Neighbors In Pain

(a prayer by Stanley Hauerwas, 

originally offered after Hurricane Fran in 1996. 

Published in: Prayers Plainly Spoken.)

God, give us Jobian humility. Help us stand awestruck - silent- before the mystery of your creation. Help us understand the wildness of your creation, wildness at once terrible as it is beautiful. Help us see you in the terror and the beauty, knowing as we do the agony of our sin in your life. We have seen the agony in your Son's cross. We know his agony continues still so that our unbelief might not damn us.

Help us claim to be Christ for one another, defeating the loneliness in which sin cannot help but clothe us. So freed, make us neighbors for one another. In the pain, in our fear of being out of control, may we discover our ability to need help and in that discovery be enabled to help others. We know normality will quickly return and we will again be OK, not needing anyone else. But sear into our memories the moments when we discern we are not our own and, thus, come close to perfection. AMEN.

The work of the people seems clearer today, closer to the surface than at other times. There is no partisanship in first-responders. Hurricanes are no respecter of politics. And from the muddle of academic minutia where we have shunted Christian ethics and moral theology, a plain-spoken voice is heard above the high-minded rhetoric: Oughtn't we to do unto others as we would have them do unto us?  

So, just for today, let us care for ourselves 

but also for our neighbors as ourselves.

For "normality will quickly return" and we will be caught up again in distinctions and quandries and exceptions to the rule that only privilege and convenience and comfort can afford.

So, just for today, let us care for ourselves 

but also for our neighbors as ourselves.

Excuse me, I have some phone calls to make...