A Frightening Child & Prayer to Save the Environment

Readings for the 29^th Sunday in Ordinary Time:  EX 17: 8-13; PS 121: 1-8; 2 TM 3: 14-4:2; HEB 4: 12; LK 18: 1-8

Were you inspired by Greta Thunberg? I couldn’t get over her courage.

Imagine: a child of 16 years suddenly thrust beneath the blinding spotlight of the world’s stage – speaking confidently with a pope and with heads of state, addressing huge crowds and the United Nations itself. All of that would frighten me. How about you?

And she called them all to task. “How dare you!” she repeated again and again to the world’s movers and shakers whose programs for addressing climate change fell far short of the goals set by climate scientists. “Don’t listen to me,” she repeated; “listen to the scientists.” In other words, align yourselves with what Mother Nature, Life Itself, and the Universe are telling us.

And, of course, you saw the effects of her audacity. Millions were mobilized across the planet.

What started as a one-girl protest before the Swedish parliament swiftly became a thing.

Youngsters everywhere, including my own grandchildren, walked out of class and imitated Greta’s defiance. My five-year-old grandson challenged us all for driving a Volvo van whose gas engine, he said, is destroying the environment. “We should be driving an electric car instead” he objected. A five-year-old!

As someone pointed out, it’s a “Children’s Crusade” against capitalism’s worship of Moloch.

And what fear it inspired in the powerful! This wisp of a girl exercising the super-powers of concentration and focus conferred by an Asperger’s condition that would have others hiding under a rock, suddenly had the movers and shakers shaking with fear. Some ganged up on her, attacked her parents, and even belittled the teenager as mentally deficient. Their cowardly desperation showed that they were more afraid of her than she of them.

All of that is relevant to today’s liturgy of the word. It’s about prayer understood as Greta- Thunberg-like alignment with Life’s processes. Regardless of what we might call it, such re-orientation can change the world and cause powerful enemies of justice to tremble even before those they see as the weakest among us.

More specifically, today’s readings trace biblical understandings of prayer from a voodoo-like practice intent on harming one’s enemies to the alignment with Life’s purposes just described. Here’s the way they run according to my own “translation.” Judge for yourself to see if I’ve got them right. You can read the originals here. 

 Long ago
 When Israel’s primitive faith
 Still pictured God
 As a Man O’ War,
 They magically imagined
 A Yahweh persuaded
 To slaughter their enemies
 By Moses’ adoption 
 Of Wiccan postures,
 Magic rocks
 And feats of
 Super-human endurance.
  
 PS 121: 1-8
  
 They were right,
 Of course,
 To intuit
 That the Creator
 Is eternally helpful
 In protecting
 The lives
 And chosen paths 
 Of his creatures
 Providing sunlight by day
 And moonlight by night.
 Divine power
 Is always disposed 
 To help
 The oppressed.
  
 2 TM 3: 14-4:2
  
 However, the mystic Paul
 Had already 
 Ventured far beyond 
 His forebears’ voodoo.
 Though he recognized
 Israel’s written tradition
 As inspired,
 He also 
 Identified Jesus 
 As its ultimate interpreter.
 For the Master,
 Life’s Author
 Was no Man O’ War
 But a loving, patient, encouraging
 Father.
  
 HEB 4: 12
  
 Deep in our hearts
 We already knew
 This to be true.
 Thank you!
  
 LK 18: 1-8
  
 The comic Jesus
 Even joked about
 Those who thought
 Of God as a cruel judge
 Susceptible
 To tiresome entreaties
 And cowering before 
 Poor widows who 
 Might cuff him 
 About the ears
 If he didn’t
 Answer their petitions.
 Better, he said
 To “pray always”
 In a quiet way
 That matches
 God’s unwavering disposal
 To secure justice
 For the oppressed.
 No Man O’ War
 No exhausting prayers 
 No Mosaic sorcerer 
 Here! 

There are salutary lessons in those readings.

According to their vision, prayer does not mean persuading some Man in The Sky to change his mind to match our capricious whims. Instead, it’s the process of aligning our minds with the Universal Love that underpins all of reality and that in practice expresses itself in justice for widows, orphans, and immigrants – the traditional biblical protegees of God’s concern. Prayer is a habit of mind that doesn’t call for words or supplications, but for awareness of the places in life where love-as-justice is breaking in.

That love remains nearly invisible because of human attempts to obscure it with tropes about rugged individualism, survival of the fittest, dog-eat-dog reality, and “nature red in tooth and claw.” Such worldly wisdom normalizes fear. Unlike Greta Thunberg, ordinary people adopting that normality become frightened and immobilized before terror -inspiring kings, presidents, bosses and judges.

Jesus’ parable of the widow and the judge turns that familiar dynamic on its head. It calls us to “pray always” in the sense earlier described. Then, once our minds are aligned with God’s loving purposes, we’re called to imitate the widow who insistently sought justice not from God, but from the judge “who neither feared God nor respected any human being.”

In other words, Love understood as Justice for the oppressed will drive us (as it did Greta and her Children’s Crusade) to petition, protest, demonstrate, and engage in the type of direct action that threatens such agents of injustice. Jesus’ joke about the judge’s fear that a poor widow might do him physical harm makes his point that the selfish ones who exercise power over us are more afraid of us than we of them.

So, today’s readings suggest, align with justice and then join Greta in the streets. Be as courageous as she. Become as a little child (MT 18:3). Frighten the hell out of those judges, presidents and worshippers of Moloch! Save the planet!