Back to Life

I had a conversation recently with a woman who is a medical marvel. Several years ago, she collapsed and hovered on the edge of death for months, but she had a huge network of friends and colleagues who prayed her through one crisis after another. She believes all those prayers pulled her back from the grave.

Inspiring story, isn't it? Yet I have been wondering whether all those prayers really changed God's mind about the outcome of her illness - and if they did, why would we think that we know better than God about how the events of our lives should turn out?

For instance, I once read a story about someone who had been in a car accident and who had fervent prayer warriors pleading for his recovery. While the medics were working on him, he had an out-of-body experience that was exquisite. He was in heaven and felt complete peace, pure love and perfect joy. He never wanted it to end. Suddenly, he was wrenched from that state and returned to earth and all he could feel was a deep sense of loss. His friends excitedly told him later that he had died and the doctors had been able to get his heart started again. They were filled with thanksgiving that God had answered their prayers. From his perspective, it was a mixed blessing.

In the Lord's Prayer, we pray, "Thy will be done," but we really don't believe that. We give God directions all the time, believing that we know what is best for us and our friends. That's scary. The God who lives outside of time, who can see our lives from their start to their finish with all their connections and consequences, will bend to the wishes of a united group of people who can't even see around the corner. That's quite a responsibility.

So, should we stop praying because we don't know what to pray for? I don't think that's the answer, but maybe we might be less specific in our desires. What we really want from God, I would imagine, is happiness and inner peace for ourselves and others. This may be the best prayer we could utter.

Perhaps what we are called to do is to surround a person with loving thoughts for their well being. If we flood our memories with positive regard for him or her and recruit the angels, the saints and our friends to do the same, the overflow of all that love must have a positive outcome because Love never fails. Our prayer then arises out of a selfless desire for another's good and not out of our own agenda.

Maybe God directs us to pray together because the unity that results from so many voices in loving agreement is so powerful that what is not loving cannot stand in its way for long. We wouldn't tolerate the social conditions that cause so much pain to so many and we wouldn't allow research into diseases to languish for lack of money. Our lives would certainly change for the better.

The world might look very different if we could all agree on how we want it to look.

The Right Place

Perhaps you’ve seen the same Forwarded email that I received recently about always being in the right place. It describes the reasons why a number of people never made it to the World Trade Center on Sept 11, 2001. They are alive today because they had gotten a blister and needed a band aid or been stuck in traffic or missed the bus. Things that seemed irritating at the time, were, in fact, the events that saved their lives. Thus, the thought goes, we are always in the right place, it’s all good and it’s just our perspective about negative events that needs to change. God always makes sure we are in the right place.

All of this is true – to a point. It’s easy to say that God’s providence saved the diverted individuals, but this line of thinking would imply that God deliberately didn’t save others. Were they too in the “right place” even though they got swallowed up in an inferno? Their survivors probably don’t think so. I can’t believe that God willed some families to lose a father or mother or that any one life was more precious to God than another’s.

Partiality doesn’t sound like the loving God who would become human and subject himself to the worst our species had to offer.  I’m sure that research would uncover just as many church goers among the dead as among the living and just as many whose fateful choices led them to the World Trade Center as away from it. What we have or have not done can’t be the measure of why some people still grieve a loss and others are thankful to be alive.

So, the “right place” isn’t necessarily the place which avoids the suffering; maybe the “right place” is simply wherever we are because God’s outstretched hand is there, too. God is able to heal the wounds made by those whose free will causes our pain. It is people who are at the root of our hurt and frustrations and the degenerative nature of our bodies explains our sickness and unavoidable death. All God can do is reveal the responses and attitudes that will lead to our inner peace in the midst of it all.

To say “Alleluia” in the midst of emptiness, darkness and confusion is the ultimate statement of faith. It arises from the belief that love never fails, that the right place is in the arms of God and that the more love we cast into the world, the less chance there is for others to act badly.

The world will change because people decide to change it, not because we wait around for God to do it.