The community of the Dan Corcoran House recently completed and now occupies a prayer room in the old garage-shed behind the house, so we have been reflecting a lot on what prayer means to us.
We have also been planning our commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. Prayer and the bomb might seem to be entirely different phenomena, but we think they are quite related. Dorothy Day once drew the parallel between the unseen, hidden power of Saint Therese's "Little Way" of prayer-filled love and the unseen but terrible power in a tiny atom. In Dorothy's analogy, the Little Way, apparently so small and insignificant, has all the explosive, transforming potential of the atom--the one a power for good, the other a power for destruction.
Core community members Mary Farrell, Jerry Daoust, Shirley Kelter, Vivian Blount, and Jim and Barbara Allaire offer some reflections on the subject of prayer.
Why do we have a prayer room? Can't we just "pray always and everywhere"?
Shirley: Sometimes it's hard for me to see find God in the activities and chaos, even though I know God is there. I need a quiet, peaceful place to feed my spirit. The Gospels are about being as well as doing. They give us plenty of examples of Jesus pulling away from active ministry in order to pray and be refreshed. Our work of hospitality is empty if it isn't rooted in prayer. The prayer room is as essential to the house as the kitchen!
Jerry: You know the story of how Elijah heard God in the tiny breeze in the stillness? Well, you've got to have some stillness in which to find God, and the house is rarely that! But the prayer room itself is not the holy thing. It's the prayer and the spiritual life that happens there that is holy.
Barbara: The wonderful thing about the prayer room is that it's a place with no other agenda except to be with God, and to be together with God. We need that kind of special place, set aside as sacred. Being there tends to focus you.
Shirley: I'm hoping that our guests, too, will use the prayer room as a place to connect with God. Our guests really have a deep reverence for God. You can see that during grace in the evening before supper; you can sense they are praying intently. I'd like for our extended community to feel welcome to use the prayer room any time as well, in private or at our community prayer.
What does prayer have to do with the Catholic Worker Movement? with hospitality and justice?
Vivian: The house is prayer. Without prayer, there is no Catholic Worker Movement and there is no Dan Corcoran House. When I was a guest here three years ago with my family, I could tell it was a place filled with prayer. I said to myself, "Where there's prayer, God's there. God sent me here for a reason." There's a purpose to everything, and you won't always know what it is. But it was great to be surrounded by people praying for you, even if they didn't tell you they were--kind of a "secret prayer."
Jim: For Dorothy Day, prayer was at the center of everything she did. She was so close to the Scriptures. She meditated on them daily and really entered into the scenes with her imagination. So when she came across challenging situations that required a response from her, she was flooded with the Word of God. It gave her what she needed to see clearly how to respond. One of Dorothy's friends and a biographer, Jim Forest, tells the story of coming upon Dorothy's missal left in a pew in the chapel, and finding in it lists of people and intentions she was praying for. Here was a woman bombarded with people and requests for prayers. How practical of her, and how disciplined and caring, to keep notes to make sure she would not forget any of them. It was part of her spirit of hospitality.
Mary: The way we live here requires a lot of prayer. We are driven closer to God, trusting totally in God, by the situations we find ourselves in. Our guests who have such terrible and sad lives keep us turning to God for them--and for ourselves, even though we don't have the kind of huge troubles our guests have. We're always asking God for healing for our guests, for their peace of mind, and then we realize that we need prayer so that we can make room in our hearts for understanding, for forgiveness when things don't go well with someone. We need prayer to keep us from shutting down, so we don't get hardened. Prayer leaves your heart open; it makes you trust God so you can believe God is in each guest and each situation, no matter how difficult.
Jerry: Praying for justice and for people who are suffering all over the world is part of being a member of the Mystical Body of Christ. It's a mystery how that prayer affects the world; exactly how it plays out we'll never know. It's like being one worker in a very long, large project that you very likely won't see the completion of. But your part is important; every small part is. The good thing about praying for people you'll never know and situations that are not part of your immediate experience is that you do it on faith, like giving a gift of yourself to someone without expecting anything in return. It's like Divine Love, given freely without any strings.
What about the power of prayer in your life? What does prayer really accomplish?
Mary: Prayer is about transformation. It's about transforming us as much as anything. One thing I have learned from the CW movement is the need to love your enemy. It was really new to me to pray for people you might least expect to "deserve" your prayer. So as a community we don't neglect to pray for the ones who have wronged our guests or us--for example, the husband of a guest, who has been very abusive to the guest and causes her a lot of anguish, or the guys who did the bombing in Oklahoma City. You don't alienate anyone, you include them in the circle of your prayer. This praying for your enemies may go like this: I might be in a situation where I would usually get judgmental or sarcastic. Maybe I see someone doing something harmful to themselves. Instead of thinking, "Well, that's just who they are; they'll never change," I'll instead pray for them that God will help them, touch them, that the best thing will work out for them--and that God will keep me from wallowing in judgment of them. Instead of thinking about how awful they are, I start to think about how I might need to change or do something in order to really help them. My prayer life has given and shown me a God who expects me to believe in the impossible and the unknown.
Jim: Without prayer I doubt that I could hold back the temptation to despair. Some years ago I first experienced what it means to "absorb evil." I had dealt with people in tough circumstances before, but it was the counseling of sexual abuse victims that taught me the necessity of prayer in a new way. While listening to these people's stories, I was in some way taking into myself some of the evil they had experienced. Their revelations haunted me and caused me great anguish. It was exhausting me. I learned a kind of prayer then that has stayed with me and has prevented my despair at the world's injustice and evil. I learned to unite and turn over to the crucified Jesus the evil I was somehow absorbing. Only through his cross could I endure and continue to be a healing presence.
Shirley: More and more, words seem unnecessary to me in prayer. Words can't really express what I want to communicate, and God knows what I need anyway, much better than I do. So I'm drawn to "centering prayer," in which you let go of thoughts and needs and requests and focus simply on being in touch with the Center, where God is found. The power of prayer for me is in surrendering: my thoughts, my needs, my agenda. The more I let go of them in prayer, the more I let go in life--I give up having to control situations or people and just am more open to them. There's a great mystery to all of this. It's bigger than anything I can know or imagine or dream of.
Vivian: Prayer has been really powerful for me when I know other people are praying for me, even if I don't know what theyÕre saying. A few years ago I was diagnosed with cancer, and I told people at a prayer service at my church. They didn't know what to say to me directly about it, but the deacon got everyone together and they prayed for me without me being there. That was powerful, to know they were praying for me. The community here at the house has prayed for me these past years, and this has helped me to be more public with my thoughts. I'm reading now and accomplishing things. I'm learning how to speak up a lot. I'm not totally confident yet but I keep getting drawn in. To know that the prayers and support are there that's great.
Barbara: The power of prayer, I believe, has to do with becoming more and more in union with God's love. When that happens, God's love flows through you, saturates your whole being, and flows out to the world with healing and mercy. It's really God loving the world through you. Union with God is about transformation. If we are going to be wide, deep channels for God's healing love in the world, there's a lot of "kinks" in us that need to be straightened, a lot of motives and agendas that need to be purified. It's a continual process of turning our life and being over to God to let God work through us. And of course we won't necessarily know how God has worked through us; that's part of the mystery
I love the words from a medieval spiritual classic, The Cloud of Unknowing, about the power of a person's prayer: "The whole of humankind is wonderfully helped by what you are doing, in ways you do not understand."