would die – and so it is with praying.” To me, Kierkegaard’s answer
is the simplest and best reply to the age-old question, “How can I
pray without ceasing?” In his eyes, a life lived in relation to the
Eternal is one endless prayer.
Carolyn, a neighbor of mine whose thoughts on worship I quoted
earlier, says:
For me, prayer is a running conversation with God, whom I address as Dear Father. Prayer for me is something very natural, and
yet it is also an act of the will. By an act of the will I mean that
sometimes, when I open my eyes in the morning, I know the first
thing I want to do is to thank God for the new day and ask for
his protection over my loved ones. At other times, though, I am
grumpy and don’t feel like talking to him, but I do it anyway.
Of course it is always easier to pray in times of trouble. When
I was a troubled teenager struggling for a direction in my life, I
sat on the beach and talked to God and felt he was close to me –
that he would help me and protect me. It gave me a new determination to give value to my life.
Now I’m fifty, and I look back and feel somewhat ashamed. I
think about the many holy people who pray and meditate.
Somehow that’s just not where I am at. I ask myself, have I really
given myself enough in prayer to God? Surely not, but I ask God
to have mercy on me.
I can’t imagine life without some kind of talking things over
with God. Sometimes, when I have made a real fool of myself, I
talk to God and try to see it from his perspective – that I really am
a foolish person. I try to laugh at myself. Or, during times of need,
for instance when my husband had a heart attack or when I had
a miscarriage, we prayed a lot. We didn’t use big words, but just
turned our lives over to God and asked for his will to be done.
Many things in our lives have not been easy or turned out the
way we might have wanted them, but if any one prayer has
been consistent in our lives, it has been the prayer for God’s will
to be done.
In the rush of life, there is always something that has to be done,
something to distract us from what is really important. Part of the
answer is to prioritize the many things that come to our attention.
Often prayer is the first thing we neglect – perhaps because we feel
it demands space or time or privacy. Yet why should this be so? If
our relationship to God is alive, we will always feel that the
channels to him are open, so to speak, and we will lift our thoughts
to him regularly, no matter the outward circumstances.
Still, Bishop Donald Wuerl of Pittsburgh points out that it is a
good practice to put aside time just for prayer:
You have to make that time, in order to hear God speaking to
you, and you need time to respond back to him. There is no way
that a relationship can be built in silence, in the sense of
noncommunication. Amid the clatter of life, we have to find the
silence of recollection, the centeredness in our lives to allow us
to hear God. Then the gifts of the Spirit are revealed: peace, joy,
love, and faith.
No two people are alike, nor do they think alike. And no two
persons’ experience of God is the same. So too, each one’s prayer
life will be different, reflecting the diversity of individual
character, belief, emotional state, and daily life. The form is never
important. Personally, my wife and I have found that praying
together in the morning is crucial to getting through our day, and
it has become part of a natural rhythm in our married life.
In his
Letters and Papers from Prison,
Dietrich Bonhoeffer goes so
far as to say that prayer (or the absence of it) can decide the
outcome of our day. When we waste time, when we give in to
temptations in thought or deed, when we feel weary or uninspired
or lazy, the root of it often lies in our neglect of prayer. Seventeenth-century English cleric Thomas Fuller, who obviously felt
much the same, wrote that for him “prayer is the key of the day
and the lock of the night.” And journalist Mike Aquilina, a friend,
says prayer is an indispensable part of his day, too:
My work, my joys, my sufferings, and my leisure, I offer to God,
and I try to keep an awareness of his presence throughout the
day. In this, I’ve found it especially helpful to make a regular commitment of time specifically for prayer. So I get up early, and as
my first act of the morning I offer God my day. While the family is
still asleep, I spend a half-hour in quiet conversation with God,
speaking with him about the day’s coming events. Then I usually
meditate on a chapter from the New Testament and perhaps a
few pages from some other spiritual book. The most important
part of my daily prayer is my attendance at Mass. At some point
in the afternoon, I usually spend another half-hour in quiet
prayer. In the evening, we pray the rosary together, and I close
my evening by examining the day’s events in the presence of
God, by offering him thanks and contrition.
That’s an outline of my daily discipline, but that’s not my
prayer, any more than a pile of my organs and bones would be
me. Prayer is something living. Prayer is seeing God in every person. Prayer is knowing I am wrong – and expressing my contrition – when I lash out in anger at my friends. Prayer is all of the
communication, verbal and non-verbal, in my love relationship
with the Lord. I think of it in comparison with my other great
love, my wife: our communication encompasses our formal marriage vows, our casual conversation, our moments with the kids,
our moments alone, winks across a crowded room, smiles across
the table, sexual intimacy, and some set phrases or gestures of
affection that we never tire of repeating. Sometimes, our communication is just knowing we are together, whether we’re
working in tandem, or sitting beside one another, each reading
a different book. My communication with God encompasses a
similar range of expressions – the set phrases, the quiet conversation, the gestures, but also my partaking in the sacrament of
the Eucharist.