Prayer takes many forms. There are the prayers of intercession that we offer together in church and at home throughout the week, when we hold each other and the burdens of the world with love to God.
There are the prayers of listening, also called meditation, when we quiet our busy and anxious minds to find the center quiet of contemplation, practicing so that we might better hear the still, small voice of the Holy Spirit.
There are prayers of pure emotion, like the psalms, when we are just turning our overflowing hearts upside down into the lap of God.
There are the prayers when we ask for God to show up. We need grace, a miracle. We don’t even know what, exactly, we need, but it would be great if God would show up soon. T
here are prayers we use from the Bible and prayer book, pre-written and handed down for generations, and prayers that pop out of our mouths and hearts without practice or polish.
But there is also the prayer that Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel called “praying with our feet.” This is the prayer that is expressed as it actively seeks justice. This is a prayer that is spoken, yes, but is also marched, written, voted, and volunteered.
In Luke’s gospel, Jesus tells his friends “a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.” It’s the story of a judge “who neither feared God nor had respect for people,” and who was mistreating a widow who repeatedly appeared in court for hearings, seeking justice for herself. In the Jewish tradition, care for widows and orphans is the paramount marker of the ethical life. A community that is following God is a community that takes care of those who are left vulnerable in a patriarchal society. But here, there’s a woman, a widow, who is in the position of having to defend her own interests in court, likely against a male opponent, in a society that saw her as inherently less. Rather than following the teachings of the Torah and seeking her wellbeing as he would his own, this judge is entrenched in his bias and does not respect the laws of God to care for her, or consider the protest she voices. Only through her persistent self-advocacy, the judge was swayed and changed his mind. She was persistent in prayer, and that prayer looked a lot like going out into the world to challenge injustice.
Her story, this parable, invites us into a life of prayer for change and hope that are accompanied by action. We can look toward great social change movements of our world to see this prayer at work in the lives of other faithful people.
One powerful story of this unceasing prayer comes from the Civil Rights movement in Tennessee. In February of 1960, a group began to sit-in at lunch counters in three prominent Nashville stores. These students had been training and preparing. They were highly principled and believed so deeply in their own human dignity that they would not harm another person. This was steeped in prayer and intention, holy work. Violent reaction to these nonviolent protests quickly followed, but they persisted, showing up again and again to sit and abide in their dignity regardless. In April of that year, white supremacists showed their opposition by bombing the home of a black lawyer, Z. Alexander Looby, who was active in the movement. The community gathered at the rubble of the home, and a spontaneous nonviolent march of 2,500 people slowly made their way to city hall, where movement leader Diane Nash asked the mayor to desegregate the lunch counters. Faced with the strength of this peaceful yet insistent response to unspeakable violence and destruction, he agreed. The tide began to turn.
When we are walking with the Holy Spirit, when we are seeking God’s love in our work to make our communities flourish, when we seek to recognize the dignity and voice of every human person, we won’t lose heart. These prayers of active love bring change in the world and change in our spirits, too.
The persistence of the widow, the persistence of those activists, is all of our calling, and we can each begin right where we are. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in his letter from a Birmingham jail, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”
We can start praying with our feet, praying like the widow, right where we are. We can feed one neighbor, be a listening ear, give a few bucks or a thousand, tutor and read to one kid, call our elected representatives and cast our votes, staff the emergency warming shelter, pick up litter on our street. In all of these things, we are people at prayer, putting love into action. Do not lose heart.