Action 12: Pray the paper

Sigh. I take it this does not mean that I can just pray for UVa to win today against Duke? Although that would be my prayer of choice.

It has always bothered me that people actually DO pray for sports teams to win. There was a priest at our church in Baltimore who routinely and publicly prayed for a Colts victory on winter Sundays, and even then, I wondered if God was a Colts fan, or whether He portioned out his favors amongst all the NFL teams--and, if so, what was His blessing schedule relative to the various teams. Did He change by the week, or by the year, or by the decade? Did He favor football over baseball or basketball or hockey? Was it just coincidence that football games were always played on Sundays (this before the days/nights of Monday Night Football...were we all keeping holy the Lord's (football) Day when we sighed and moaned and hallelujah-ed in front of the TV?) One wonders.

The difficult bit about 'praying the paper' is avoiding the blanket, one-prayer-serves-all type of prayer.  There are so many issues and events that appear to be beyond our power, that necessarily must be referred upward in the chain of command. I might be able to affect a corner of my own world by an act of prayer (a prayerful action), but when we launch off into the Washington-Post-headline level, I'm afraid that most things fall above my job description.

So, here's a collection of things I am powerless against, to name but a few:

• the finding of that Malaysian airliner (those poor passengers, their poor families)
• the Ukraine, the Crimea (people at the mercy of leaders who want power and will trample anyone in order to get it)
• political scandal (and the weariness of dealing with it; when will politicians--and their staffs-- realize that they will get caught, that anonymity no longer exists?)
• the weather (not just this endless winter, but the ill effects of storms and flood and fire and ice and snow and changed school schedules)
• the economy (including health care, the job market, the real estate market, the decline of cities, and the often irrational assignment of blame for problems therein)

Can I wrap these all up in a giant Hefty bag and put them it on God's doorstep and ring the bell? That doesn't seem quite right. 

I guess what this action is meant to do is to make me acknowledge that there is a world of problems beyond my power to solve, that I depend on the good offices of someone beyond my pay grade for help.  That is unavoidably true. It also demands that after that fact is acknowledged, I need to ask for help--not just for me and the Cavaliers or whatever frivolous 'wants' I might have, but for this world, of which I am a part. In spite of distance, time and condition, we are all connected, if only by our humanity and helplessness.