2024-07-10 A Meditation on a Tide to Swim Around
“13 Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing praise. 14 Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. 15 And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. 16 Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working. 17 Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. 18 Then he prayed again, and heaven gave rain, and the earth bore its fruit.” (James 5:13-18 ESV)
Against a tide, the prayer warrior capitalizes on each hour as his or her investment and safe claim. The prayer warrior is swimming furiously and can seem strange for being grateful for unsubstantiated, just “making it” kinds of boast. Kinds of fruit. Kinds of Lived Out investment and embarkation, endowment, Purpose. All this, in the absolute humility of how to see around a corner, to reach this or that Imaginative Plateau, is no owned skill but a Gift: we see anew, entirely new landscapes, dreamscapes, hopescapes, swirl and come together, even with scarcely any new data to work with: the data are our patient Investment of that call of duty, to be servants of Prayer.
Our patient life on the edge, our friend and companion, compatriot being source so much of that leveling Reality, so we can indeed Invest and Own a swimming furious fight against an invisible tide: this one, horribly maimed by their own—it would seem—bad decisions, and what have we to say except to turn away in disgust, almost: for we ourselves have the makings of any number of trauma responses or neurotic intake or crutches in life. We ourselves also therefore pray for some respite, if not for us, then for these our peers: that the diligent Work would be rewarded, if not publicly then notionally, in some sincere across-the-stage word of encouragement, gratitude, acknowledgment.