Slip away and pray

The Church has a long tradition of consolidating the teaching of Jesus in Matthew 25 in a list of  “corporal” acts of mercy to which all followers of the Jesus Way are called: to feed the hungry and give drink to those who are thirsty; to shelter the homeless; to visit the sick; to visit those in prison, to bury the dead; to give to the poor. These acts are one way in which we are grafted onto the gift and testimony of our Jewish forebears, for whom to care for the poor and alien in the land, and to release the captive at Jubilee (Lev 19: 33-34; 25:1-55), was to remember whose they were, once themselves aliens in the land, subject to violence and oppression and poverty, then delivered by and into the grace of God who remembered the covenant with them. To keep the commands of God to do these things was to fulfill their very identity and destiny. To show mercy to others was a mercy, also, to those who offered it, because to live in this way was to return to themselves, become who they were and are, in their very depths made a people by the grace of God.

In Christian language, one succinct summary of this movement outward to serve others as an expression of the identity of a people for whom God’s Son emptied himself – taking the form of a servant – is simply this: “we love, because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).

But this work, even as it is life-giving and identity-conferring, can be hard. Care for the poor and lonely, feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, giving shelter to the stranger, is often unglamorous, laborious, time-consuming. There are costs to our acts of mercy. It is difficult to see our neighbors struggle or suffer, sometimes no matter what we do. Working steadily at the corporal acts of mercy fulfills us but also bears down on us. “Compassion fatigue,” as we have come to call it lately, can set in. Equally a problem, given as we are to self-reliance and pride, we can begin to think that by showing mercy we earn something for ourselves: accolades from others, self-satisfaction, the assurance to ourselves that we are “good,” or the right to enter heaven, whatever we conceive that to be. It is a tiring exercise to try and earn one’s own salvation. And it shrinks the soul.

In addition to the interior costs of fatigue from the unending work and the withering of the soul from our tendency to self-righteousness, in a context like the present United States there can be real danger in showing mercy to “the least of these.” If the designs of our nation’s leaders are to punish or eliminate the alien in the land, to tie national strength to oppression of the poor, to erase the liberty of those whose skin is too dark, to steal resources intended for the care and treatment of the sick, then our leaders are flouting the most basic commands of God, and we find ourselves, in our works of mercy, standing against the national leadership. We serve in our very bodies, our very material practices, as a counter-sign to their designs. The threat we face for showing mercy to the least of these is real and it remains to be seen, in the U.S., whether that threat might lead even to our own harassment, imprisonment, or even deportation. We do well to remember that many Christians throughout history have been punished or even martyred by Empire, in its various forms, for witnessing to Christ the servant-savior. We also do well to remember that the term martyr simply means “witness.” We are called to witness, whatever the cost.

So practicing mercy, and calling our nation to rise to the practice of mercy, is life-giving but costly. How do we draw strength for this prophetic work that overcomes fatigue, expands our souls with gratitude and joy, and blesses us with the courage needed to be counted as a resisting witness against Empire?

The clue to the answer is visible in Jesus’ own ministry. Surrounded by the poor needing to be fed, the sick clamoring to be healed, the religious leaders sure of their rightness and righteousness, Jesus prayed.

Jesus prayed regularly. Deeply. Slipping away alone in the wilderness to enter the presence of God in silence. Praying with his disciple community, teaching them how to pray as well. The strength to show mercy to others, over the long haul and in the very teeth of Empire, is quite simply sustained by our primary purpose as created beings: to stand still before God in gratitude, thanks, praise, and awe. “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name” are the first words of Jesus’ model of prayer. To bless the name of God and to adore God. To know ourselves again in that act of hallowing God’s name: recipients of the mercies of God, the mercy of being, the mercy of serving, the mercy of flourishing in these things. To show mercy to others because we recognize others too as made in the image of God, and to bow before God in sheer gratitude, no matter what is happening around us – this, and only this, is what sustains us for the service to the least of these to which God calls us. And this is cultivated in our continuing worship and prayer.

The great Anglican spiritual master Evelyn Underhill knew that the awestruck adoration of God was the wellspring of all our action. She knew that our acts of mercy had to be situated in a life of prayer and in simply being in rapt stillness before God. She knew our acts of mercy would mean nothing and lead us finally to exhaustion and to retreat from the threats against us if they did not happen as an outworking of “awestruck” adoration and thanksgiving. She is worth quoting at length:

Being still before God, simply adoring the giver of our being, considering in stammering awe the transcendent holiness of divine love that gives rise to thankful hearts will alone sustain us for the service we carry out toward others, as God commands. Only through prayer do we experience again and again that God commands mercy because God is mercy; even God’s judgment is mercy toward us, to call us back to what is life-giving. Such stillness is cultivated, above all, in our prayer and worship whose first language is gratitude.

There is much to be commended in the current preoccupation in many Christian circles with “social justice.” Social justice is an umbrella term for a constellation of the traditional corporate acts of mercy toward the poor, the alien, the hungry, coupled with a focus on the systemic ways that the least among us are made least to begin with. Work for social justice is good Christian work. But we must be careful. The acids of modernity that eat away at our capacity for God-awe and substitute for it the idol of human accomplishment can easily turn our work toward social justice into self-righteousness, masquerading as the “kingdom of God” about whose many givens and assumptions Jesus spent so much effort to complicate, upend, and expand. Jesus warned us about trusting our own efforts to attain righteousness, long before modernity’s fascination with frantic activism. We must place at the heart of our actions in the world the commitment to prayerful adoration and awe if we are to be sustained in our works of mercy, feel our hearts continuously enlarged by our service and prophetic witness, and remain humble witnesses, whatever the cost, to the kingdom that God alone will finally bring to pass.

Let us stand continually in prophetic witness to the rights and the dignity of the least of these to whom God’s Word holds us accountable. This is the work of mercy to which we children of Abraham and Sarah and Hagar have long been called and are still called. Let us stand with the poor, the hungry, the stranger in the land. Let us stand with any whose dignity is under assault by a corrupt and misguided political administration because of color, gender, opinion, or for any other reason. But as the heart and soul of this work of mercy, to keep us in life-giving joy: let us pray.