A prayer before Pope Francis comes to the United States

          This summer I attended the Benedictine Development Symposium in Schuyler, Nebraska and met a extraordinary speaker and writer. He may not thank me for this mention, but I was impressed by his writing skils and passion. And so I share with you a snippet of Brian Doyle, editor of Portland magazine at the University of Portland. He is the author of Leaping: Revelations and Epiphanies, A Shimmer of Something: Lean Stories of Spiritual Substance, and many more.

         Today I‘m sharing with you a prayer from Brian Doyle's A Book of Uncommon Prayer:100 Celebrations of the Miracle and Muddle of the Ordinary. Sorin Books, 2014, pp. 17-18

          Brian’s prayers remind me of Daniel Berrigan’s psalm prayers in Uncommon Prayer: a Book of Psalms and Walter Brueggemann’s prayers in Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth. Brian, Daniel and Walter share the same passion for the apt word/ phrase, for social justice, for an intense struggling relationship with God and for speaking the hard truth of human suffering and small delights. Their prayers are not easy to pray, just as many of the psalms are not easy to pray. Their prayers like the psalms come from the deepest part of us and stun us with their power.

          I present Brian Doyle’s prayer as an example of a modern yet Biblical way of calling out to God It is also a good prayer for the week before Pope Francis comes to visit.

Furious Prayer for the Church I Love and Have Always Loved but Which Drives me Insane with Is Fussy Fidgety Prim Tin-Eared Thirst for Control and Rules and Power and Money Rather Than the One Simple Thing the Founder Insisted On

Granted, it’s a tough assignment, the original assignment. I get that. Love—Lord help us, could we not have been assigned something easier, like astrophysics or quantum mechanics? But no—love those you cannot love. Love those who are poor and broken and fouled and dirty and sick with sores. Love those who wish to strike you on both cheeks. Love the blowhard, the pompous ass, the arrogant liar. Find the Christ in each heart, even those. Preach the Gospel and only if necessary talk about it. Be the Word. It is easy to advise and pronounce and counsel and suggest and lecture; it is not so easy to do what must be done without sometimes shrieking. Bring love like a bright weapon against the dark. The Rabbi did not say build churches, or retreat houses, or secure a fleet of cars for general use, or convene conferences or issue position papers. He was pretty blunt about the hungry and the naked and the sick. He was not reasonable. We forget this. The Church is not a reasonable idea. The Church should be a verb. When it is only a noun it is not what the Founder asked of us. Let us pray that we are ever after dissolving the formal officious arrogant thing that wants to rise, and ever fomenting the contradictory revolutionary counter-cultural thing that could change life on this planet. It could, you know. Let’s try again today. And so: amen.

Thank you, Brian Doyle.

        Sr. Deborah Harmeling, OSB