Looking back at the news of 2003

Lutheran, The, Jan 2004 by Crafton, Barbara Cawthorne

How do you pray for the headlines?

So many TV news specials at this urning of year look back at the op stories of the last 12 months. We watch these programs, see again the faces we, in some weeks, saw every day-Elizabeth Smart, Jessica Lynch or the latest odd couple from the latest "reality" dating show. We review the 2003 parade of the sad and the ridiculous, the hero and the buffoon, each hustled offstage after his or her 15 minutes of fame.

Other people-Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden-remain stubbornly in the headlines, as does the war that began in confidence and continues in deepening concern. We still read about the 2001 World Trade Center attack-as if by reading about it we can somehow come to terms with it, but we set aside the paper and realize that we will never come to terms with it. We wonder what the year ahead will bring, and pray that it is nothing like that, not here, not anywhere.

There are more in this parade, the living and the dead: Katharine Hepburn, Mr. Rogers, Venus and Serena, J.Lo, the president of the United States, an ailing pope. Some of these will never be forgotten. Others had their 15 minutes and nothing more.

Praying for the headlines

How do you pray for the headlines in the newspaper or the lead story on the radio? How do you pray for situations of violence and disappointed hopes for peace, for the times when human hatred tramples human love in the dust? How do you pray for the souls of suicide bombers when your eyes are so full of tears for their victims that you can barely see?

How do you pray for the souls of the unborn and the soul of the doctor who would have cut off their chance at life, for the soul of the man who entered the lives of both by calmly taking aim at another person's head and pulling the trigger?

And how do you pray for the trivial, for what our more crass fascinations say about our society? How do you pray about a people who cannot take their eyes away from sex and sensation, from violence as an amusement, from voyeuristic obsession with the rich and famous?

To pray for another-for your mother, your beloved child, for the person whom you will never meet but whose name has become a household word, for the person whose deed makes your blood run cold-is to turn that person over to the great love of God. Prayer is more than thinking kindly of someone. That we can do on our own.

Prayer is different. It takes the puny love we can summon-and sometimes our love is puny indeed, and sometimes we cannot summon love at all-and adds it to the mighty river of God's love, which carries everything in its powerful stream. The good and the bad alike are no match for it. It's greater than our love or our hate. It's even greater than our apathy. Put the things you cannot understand into that mighty stream. All of them.

Praying your contradictions

Put the things in your heart that contradict each other into that stream: Your sorrow over abortion and your sorrow over the killing of the abortion provider. Your distress over the state-sanctioned killing of the death penalty and your horror at the calm self-satisfaction of a murderer. Your indignation at violence on television and your guilty fascination with it in the headlines.

Put your nobility and shabbiness into the mighty river of God's love. Put it all there. God knows us very well. Knows exactly where we are less than we should be and where we are more than we ever dreamed we could be.

There will be another spate of news retrospectives next year at this time. We'll look back at 2004 over the lives and the deaths, the triumphs and the disasters. Some will thrill our hearts. Others will make them tremble with fear. Some will be things over which we have absolutely no control. But others will be things about which we must choose.

Pray for your ethical choices and the choices of others. Pray for what happens as a result of those choices. Stumble along and figure it out as best you can. Peer as far into the future as you can see, never very far, and try to see all the possible outcomes of your actions. Then take a deep breath and act. And throw yourself upon God's mercy.

Crafton is an Episcopal priest and spiritual director in Metuchen, N.J. Her most recent book is Some Things You just Have to Live With (Morehouse Publishing, 2003). Visit her Web site at www.geraniumfarm.org.