by Di McCullough and Karl Stevens
You may have noticed a certain playfulness slipping into the Prayers of the People in recent weeks. At the point in the prayers when we ask God to “give us all a reverence for the earth as your own creation” people have begun listing animals and trees and other aspects of the natural world that they have encountered recently. We’ve prayed for herons and bald eagles and rabbits. We’ve prayed for sycamore trees and for national and state parks. We’ve even prayed for javelinas, after a discussion about them during our monthly journaling workshops. Praying in this way has helped us manifest our reverence for the earth and make it specific, and helped us to acknowledge that the earth’s wonders are part of our daily experience.
We want to begin approaching our prayers for the nation and the world in a similar manner. It’s easy to despair about the state of the world, especially as we see the harmful effects of legislative decisions in our state and observe the divisiveness of our national politics. Yet small and important victories are happening all of the time. Progress can still come through legislation (like the state of Massachusetts’s new budget, which provides free universal school lunch and free community college), but some important work happens in quiet places. For instance, botanists have recently committed to re-titling several hundred plant species that have racist components to their names. Taxonomy is not a story that’s going to make the front page of a national newspaper, but it is a sign that positive change has taken root.
A number of years ago, I (Di) started reading Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark every Advent. It’s a small book of short chapters that takes us through grassroots victories which bring us incrementally closer to a world that loves neighbor and respects creation. Solnit is an activist and writer, and among her several hope-strengthening points are these: that we quickly forget how impossible our accomplishments were before we achieved them, and that victory often comes in small steps with little fanfare.
My daily attempt to stay connected to small victories is to jot down a quick headline of progress in my planner. Even in the scariest, most difficult times, I have been able to find a bit of good news for each day. (If you’re interested in giving it a try, I’ve often found hopeful stories in nonprofit news outlets like AP and Reuters.) It’s an easy habit to fold into other regular spiritual practices – for example, by thinking of the Ignatian prayer of daily review as communal as well as individual, or by remembering people doing holy work in the world as part of a loving-kindness meditation.
We would like these kinds of hope-mongering practices to become part of our corporate prayer. When you pause to add a petition to the prayer list on your way into church, note some hopeful development in our community, state, national life, or global politics under the bidding that begins “Guide the people of this land, and of all the nations, in the ways of justice and peace.” We can all help each other build a habit of hope that sustains us in challenging times by reminding each other of how many good things are happening as the result of diligent and faithful efforts.