This Sacred Time for Prayer and Hope

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(This post was written before the elections.)

I have just participated in my community’s prayer of blessing for poll chaplains of which I am one. The chapel welcomed the sisters who seemed serious and yet serene. We were blest by our leadership to help others in the quest for democracy to continue and to grow as the biblical “City on the Hill.” I am overwhelmed that the prayers and the classical gem, “Finlandia,” composed by Jan Sebelius, were chosen to inspire us and to set a tone of peace, something which we poll chaplains were encouraged to share at our posts. I would ask you to Google “Finlandia”and as you hear it read the words you can Google along with the music. Reading the words and listening to the music left me deeply moved for our country – all it has given me, you, our neighbors, our global neighbors. This hymn has always been a favorite of mine.

Tomorrow, I go to my post. But I bring so much prayer and hope but also a deep wariness and, I admit, fear. Like you, I hold my country in my heart asking our God to guide the nation I love, that the nation that can and does so much good for others, will prevail. I place it like an offering, a prized offering as did the Hebrew nation of old – I lift it up in my spirit and I will vote for its continuance, its flow within our veins and in our souls, our minds, our spirits.

Writer Sara Sherbill’s column (New York Times, November 3, 2024, p. 12) titled, You Should Consider Praying, gave me encouragement. Though I am writing this blog on the eve of our voting day, I am still a ball of nervousness, a bird on a leafless branch hungry for the least morsel of comfort to seize on.

Sherbill was raised an Orthodox Jew, and I detect that she absorbed the mysticism of her faith as she sought to pray herself through the past year of pain and personal loss. She asks, “What can we do when we don’t know what to do? We can pray.”

Prayer does not have to be the prayers we have all memorized since our youth. Nor is it always the ones we know by rote – good and helpful as these are. Sherbill offers a redefinition of prayer as an experience, “a place of solace within us.” For instance, if you decide to just be still and simply breathe and try to imagine that yes, you are worthy of what you are praying for, what you desire, a peace will settle in and perhaps you will acquire that strength and clarity of mind to know what path you are to take. That’s an answer to a prayer.

Sherbill goes further: “What if prayer is asking a deceased loved one to watch over us?” We Catholics should gravitate to that idea with our belief in praying for the dead. Perhaps we should pray to the dead! In her desperation after her losses, Sherbill called out one rainy night as she was driving home: “Hashem, (a Jewish name for God) help me. Just please help me,” her windshield wipers sloshing back and forth in the rain and her tears falling like melting icicles from a heart frozen in fear. Someone will hear that prayer she says, “even if that someone is you. We become more open, more peaceful when we pray like this.” Our friend, Jesuit Karl Rahner, my poet theologian wrote, “We only need the will to make the prayer of the heart.” 

Reflection

Praying for elections – and probably the aftermath – should be earnest, serious, and selfless. It should be for the good of the country, not just for what I want as an individual. How did I mark my ballot? Pressing down hard with a vengeance against the marginalized? In other words, pressing my mark with a gotcha attitude? Did I press hard on the ballot because I bear a tinge of anger believing many people don’t work as hard as I do and don’t deserve to cash in on the American dream? Did I really understand why the economy and grocery prices and gas prices are really doing so bad? Worse, do I fall for the criticism of one candidate or person and not a history of the problem? Have I studied or watched the reports from financial analysts to see where things were challenging and where they grew? Or did I rely on the gas pump, throw up my hands, and declare nothing has been so bad? 

Instead, I hope you marked your ballot aware of the sacredness of the moment. I hoped you marked it feeling the trembling holiness of the moment and that you were also voting for the disenfranchised all over the world, something a new leader will have to consider along with the cost of our groceries and gas. In that private booth where you will have cast your vote, a universe of people at war, in dire hunger, homeless, insecure will be with you and me for we are voting for the common good and who can embrace that good as our candidate.

Sherbill tells the story of a young boy who was not admitted to the synagogue because he could not read and thus presumably not pray from the holy book. But when the congregation heard his beautiful playing of a pipe reed for the sheep outside the walls, their own prayers of distraction, of misplaced and selfish intentions, were lifted, perhaps purified, and the gates of heaven opened embracing their prayers and that of the boy’s divine music. 

No matter the outcome of our elections, let us pray and act on the interest of the common good. Let us never lose commitment to this even if we have a tiny flute whose music we think the powerful will never hear.