Prayers for Hope & Healing During an Election Year
“To reinvent your country you need a great deal of hope.”
-Jurgen Moltmann
Over the past year or so that I have been sharing the hosting of Shalem’s Prayers for Hope and Healing, I often reflect on the audacity of it all.
A gathering of Shalem-inspired folk populating the assembled squares of a Zoom screen; thirty minutes with a few words and shared silent sitting in the Presence, to accomplish what?
- a plea for healing for all that is broken in our lives but especially for all that is broken in our fractious, anxious world
- to support and bid for hope in the face of fear, despair, overwhelm, and so much more.
So little time and effort to pray in the face of so much, and yet, every other Thursday we light another beam of hope and wholeness in the face of so much that is dark.
In a recent conversation with Margaret Benefiel I said that I supposed that Prayers for Hope and Healing had started in, and as, a response to the COVID pandemic when we all turned to Zoom to sustain community. But that was not the case. Prayers for Hope and Healing began in 2016 when there was a lot of individual and collective anxiety about our future as a country and for the wider world generated by that year’s pending presidential election.
Her word planted a seed that came to flower for me with the news, in mid-June, of the death of Jurgen Moltmann. The name may be familiar to some or many. He was one of the greatest Reformed theologians of the 20th century whose most well know work was, “A Theology of Hope.” His was a hard-won hope. As a young man in Germany he was drafted into the army, was nearly killed twice, and emerged after the war to confront the horror that the leaders of his country had instigated and his neighbors had embraced. Where in this to find hope? One quote, from among many, gives us a sense of how he found hope, and can inspire us to claim it.
“But the ultimate reason for our hope is not to be found at all in what we want, wish for and wait for; the ultimate reason is that we are wanted and wished for and waited for. What is it that awaits us? Does anything await us at all, or are we alone? Whenever we base our hope on trust in the divine mystery, we feel deep down in our hearts: there is someone who is waiting for you, who is hoping for you, who believes in you. We are waited for as the prodigal son in the parable is waited for by his father. We are accepted and received, as a mother takes her children into her arms and comforts them. God is our last hope because we are God’s first love.”
― Jürgen Moltmann, The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life
Moltmann confronted the worst humanity could inflict on life and found hope in the God who suffers with and loves all no matter what.
To liken Moltmann’s experience to our current replay of 2016 is an overstatement indeed, but his insight, captured in the title of this essay, encourages me to invite the Shalem community to rededicate Prayers for Hope and Healing, not as an exercise in partisanship, but in affirming hope and praying for healing in the midst of all the anxiety and anger welling up all around us.
Prayers for Hope and Healing meets via Zoom every other Thursday from 4:30pm to 5:00pm Eastern time. The Zoom link is sent out the morning of the day. Each gathering is led by one of the participants who brings a few words to anchor that day’s prayer and practice.
We probably need, “a great deal of hope.” Even 30 minutes every other week helps.
You are invited to join the Shalem community on Nov. 5th for 30 minutes, one hour, or more, for a special Election Day Prayer Vigil. To register, click here.
