My husband and I have talked a good bit this week about what to do in the face of the political and environmental disaster unfolding before us. We look on in horror at the promotion to positions of highest authority and power of those espousing white-supremacist, misogynist, homophobic, anti-ecological and anti-scientific, and other execrable views, while acknowledging our own privilege, complacency, and complicity in the oil-and-slave economy, feeling helpless to effect any real change in our society. If even the most courageous water protectors and the most active activists must rely on petrol and jet fuel to get where they’re going, and on electronics made by entrapped persons to spread their messages – and if yesterday, clearly on the wrong side of things by dint of using my car, I drove past any number of cyclists and a handful of people protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline – what hope is there? My husband looks for a leader to unify progressive voices, and longs for imaginative direct action as a means for change. I want to believe in the power of ongoing creative work – writing, music, art, design, whether in direct protest or simple defiance – and seem to continue to expect that the Church will afford the opportunity for that work in a rich sacramental, ascetical, devotional, and (in a certain way) aesthetic context.

We are both continually disappointed – and frustrated and fearful – and at the same time comfortable. Those calling and working for justice seem weak and scattered, powerless in the face of the electoral college, party machines, gerrymandering, and corporate cash that so distort the good will of many people. A Church that, in my experience, constantly backs away from the scriptures, the sacraments, the saints, from any call to repentance, fasting, prayer, from any vision of abundant and eternal life in the Kingdom, is unlikely to effect much personal or communal change.

But among the commands and promises coming our way in this season we find this great passage from the Epistle to the Philippians assigned to Thanksgiving Day in Year C (this year) –

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you.

– which is echoed in I Thessalonians, read in Year B –

Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise the words of prophets, but test everything; hold fast to what is good; abstain from every form of evil. May the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do this.

Fr Aidan Kimel’s timely posting of an article (which refers to the above passage) by Met. Kallistos Ware is a welcome reminder of a well-trodden path to unceasing prayer: the Jesus Prayer. And this, Ware says, does indeed have an effect on us and on the world around us:

Moreover, so far from turning our backs on others and repudiating God’s creation when we say the Jesus Prayer, we are in fact affirming our commitment to our neighbour and our sense of the value of everyone and everything in God. ‘Acquire inner peace,’ said St Seraphim of Sarov (1759–1833), ‘and thousands around you will find their salvation.’ By standing in Christ’s presence even for no more than a few moments of each day, invoking his Name, we deepen and transform all the remaining moments of the day, rendering ourselves available to others, effective and creative, in a way that we could not otherwise be. And if we also use the Prayer in a ‘free’ manner throughout the day, this enables us to ‘set the divine seal on the world’, to adopt a phrase of Dr Nadejda Gorodetzky (1901–85): ‘The Name of Jesus may become a mystical key to the world, an instrument of the hidden offering of everything and everyone, setting the divine seal on the world. One might perhaps speak here of the priesthood of all believers. In union with our High Priest, we implore the Spirit: Make my prayer into a sacrament.’

Prayer, and the Jesus Prayer in particular, is not meant as a substitute for the official Sacraments, but it, like they, can

signif [y] the rediscovery and ‘manifestation’ of baptismal grace. To pray is to pass from the state where grace is present in our hearts secretly and unconsciously, to the point of full inner perception and conscious awareness when we experience and feel the activity of the Spirit directly and immediately.

That is, prayer, with the official Sacraments and the totality of Christian life and disciplines, reveals the Kingdom, reveals things (including our selves) as they are, as God sees them, as sacramental gifts from God to us and our offerings back again – and this changes us:

‘Prayer is action; to pray is to be highly effective.’... The Jesus Prayer makes each into a ‘man for others’, a living instrument of God’s peace, a dynamic centre of reconciliation.

Prayer is not a substitute for action in the world, but it leads to action, and is action in itself. We see this of course primarily in the eternal prayer/life of Christ, and secondarily in those of the saints, many of whom, like Our Lord, took the ultimate action. Whether we are chosen to follow them to this point or not, we can each be ‘a living instrument of God’s peace, a dynamic centre of reconciliation’ – and what is more needed in today’s world than this?